The pope's necessary obedience to the Church
April 6, 2018
In the spirit of this weekend's Conference in Rome in which two distinguished speakers are listed as due to speak on the limits of Papal authority, I here reprint, with its original thread, a piece from last year. I'll add two other relevant pieces tomorrow, including one which brings in the testimony of Blessed John Henry Newman.
Is the pope above the Church? Depends what you mean. There is, of course, no doubt that
the Roman Pontiff is the supreme law-giver of the whole state of Christ's Church Militant here in earth. But he is a member of, therefore within, the Church. He is therefore also a subject of the Church. (This does indeed mean that he qua Jorge Bergoglio is subject to the Church and therefore to the Pope qua Supreme lawgiver.) He is not the one person upon earth who is
solutus ab omni lege.
Regular readers will recall my repetitious quotation from the writings of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:
" ... the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith ... The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition."
Although not thus footnoted by its author, this phraseology is clearly based upon a statement by the German bishops after Bismarck had attacked the Definition of Papal Infallibility agreed at Vatican I.
Bismarck had alleged that it made the pope "an absolute monarch". The German bishops replied that Papal Infallibility, being an instance of the Infallibility of the Church, is bound to the doctrine contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition and definitions already promulgated by the Church's Magisterium.
The pope, they explained, is bound (obstrictus) to those things which Christ set in place in His Church. He cannot change the constitution given by the Church's Divine Founder, and the constitution of the Church is founded in all essential things in the divine arrangement (ordinatione) and is free (immunis) from every arbitrary human arrangement.
Blessed Pius IX praised, in fulsome language, this explanation of the German bishops.
The question of the limitations upon the papal office came up again at Vatican II. In
Lumen Gentium paragraph 22 (at the end), Blessed Paul VI, laudably anxious that papal authority should not be given away on his watch, wished to add the words
uni Domino devinctus. In the old Abbott translation, this would have made part of the last sentence read "provided that the pope himself, bound fast to the Lord alone [or bound fast to one Master], calls them to collegiate action."
But the Council's Theological Commission refused the pope's request on the grounds that it represented an excessive simplification (
nimis simplificata);
"the Roman Pontiff is bound to observe Revelation itself, the fundamental structure of the Church, the Sacraments, the definitions of previous Councils, etc. [sic]. All of these cannot be counted".
Indeed he is. Indeed, they can't.
Every pope is as tightly bound in obedience to the Magisterium as you are. He is no more allowed to set aside a syllable of it than I am.
7 April 2018
Still interested in contributing to the debate on the limits of papal authority, today I reprint two pieces with which I accompanied the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul last year.
St Leo II and St Peter
and the Papal Magisterium
... as I look into the pre-Pius X breviary by my desk, I discover that in even earlier days, June 28, yesterday, was occupied by a great pope, St Leo II (681-683).
Did I say a great pope?
Our Holy Father Pope St Leo II was great because he undertook the unhappy but necessary duty of ratifying the condemnation, by the Sixth Holy Ecumenical Council, of his own predecessor, Pope Honorius I (625-638), as a heretic. As the Vicar of Christ wrote to the Spanish bishops,
Pope Honorius "did not, as befits the Apostolic dignity, extinguish the fire of heretical teaching when it began, but by his negligence fostered it".
Some people believe the Petrine Ministry means that a Pope is set in place and guided by the Holy Spirit in order to give exciting new perspectives, perhaps even surprises, to the Church. Not so. Not in a month of Sundays.
As Blessed John Henry Newman taught, in a memorable passage in his Apologia about which I will write more tomorrow,
the ministry of the Roman Church, its "extraordinary gift", has always been negative, to be a remora, a barrier against novelty, innovation.
At the jagged and dangerous edge of a high and precipitous cliff, the Pope is the Council Workman whose very simple job it is to put up a notice saying
DANGER: KEEP AWAY.
'Negative', laconic, 'rigid', but, oh, so necessary. A mischievous or homicidal or mischievously homicidal pope who put up a notice reading
ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND
or
YOUR CONSCIENCE WILL TELL YOU WHEN TO JUMP
or
WE WILL ACCOMPANY YOU RIGHT UP TO YOUR JUMP
would be failing in the duty set him by his Master.
