This article called for the setting up of the Synod of Bishops....a good idea at the time...but soon reformatted by John Paul II:

Meanwhile, a Synod of Bishops was to be established in Rome as an organ of the world episcopate. It was supposed to be "a counterpart" to the curia, not "part of the papal bureaucracy." Here Ratzinger acknowledges that the Synod of Bishops that was eventually established by Pope Paul VI was substantially different from what many bishops had hoped for. As it turned out, this new body was directly subordinated to the authority of the pope, who alone had the right to convoke it and decide the venue. Many bishops felt that a collegial organ had been turned into an instrument of the primate. Ratzinger tried to look at the bright side, hoping the synod would still be "something like a council extended into the church's everyday life." 

It was not to be. Over the coming decades, John Paul II, one of the most dominant popes of all time, brought about a renewed absorption of episcopacy by primacy. In his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis, the new pope made it clear that the bishops were there to help him with his government. A bishop was collegial if he agreed with the pope. And at John Paul's side in establishing this view was that formerly reforming German theologian, the same man who had once so vigorously welcomed a decentralization of papal power. 

In Rome as head of the CDF, Joseph Ratzinger developed a very different view of bishops' conferences from the one put forward in Highlights. That view was reflected in John Paul II's 1998 apostolic letter Apostolos suos, which instructed the conferences that they had only the most circumscribed authority to pronounce on church matters. They should be seen not as bodies exercising an intermediate collegiality in their own right--as Ratzinger had once thought--but as mere associations of individuals. A deliberative opinion could only be offered by a conference if every single one of its members agreed with it. That spelled the end of pastoral letters such as those issued by the U.S. bishops on nuclear deterrence in 1983 and on economic justice in 1986. In canon law the standing of the conferences has been defined in terms very close to those applying to the congregations of the Roman curia. The curia, however, is of wholly human origin, while the authority of bishops is rooted in revelation. The new canonical definition allows each episcopal conference to legislate as a body, but not to teach without unanimity.    (from this article)

Jesus, please let the Synod of Bishops get back to what it's supposed to be