As I see it, there are two huge problems with bishop's conferennces.
1. This may seem odd but every Catholic is supposed to represent the entire church. Part of being a Catholic is to consider the impact that my decisions will have not just on me as an individual but the effect they will have on the way others see the whole church.
Obviously, this also applies to those with priestly vocations. Every priest is a priest for the whole world and every bishop is a bishop for the whole world. And there you have the first danger of bishop's conferences. They tend to split the world up into jurisdictions. We tend to get groups of bishops protecting their turf.
2. The second problem is the complaints desk problem. If you are as old as I am or older, you will remember that major retail stores used to have complaints desks. The idea was that this one area would deal with customer complaints exclusively, thereby freeing up managers to do other things.
The problem with complaints desks, however, was that they freed up managers. If the store was selling a product with serious drawbacks people would buy it and then they'd return it and the managers would never feel any need to do anything about it because the complaints desk handled all the problems
Back in the 1980s, a bunch of businesses discovered that getting rid of the complaints desk actually made the business more efficient precisely because it got more customers in the manager's face.
That, it seems to me, is also true of the Canadian and American bishop's conferences. By insulating individual bishops from many of the big problems, it allowed them to ignore them.
People will say but some of the individual bishops are real disasters. And yes, some are. I can think of one Bishop (who will remain nameless but just let em say I'm glad he isn't running the archdiocese I live in) whom I wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stand. But, again, it was the security blanket that the conference provided that has given this guy cover all these years. Without it he would have been exposed long ago.
I think the problem with that is that the Bishop's Conferences have no real teeth. Only Rome can discipline a rogue bishop, the Conference can only advise, like the Dallas Charter, and its essentially up to the individual Bishop whether or not he will comply. And lets be honest, the only time Rome has even tried to discipline an errant Bishop has been as a result of public outrage over the way a Bishop mishandled sexual abuse reports, in Ireland and I believe Belgium. And this is only recent, remember Cardinal Law? He got a promotion for the way he handled the SA reports when he was forced to flee jurisdiction in the wake of an imminent indictment! That could easily be changed, but Rome is in a panic mode now, so the idea of any further decentralization isn't even on their radar. And it really doesn't matter anymore, at this point it would be a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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