Through two millennia, it has been the duty of successive Bishops of Rome to resist, condemn, and extirpate novelty and any attempt to change the Faith.
That is why St Vincent of Lerins (circa 450?) quotes Pope St Celestine (422-432) as writing
"Innovation should stop attacking what is ancient", and the next pope, St Sixtus III, (432-440) as writing
"Innovation has no rights, because it is inappropriate to add anything to what is ancient; clearly, the faith and belief of our ancestors should not be stirred up by any mixture of filth".
The great Anglican historian of the Papacy, Trevor Jalland, wrote of the "supernatual grandeur" of the Roman Church;
"its strange, almost mystical faithfulness to type, its marked degree of changelessness, its steadfast clinging to tradition and precedent".
On this great feast of the Holy Apostles of the Church in Rome, we can do worse than listen to those powerful words of St Leo II. His predecessor Honorius had been Pope when a particular error arose; it had been his duty as
domnus Apostolicus to extinguish the blaze; but he was negligent; he failed to do his (negative) duty of repelling innovation; and his negligence led to the growth of the error.
It therefore fell to an Ecumenical Council to condemn him, together with the leaders of the heresy he failed to extinguish, with the unambiguous noun
heretics and the unambiguous verb
anathematizomen.
There is more than one way of qualifying for the title of Heretic!
***
Yesterday, the great Feast of the Holy Apostles of Rome, I strolled down to Sandford lock. I took with me my battered "summer picnic" volume of the Pars Aestiva; and, since Blessed John Henry Newman, Patron of our Ordinariate, must often have walked there from nearby Littlemore, I took also his
Apologia pro Vita sua.
I love the Mattins readings for the Second Nocturn, from St Leo I's First mighty Sermon
In natali Apostolorum Petri et Pauli. It gets to the heart of the
Romanita of the Western Church, and especially of the English Church; St Leo I, the finest Latin stylist since Cicero, explains to the
plebs Romana (now the
plebs sancta Dei) how
all that is meant by being Roman has been transformed ... yet, in transformation, preserved and enhanced ... by the Gospel.
"For although, glorified by many victories, you have advanced the jus of your imperium by land and by sea, yet, what the labour of war subdued to you, is less than what the Pax Christiana subjected to you".
The culture of classical Roman antiquity was baptised by St Leo; my view is that he is the one who finally recast the Roman Eucharistic Prayer in a Latinity moulded by the the prayer-style of the old, pre-Christian, prayer-style of early Rome.
Under St Leo, being a Christian finally ceased to be adherence to a foreign and dodgy sect largely followed by Greekling immigrants, and became the new majestic embodiment of all that it meant to be Roman in culture and law and liturgy.
And, with St Augustine [of Canterbury], that
Romanita was parachuted into Kent and became the marker too of the Anglo-Saxon Church; the Church of Augustine and Justus and Mellitus; of Wilfrid and Bede and Alcuin. The Kentish king who had considered it beneath his dignity to adopt his wife's Merovingian Christianity rejoiced in the opportunity to receive Christianity from its august and Roman fount. Therein lies the exquisite beauty of "the Anglo-Saxon Church", a Roman island beyond the Alps.
And that same Mr Newman expressed the essence of the Petrine Ministry, of the
munus of the Successor of Peter, in an epigrammatic passage:
"It is one of the reproaches urged against the Church of Rome, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or break in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift".
It is precisely along these lines that Cardinal Ratzinger in a passage of lapidary elegance criticised the bloated and corrupt hyperpapalism of the post-Vatican II period, with its disordered, disordering belief that a pope, especially if backed by a Council, could monkey around at will with Tradition.
It is, Ratzinger asserted, the Pope's job to be the Guardian of the Tradition and the preserver of its integrity and authenticity. This is where the essence of the Holy Father's Ministry lies ... not (as some very foolish and dreadfully noisy people mistakenly think) in being a charismatic innovator, the herald of a God of Surprises.
Heaven forbid that any Pope should ever sink so low, should be so deaf to his true ecclesial vocation.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/04/2018 01:29]