Folia Canonica 5. (2002)
STUDIES - Kenneth Pennington: Bishops and their Dioceses
16 KENNETH PENNINGTON metaphors that had traditionally described the bonus pastor often became more and more rhetorical embellishments rather than descriptions of reality. The diocese and the bishopric were, as I have argued above, the forerunners of the modern state. Bishops, like secular princes, exercised increasingly centralized jurisdiction over their territories. Here, however, the comparison between the secular and the ecclesiastical world diverges. Bishops were gradually subjected to the central authority of the pope. Secular princes became autonomous rulers. At this point we may make some comparisons with bishops of the Eastern, Orthodox churches. What strikes us first about the Orthodox church is the doctrine of episcopal equality that permeates its ecclesiological thought. In part the doctrine of equality, recently defined as a “communio ecclesiology,” finds its roots and its legitimacy in the history of the early church which modem Orthodox scholars have characterized as a “eucharistie community,” presided over by a bishop. These communities were linked by faith, not by hierarchy. Bishops were equal and bishoprics were autonomous. Eastern ecclesiology is shaped by history, but we can see that the Latin church was not significantly different before the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Orthodox tradition has interpreted the primacy of Rome as having been a primacy of sollicitude (sollicitudo) that finds its justification in the earliest descriptions of papal power. The shepherd should care for his flock. Sollicitude is an general pastoral concern that does not have limits but does have jurisdictional limits. The bishop of Rome’s primacy of sollicitude is not a primacy of jurisdiction. Orthodox scholars have argued that the role of the patriarch of Constantinople or any other central power within the Orthodox church is very limited. The patriarch was responsible for the sollicitude of the church and its people. John Erickson has observed that it is paradoxical that:23 in the course of late antiquity and the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church insisted that its primacy was due not to the contingencies of politics and history but to Christ’s promise to Peter ... <while> the Byzantine Church, on the other hand freely acknowledged that primacies depend on the order of the principalities of this world. Yet what is clear from our survey of Western ecclesiology is that during the period in which papal centralization was established this development within the church was contrary to contemporary political developments and contrary to its own traditions of power and authority within local churches. There is no question, however, that the power of the tradition of Saints Peter and Paul’s founding of the Roman church was the essential ingredient for creating the monarchical constitutional structure of today’s Latin church. 23 J. ERICKSON, The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History Crestwood, NY 1991, 84-86.
