Washington D.C., Feb 22, 2016 / 17:18 pm
The bishops of the Church must be united under the Holy Father and not divided into factions, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban maintained Thursday at a lecture in which he shared lessons gleaned from South Africa's effort to end apartheid.
Bishops "should never be seen as pitted against each other in a contest or control over the Church, but rather they're a college," Cardinal Napier said Feb. 18 in Washington, D.C., where he was delivering the annual Cardinal Dearden lecture at the Catholic University of America.
The lecture is meant to promote the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and Cardinal Napier focused on the collegiality among bishops taught in Lumen gentium, the council's 1964 dogmatic constitution on the Church.
Cardinal Napier discovered the power of collegiality when he joined South Africa's bishops' conference and they united the Church in opposition to the racial segregation of apartheid, then a national policy.