When I was studying at university in the North of England, there was a healthy, growing, intellectually engaged group of traditionalist Catholics – converts, reverts and homeschooled cradles – who met frequently for a devotional rendezvous.
After praying the rosary together in front of bewildered or curious Anglicans by the shrines of Saints Bede and Cuthbert in the dark Romanesque chambers of Durham Cathedral, this motley crew of male and female dissidents, like good Christians, would head through the cobbled medieval streets of Durham under the lunchtime sun to the pub. Once there, the conversations tackled hard ecclesiological and theological questions.
On one such occasion, the question arose of statements and actions by post-Vatican II popes which seemed difficult to reconcile with – or even to contradict – historical magisterial teachings or ecumenical councils. This should not be possible. We believe defined Catholic truth has been supernaturally confirmed by God with certainty. It ought not to be revised or regarded as wrong in future. Heated from the outset, that afternoon over ale, initiated an ongoing debate which continued over the airwaves for weeks after we all went home.
Attempting to resolve how popes could apparently say or do something almost or actually heretical, erroneous, or at least misleading in their presentation of the Faith. Participants in this debate dug deep into the documents of Vatican I. We discerned the categories it laid out – the “ordinary”, “extraordinary” and “ordinary and universal” magisterium respectively – and, as it became clearer how the Church defines the who, what and when of infallibility, the debaters fell into one of two camps.
The first camp concluded that though the Pope’s ordinary teaching capacity imposes a duty of obedience upon the faithful, the documents recognise he is not infallible when not explicitly calling upon his magisterial charism to define dogmas and morals ex cathedra. The second camp – a minority comprised mainly of SSPX attendees, though not all – emphasised the importance and centrality of matters attributed to the Holy See and concluded that the fact the papacy had apparently promulgated heretical or erroneous statements as part of its ordinary magisterium proved grave contradictions and suggested the papacy was in an exceptional period of compromise.
One member of the group, an SSPX attendee – let us call him “Robert”, an intelligent convert and zealous devotee of theology, history and politics – struggled most with this question. He protested the first camp fiercely, stating that Catholics cannot simply listen to the Pope and ignore him as they please. “If the ordinary magisterium of the Pope has taught error, then the ordinary magisterium is over,” he bluntly texted one evening.
I knew Robert well. He was a promising and gifted young man and could have made an excellent Catholic. Alas, the dramatic tone of his text was not without cause – he found this dilemma irreconcilable and he lost his Catholic Faith. Today he is an Orthodox Christian, with the long red beard of an ascetic mystic. This is simply to say that this is an important question to answer. Souls remaining on the Barque of St Peter and within the Catholic fold depend on it. I have personal experience of this.
I fall into the first camp. I was unsure at first and, like Robert, disturbed, but I came firmly to disagree with his position. All should, I believe. And we ought to know why if we wish to avoid – or save ourselves and our fellow Catholics from – his fate.
Ironically, his error is precisely the same “ultramontanism” and hyper-papalism that the most fanatically progressive followers of Pope Francis fall into. Before I explain why, it is important to gain perspective on how this timeless question intersects directly with the issues of the contemporary Church.
Cardinal Müller recently confided to me, in a conversation with the Catholic Herald, that – against the likes of Mike Lewis of WherePeterIs, Austen Ivereigh of The Tablet, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández and Massimo Faggioli – there is no such thing as the “magisterium of [Pope] Francis” as opposed to or distinct from the historical magisterium of the Catholic Church which can supposedly supersede or contradict it.
These broadly liberal devotees of Pope Francis seek to form a “cult of the personality” – as Cardinal Müller condemned – around the pontiff in order to promote an evolutionary understanding of magisterial teaching which leaves the door open to essential change, often under the guise of “development”.
While actual change remained minimal, there were a number of issues the Francis pontificate seemed to be pushing in this direction: Communion for the divorced and remarried without annulments after Amoris Laetitia; blessings for same-sex couples after Fiducia Supplicans; and, perhaps most problematically of all, the editing of the article pertaining to the death penalty in the Catechism.
The death penalty issue is the most pertinent. Here, the keen observer will find what appears to be a direct contradiction. In the past, not only did the Church permit the death penalty, but there are countless examples of popes, clerics and theologians – even Doctors of the Church – recommending and sanctioning it. The Catechism of the Council of Trent did so explicitly. Sacred Scripture does also. Until Pope St John Paul II diluted the wording of the Catholic teaching and Pope Francis, ostensibly, reversed it in the Catechism.
Yet the Church teaches that her longstanding, universal teaching by historical consensus is infallible. It should not be possible to contradict this. In 2,000 years, the Church had never contradicted herself on a matter she solemnly held to be infallibly true. Until now?
