Q. I saw in the news that the USCCB is meeting this week in Baltimore. What exactly is the USCCB’s job? What does it do?
A. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is the assembly of bishops in the dioceses and Eastern Catholic Churches in the United States. All diocesan bishops, retired bishops, and auxiliary bishops are members of the conference.
The USCCB was founded in 1966, when episcopal conferences were established by Pope Paul VI in each nation or region of the world.
The job of an episcopal conference is delineated by the Holy See. Christus Dominus, a decree of the Second Vatican Council, says that “an episcopal conference is a form of assembly in which the bishops of a certain country or region exercise their pastoral office jointly in order to enhance the Church’s beneficial influence on all men, especially by devising forms of the apostolate and apostolic methods suitably adapted to the circumstances of the times.”
The USCCB, and all episcopal conferences, are entrusted with certain immediate responsibilities: to make certain norms regarding the financial administration of dioceses, to establish the age range for Confirmation, and certain other sacramental disciplinary norms, and to establish certain norms regarding fasting, holy days of obligation, and other liturgical issues. Those are the limited areas in which the episcopal conference is given responsibility to act with authority.
But for the most part, episcopal conferences do not act with authority; instead, they serve as a forum in which bishops can plan together and work together— for example, advocating for religious liberty together, or teaching together on good citizenship and the danger of pornography.
While the USCCB, like all episcopal conferences, does many good things, it is mostly a forum for bishops to share ideas with each other, pray with one another, and discern together the will of God as they lead the dioceses with which they have been entrusted.
Write to Ask the Register using our online form, or write to 3700 Sheridan Blvd, Lincoln NE 68506-6100. All questions are subject to editing. Editors decide which questions to publish. Personal questions cannot be answered. People with such questions are urged to take them to their nearest Catholic priest.
