After defining, within strict limits, the infallibility of papal teaching on faith and morals, the First Vatican Council intended to take up the parallel question of the authority of bishops in the Church. But the Franco-Prussian War interrupted Vatican I in 1870; the council was never reconvened, and it was left to the Second Vatican Council to fill out the picture of who exercises authority, and how, in the Church.
Vatican II did this in two documents: its seminal Dogmatic Constitution on the Church and its Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church. These texts taught that the Church’s bishops are the heirs of the apostles appointed by Christ; that the bishops form a “college” that is the successor of the apostolic “college” in Acts 15; and that this “college,” with and under its head, the bishop of Rome, has “supreme and full power over the universal Church.”
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