Do We Have Accountability Between Bishops and Theologians?

I will someday have to look through Ivan Illich's corpus of writings on power disparity as applied to the institutional Church.

Most of what is put forth in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (a Latin document, which I can't repeat enough) is not divinely revealed precepts (either through Tradition or the Natural Law), but moral theology, as the Compendium itself admits. No bishop becomes automatically competent in moral theology simply by being consecrated a bishop; and whatever authority he possesses in that field will depend on the state of his knowledge of moral theology and the soundness of his reasoning, not his possession of Holy Orders. Just because he is a bishop doesn't mean that his moral theological opinions are sound or that they have authoritative weight by virtue of his being a bishop. What would have authoritative weight is his presentation of divinely revealed precepts or commandments, and even this must be tested as it is not an innate form of knowledge but handed from one generation to the next. Any "new" precepts must be established or demonstrated from precepts that are known, and this is the task of moral theology -- there is no new "Divine Revelation" as such, though this may be considered a legitimate development of doctrine.


It should also be added that a competence in moral theology is not limited to those in Holy Orders alone, but may be gained by laymen, and any sort of political action or reform is dependent upon them, not on bishops. It is true that bishops do not have any sort of political authority over the faithful, and their appeals to their authority, the pope, or “Catholic social teaching” or the Pope to defend their political platform (as put forth on the USCCB website) should be criticized, just as their attempts to assume authority over non-Catholic secular leaders and to lecture them on political matters should be criticized, as it is not clear that they have been given a mission to do so. In that respect they are merely imitating the bishop of Rome and what he saw as one of his roles in [Western] Christendom, and this role as teacher of the secular powers could only increase in prominence after he lost any sort of temporal authority.

How many Latin bishops can make a separation between themselves as bishops and as moral theologians How many would be willing to allow themselves to be questioned on the reasoning behind their political opinions? How many of them would admit that they still have much to learn about moral theology?

Even if we concede that bishops can have a role in formulating opinions about political matters, not because they are bishops but because they are wise, this should probably not be done in isolation but in collaboration with those who have expertise in moral theology, laymen or otherwise, and these laymen should be members of their own flock. For this reason I do not think that collaboration between individual bishops (or even the USCCB, represented as a whole or by a few) with Catholic academia suffices, because of the distance between the two and the lack of mutual accountability. It would not be shocking if academics were seeking to ingratiate themselves with bishops in order to promote themselves. And while dissident (i.e. heretical) "Catholic" theologians have no fear in contradicting or ignoring their bishops, it is not clear to me that those who are supposedly "orthodox" would be willing to stake their reputations in calling out the errors (or just questioning) the political opinions of bishops. Here what Illich says about power disparity as it relates to interpersonal dynamics might apply.

Would it be too much to expect those who would rule to have this foundation in moral theology as well? While law-makers should have some skill in reasoning about laws, this is not necessarily the same as scientific knowledge. It probably suffices to know the meaning of laws (e.g. the purpose) and the legal tradition, unless one has inherited bad laws, in which case it is necessary to understand the Natural Law and why those laws are bad and how they should be corrected. While Catholic intellectuals could be excused for not having the same expertise on current laws and the legal tradition as lawyers (unless they themselves are lawyers and professors of law), they are generally blind to their shortcomings in moral/political philosophy or moral theology with respect to political life, having been inculcated to assume that whatever political arrangement they are in is the standard by which they are to understand political life. They may know how to do scholarship or write to get published, including commentary on what others have written, but how many of them truly have knowledge of political life in a scientific manner and are able to explain it? Very few.