• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

Synodality Against Episcopacy?

Michie

Well-Known Member
Site Supporter
Feb 5, 2002
181,288
65,472
Woods
✟5,791,934.00
Country
United States
Gender
Female
Faith
Catholic
Marital Status
Married
Politics
US-Others
Some crucial teachings of the Church have been called into question, even contradicted, by various aspects of the synodality project.

After defining, within strict limits, the infallibility of papal teaching on faith and morals, the First Vatican Council intended to take up the parallel question of the authority of bishops in the Church. But the Franco-Prussian War interrupted Vatican I in 1870; the Council was never reconvened, and it was left to the Second Vatican Council to fill out the picture of who exercises authority, and how, in the Church.

Vatican II did this in two documents: its seminal Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) and its Decree Concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church (Christus Dominus). These texts taught that the Church’s bishops are the heirs of the Apostles appointed by Christ; that the bishops form a “college” that is the successor of the apostolic “college” in Acts 15; and that this “college,” with and under its head, the Bishop of Rome, has “supreme and full power over the universal Church.”

Continued below.