Maturity Required

From a Zenit article summarizing the Ontario Bishops Ad Limna visit:

"The president of the Ontario episcopal conference, Bishop Richard Smith, said that "like anything this Pope composes, the message he delivered is very beautiful and profound with lots of prayer and meditation behind it."

In other words. . . he gave them food for thought.

This reminds me of the lecture in JPII Theology today. . . we were discussing to what extend did Pope John Paul II's view of collegiality change throughout the course of his pontificate. Basically what it came down to was that he favoured collegiality but that a greater freedom for the bishops conferences was dependent upon their maturity and well. . . it didn't take too long for him to understand that maybe they weren't quite as mature as he had initially thought (or hoped). In fact, "Some of the bishops conferences were grossly immature and did some pretty silly things" (that's my quote of the day from lecture).

Freedom assumes maturity and apparently, when it comes to some of the bishops conferences, maturity cannot be assumed. Example? The infamous Winnipeg Statement.