Folia Canonica 5. (2002)
STUDIES - Kenneth Pennington: Bishops and their Dioceses
BISHOPS AND THEIR DIOCESES 17 Many questions and avenues remain unexplored in this survey of ecclesiology. However, I would like to explore briefly an alternative universe of ecclesiological thought. I base these considerations on the unpublished work of Orazio Condorelli. In a book that will appear shortly Condorelli explores another tradition within the Latin church that dates back to the ecclesia primitiva but that was taken up in the later Middle Ages: that several prelates could exercise jurisdiction and pastoral care in the same territory.24 A variant of the idea that prelates could share the same territory can be found in canon 9 of the Fourth Lateran Council. In that canon Pope Innocent III declared that although there can be only one head in each diocese the bishop could appoint a vicar if there were groups within the diocese that spoke other languages and used other rites. As Condorelli points out the canonists reacted to this canon in several different ways during the next two centuries. In the fifteenth century with the attempt to reunite the Greek and Latin churches this canon gained significance and importance in their writings. While commenting on the Lateran canon the great Sicilian jurist Panormitanus concluded that, if necessary, the pope could appoint two bishops to one diocese. What Panormitanus undoubtedly had in mind were the dioceses of Southern Italy where large groups of Greek speaking Christians lived under Italian bishops. In the post-Schism era Panormitanus flatly rejected the horror of two popes, but two ordinary bishops, he thought, could rule the same diocese. To use the terminology of the political scientists, the bishops would share sovereignty over a single territorial state. Shared sovereignty was common in medieval and early modem states. In fact, in the medieval and early modem world, shared sovereignty was the rule rather than the exception. It is a concept that has attracted much interest and attention recently as a means through which some of the worst excesses of the nation state might be ameliorated. Shared episcopal sovereignty is a remarkable idea, whose time has probably not come. It would entail a church with many prelates, diversa capita, exercising pastoral care and jurisdiction over many different rites, languages, and, dare I say dogmas, but all participating in one community, unum corpus. The church has been and still is a varied and multi-faceted institution. The ecclesiology of unum corpus, diversa capita may still hold promise for Christendom in the early 21st century. It is not completely alien to the traditions of the Ecclesia universalis. 24 O. CONDORELLI, Unum corpus, diversa capita: Modelli di organizzazione e cura pastorale per una "varietas ecclesiarum" (secoli XI—XV) to be published by II Cigno Galileo Galilei in Rome. My warmest thanks to Professor Condorelli for giving me a prepublication copy of his work.
