Chapter 4
In: Global Catholicism
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Abstract
The reshaping of Catholic institutional life by global Catholic regions and the re-imagination of Global Catholicism is matched by developments and disruptions in global Catholic governance. Centralization following the European model was possible when the Church was primarily a European church with a global reach and even when it transitioned toward a Euro-Atlantic core. Internal and external pressures have exhausted that model but the precise outlines of the emerging one remain unclear. Previously, a kind of symbolic imperium combined with the blunt instrument of permitting or forbidding, and by the late nineteenth century the now taken-for-granted centralized naming of bishops. The power and appeal of the sacramental economy allowed for a shared theological culture even where actual cultures differed dramatically. Mutual understanding of distinctive contexts and values was not critical as long as leaders shared Roman training and ordinary members responded to the call to “pay, pray, and obey” within the sacral system. The “sign of the times” is the exhaustion of this model and the potential emergence of new ones based on mutual self-recognition. The call and logic of catholicity remains but becomes more challenging when it needs to be explicit. This is at the heart of the Second Vatican Council, debates regarding the Council, and the global leadership of the Church from the first Synod of Bishops in 1967 through the Synod on Synodality of 2023–24 and beyond.