Religion: People’s Choice

In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope has all but complete authority to appoint any priest to the rank of bishop,* and the Catholics in the diocese must accept the appointed bishop’s ecclesiastical authority. Last week Jesuit Theologian John Walsh suggested that the upcoming Second Vatican Council might well think about letting laymen have a hand in choosing their spiritual chiefs. Speaking at Massachusetts’ College of the Holy Cross to a group of lay Catholics, Father Walsh pointed out that the laity had some hand in electing bishops for the first 1,000 years of the church’s history; the custom was abolished during the Middle Ages, after nobles and kings misused the people’s electoral privilege by putting forward their own relatives and friends as candidates for vacant sees.

Nowadays, said Father Walsh, there is little likelihood that episcopal elections could be corrupted, and lay voting for bishops—with ultimate approval reserved to the Pope—might well cause Catholics to “show more concern for the cares and worries of their religious leader.” Moreover, the restoration of episcopal election could speed the course of ecumenicism: “A Catholic Church with a popularly elected hierarchy would unquestionably seem more inviting to our separated brethren in the Protestant and Orthodox churches, as well as to millions of believers who belong to no church but are attracted by democratic procedures.”