The papacy in the new millennium

Submitted on May 10, 2001

Send to friend On Feb. 26, 2001, Pope John Paul II announced that an extraordinary consistory or meeting of all the Church's cardinals would be convened in order to discuss and explore the ministry of the papacy and its meaning and relation to the collegiality of the bishops. Some elements of the press have already begun to misreport and misunderstand the aims of this meeting. Several reports have suggested that Pope John Paul II wishes to begin "downplaying" the primacy of the papacy; that he wants to decentralize the role of the Bishop of Rome in the leadership of the Church. It is fair to say, clearly this is not his purpose. As with all else he has written and accomplished, Pope John Paul II has laid the intellectual and theological groundwork for this consistory for the last 17 years in his public addresses, his commissioning of a special symposium on the subject of the Petrine ministry, and with the writing of an encyclical on the office of bishop and ecumenism. In May of 1995, his encyclical "Ut Unum Sint" ("That They May Be One") was promulgated. One of its purposes was to shed some necessary light on the essential characteristics and functions of the papacy for the new millennium and the new evangelization. In it, he extends for our modern context the understanding of St. Augustine's famous exhortation concerning the papal ministry: "May all shepherds thus be one in the one Shepherd; may they let the one voice of the Shepherd be heard; may the sheep hear this voice and follow their Shepherd, not this shepherd or that, but the only one; in him may they all let one voice be heard and not a babble of voices, but the only one free of all division." Pope John Paul II extends this understanding by describing the Bishop of Rome as the "first servant of unity," ecumenical unity, whose mission is to unite the various Christian communities, under the paternal watch and one true voice of Christ. Hence, like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, he is the initiator of this service of unity, and therefore, he possesses a particular responsibility "in acknowledging the ecumenical aspirations of the majority of the Christian communities and in heeding the request made of me to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation" [emphasis added] (n. 95). Throughout the 19th century, beginning with Napoleon, many identified the papacy with the temporal rule of its lands, namely the Papal States. They predicted that if this were to end the papacy would be finished; yet no one would argue that the papacy has been diminished in the 20th century because of the loss of the papal states. In fact the contrary has been true - the 20th century papacy has been a powerful beacon in the darkness of modernity. We do not know what this "new situation" might look like. But we can be secure in our belief that the papacy will not be diminished but enhanced, fulfilling more perfectly its mission as servum servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God.