Why the Pope is not a CEO

Excellent teaching by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver via First Things:

In reality, each diocese is a separate, autonomous community of believers. Each bishop in a province is an equal. Each is a successor of the apostles. And each is the chief teaching and governing authority in his own local church. Of course, the bishop of Rome, who is also the pope, is uniquely different: He is first among brothers, and yet he also has real authority as pastor of the whole Church. But he is not a global CEO, and Catholic bishops are not—and never have been—his agents or employees.

It’s useful to remember this today as lawyers try ingeniously to draw the Vatican into America’s ongoing sex-abuse saga. In O’Bryan v. Holy See, currently being heard in the U.S. district court in Kentucky, plaintiffs’ attorneys are seeking to depose Vatican officials—including, potentially, the pope himself—to determine what they allegedly ignored or covered up about the handling of clergy sex-abuse cases by American bishops. The plaintiffs’ legal argument hinges on the premise that bishops are, in effect, Roman-controlled employees or officials.

That argument is not merely false in practice. It is also revolutionary in consequence. In effect, it would redefine the nature of the Church in a manner favorable to plaintiffs’ attorneys but alien to her actual structure and identity. To put it another way, plaintiffs’ attorneys want a federal court to tell the Church what she really is, whether she agrees or not, and then to penalize her for being what she isn’t.

Every bishop in the United States has a filial love for the Holy Father and a fraternal respect for his brother bishops. But these familylike words—filial, fraternal, brother—are not simply window dressing. They go to the heart of how the Catholic community understands and organizes itself—and, more important, to how the Church actually conducts herself, guided by her own theology and canon law.

Please read this carefully and really ponder this sentence: "To put it another way, plaintiffs’ attorneys want a federal court to tell the Church what she really is, whether she agrees or not, and then to penalize her for being what she isn’t."