CONFERENCES. - Besides councils, general and particular, and diocesan synods properly so called, public and official assemblies par excellence, the ecclesiastical order provides for other periodic meetings of the clergy, less public and solemn, for consultative and professional instructional purposes, such as the rural-deanery or vicarial conferences and the episcopal conferences (cann. 131, 591, 292).
I. FORANEOUS OR VICARIAL CONFERENCES
These are periodic assemblies of the clergy, to be held as an obligation several times a year, in the chief town of the diocese and in the individual foraneous vicariates, to discuss moral and liturgical topics, to which the Ordinary may add exercises on other theological disciplines, such as dogmatics, Sacred Scripture and canon law (can. 131). They are also called congregations, moral conferences, pastoral conferences or conferences on cases of conscience.
The practice of gatherings of this kind goes back to a rather ancient period. St. Basil the Great (d. 377) mentions them in one of his letters to Chilo. In the West, however, the first traces of the institution appear only in the 9th century in certain dioceses of southern France, among the rural clergy; Hincmar of Reims regulated the aforementioned gatherings with the first laws. In the 10th century, the same practice, while becoming more frequent in France, was also adopted by certain dioceses of England, Germany and Italy. It cannot be said, however, that such gatherings exactly reproduced the modern conferences of the clergy, since they were in reality true local synods that exercised legislative and judicial power, regulated public penance and imposed canonical penalties on clerics and laypeople.
The institution and the first organization of the conferences of the clergy in the modern sense is due to two of the most distinguished champions of the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century, Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona, and St. Charles Borromeo, archbishop of Milan. Giberti had instituted them in his diocese even before the Council of Trent and had regulated their functioning in his Constitutiones (tit. I, ch. 23). Following the example of this man, of whom he was a great admirer, St. Charles introduced them into his archdiocese at the First Council of Milan in 1565, strengthening their development and completing their organization. For this purpose he divided the archdiocese into various territorial districts, over each of which he placed a foraneous vicar with the task of presiding over the monthly gatherings and rendering him an exact account of them.
The institution, encouraged by the councils and warmly recommended by the popes, immediately spread widely in Italy and beyond. In the 18th century it could already be called general in Europe. It was introduced into the two Americas at the beginning of the following century. By the time the CIC came into force it was already established in fact in universal practice. In can. 131 the CIC made it universal by law, inserting it into the general order of the Church.
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II. EPISCOPAL CONFERENCES
Under this name are understood the periodic meetings which the bishops of one and the same ecclesiastical province, or, for Italy, of one and the same conciliar region, are obliged to hold at least every 5 years, for the purpose of consulting together about the measures to be adopted in order to promote by common accord the good of religion in the individual dioceses, of arranging a common line of conduct in the special contingencies that may arise, and of preparing the future provincial council (can. 292).
The CIC lays down on this matter a new right in that it introduces the obligation of episcopal conferences into the general law and prescribes them for provincial circumscriptions. Their use, however, albeit in the form of national or at most regional conferences, in fact pre-existed the codification in the fairly common practice of many nations. Episcopal conferences arose and established themselves spontaneously as a substitute for councils, as these became rarer, because of the need felt by the bishops of the various countries to coordinate their pastoral initiatives more frequently, outside the solemnity of the councils themselves. The favorable attitude of the supreme pontiffs contributed much to their development; they not only approved and unconditionally praised the initiative, but warmly recommended it, as appears from the official sources, so that it might be introduced in those countries where it did not yet exist. Although examples of episcopal conferences can be found in isolation even in earlier periods, a fairly uniform and constant practice on the matter is encountered only at the beginning of the 19th century, in Europe, in the Americas and in Australia. By making them obligatory every 5 years for provincial circumscriptions, the canon lawgiver intended to meet the votum already presented to the Vatican Council to shorten to 5 years the term for the periodic convocation of the provincial council.
Episcopal conferences are prepared, convened and presided over by the metropolitan or, in his absence, by the suffragan bishop most senior by promotion. After prior convocation, all those who are obliged to attend the provincial council must take part in them. They serve as a link between one provincial council and the next, whose more frequent convocation they supply and of which they reproduce certain aspects and formalities. Juridically, however, they are not councils: they take the form of friendly meetings of a purely consultative character, and their deliberations do not assume the nature of conciliar statutes, but rather of simple agreements which each participant undertakes to carry out as if he had deliberated them on his own initiative for his own territory.
The lawgiver foresees in this matter the possibility of a ius particulare for individual places (can. 292 § 1). In Italy, for example, the decree of the S. Congregazione Concistoriale of 22 March 1919 is still in force, prescribing annual episcopal conferences to be held not by province but by conciliar region (cf. decree of the same Congregation, 15 Feb. 1919), whose deliberations, indeed, by a subsequent decree of the S. Congregazione del Concilio, 21 June 1932, must be transmitted ex officio to the Holy See, which subsequently communicates any observations and decisions (cf. AAS, 11 [1919], p. 175; 24 [1932], p. 242 f.).
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Zaccaria da S. Mauro