This is why questions of authority and infallibility are vitally important for Catholics who wish to maintain a sincere, coherent and intellectually grounded faith, by the grace of God and in accord with nature. One can sympathise, to an extent, with Robert’s crisis of faith.
We must still disagree with his conclusions. And the way we do so allows us to resist the attempted innovations of some progressives simultaneously.
Because Robert was unwilling to hold to a thicker conception of the magisterium, and of the necessarily concordant relationship between binding authority, truth, infallibility and obedience, he fell into an epistemic error – a mistake pertaining to how we know things.
Put simply, Robert and certain progressives hold to a “Simon says” understanding of ecclesial and papal authority. Something is right simply by virtue of the one who commands it. Peter orders you to jump, so you must jump. But as “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccles 1:9), we can look to Catholic history to resolve this mistake.
From the 16th century, as the Jesuits became the nascent golden child of the Catholic world and helped convert entire continents, their active, practical theology drew them into a centuries-long theological dispute with the Dominicans. The Jesuits, following the soldierly theology of St Ignatius of Loyola, generally held to his attitude that “what seems… white, [we] believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines”.
The Dominicans protested this attitude, warning that it could lead to grave mistakes. They disagreed with this kind of divine command theory when it came to truth and obedience, criticising it as implicitly suggesting that the divine intellect and will could be in contradiction.
To put that less abstractly: though believing things on the basis of authority is a legitimate and rational means of finding truth – we generally believe accomplished physicists about physics, doctors about medicine and honest men about their experiences – it is not the only means of discovering truth. Authority should be concordant with what we rationally and empirically discover to be true, because God gifted us reason and senses capable of grasping truth. To the Dominicans, if a pope said it was sunny outside but they plainly saw it was overcast and raining, they would believe their eyes. The Jesuits would submit to the Pope and head to the beach.
The Dominicans say God wants you to follow Him, who is one and the same with the Truth, at all times, and that clerics are His imperfect but real instruments in helping us do so. The Jesuit attitude concludes that truth is whatever a cleric or Pope says.
History, the argument runs, vindicated the Dominicans despite the remarkable successes the Jesuits enjoyed during the Counter-Reformation, when they produced martyrs and saints of heroic calibre en masse. Because when the 20th century and Vatican II arrived, the Jesuits, being rigidly hierarchical, fell prey to Marxist liberation theology. The Dominicans, with some exceptions, retained their reputation as the most dependably orthodox major order in the Church.
We have to be like the Dominicans. God wants you to heed the Pope, His vicar and representative, when he acts according to revealed truth as handed down by the saints, ecumenical councils and the historical magisterium. Not when he transgresses truth, morals or reason, as the first pope did before Paul rebuked him in Galatians.
To resist the “magisterium of Francis” – which can seem to put all Catholic doctrines up for grabs and thus dilute the Faith – and to avoid concluding that the hierarchical claims of Catholicism are no longer tenable and leaving for sedevacantism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism or atheism, we must recognise that the non-infallible ordinary magisterium can err and that obedience has limits when truth is at stake.
We all know obedience has limits, even if it is a virtue. If Archbishop Moth told his flock to jump off London Bridge, there is still enough sanity in Holy Mother Church that the good people of Westminster would disobey. The obscured meaning behind the story of the near sacrifice of Isaac may even suggest as much. Obedience was requested, but given the extremity of the matter it was not, ultimately, commanded – for mere man at least.
Which is why, when we hear that the entire town of Portsmouth was placed under excommunication for nearly 60 years after a bishop was murdered there by papal decree in 1450, or that Pope Sixtus IV was embroiled in a plan to murder members of the Medici family during Mass, we can resist the “exaggeration that says every private meaning of the Pope is a dogma or is an interpretation of the revealed truth”, as Cardinal Müller encourages.
“I think history supplies us with instances in the Church where legitimate power has been harshly used,” said St John Henry Newman in his Apologia. “To make such admission is no more than saying that the divine treasure, in the words of the Apostle, is ‘in earthen vessels;’ nor does it follow that the substance of the acts of the ruling power is not right and expedient, because its manner may have been faulty.”
Like the Dominicans of the 16th century, Newman had reservations about the wording of Vatican I, even though he accepted it. My favourite priest agrees and thinks the limits of papal authority – though supreme and foundational – have not been sufficiently defined. As ever his protégé, I am inclined to agree.
The “Simon says” divine command theory must be rejected in favour of an authentically obedient and orthodox stance. Like St Thomas More, we must be the Pope’s “good servant”, but God’s first.
