Contrary to what some may think,
a Pope cannot do anything he pleases:
The limits to what a Pope can do
March 4, 2015
There is a report that some daft archbishop somewhere has suggested that since the Pope has the power of the keys, perhaps he can dissolve valid consummated sacramental marriages.
But, however hard these extreme ultrapapalist mavericks struggle to portray the Holy Father as some sort of magically cunctipotent wizard or godlike superman or supremely effective alchemist,
the fact remains that only a nutter, surely, really believes the Pope could do anything.
He can't, for example, in my humble and respectful but cynical and decided opinion, turn the Alps into cheese or add the Da Vinci Code to the Bible or beam Obama up to Mars or grow a tail or turn Walter Kasper into the Dalai Lama or abolish the Sacrament of Baptism or suppress Easter or turn a pumpkin into a carriage or abolish bodily death or transsubstantiate a consecrated Host into bread or dissolve a Christian marriage or erase the character of Holy Order or transmute lead into gold.
I repeat, underneath, a previous post about what the Pope is for and is supposed to do and does have the grace of the Holy Spirit guaranteed to him to accomplish. You might have thought that someone, such as a seminary lecturer, would have broken this somewhat ancient news, dating from at least 1870, to wannabe archbishops.
Having posted not too long ago the commentary on 'Papal authority' that Father H refers to above, I shall merely re-post the three substantive citations he made to underscore the limits of what a Pope can do:
The Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter so that by His revelation they might disclose new teaching, but that, by His assistance, they might devoutly guard, and faithfully set forth, the Revelation handed down through the Apostles, the Deposit of Faith.
So this gift of truth and of unfailing faith is divinely invested in Peter and his successors in this chair, so that they may discharge their lofty job [munere] in order that the whole flock of Christ, turned away through them [the popes] from the poisonous food of heresy, may be nourished by the food of heavenly teaching so that, all occasion of schism being done away, the whole Church may be kept as one and, resting upon its foundation, may stand firm against the Gates of Hell.
- From the Decree on Papal Infallibility
The First Ecumenical Vatican Council, 1870
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 brake in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as a truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift.
- Blessed John Henry Newman
After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything ... especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. ... In fact, 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 ... it is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Of course, if you believe, as Vatican-II 'spiritists' do, that Vatican-II created a 'new Church', or that, at the very least, it represented a 'rupture' or 'discontinuity' with everything about the pre-Vatican-II Church [a really stupid claim, to begin with, on the basis of objective fact - i.e., the Vatican II documents themselves, even the parts that were deliberately ambiguous], then anything from Vatican-I or all the other ecumenical councils before it would necessarily be worthless, and the supposedly 'new church', which it would be presumptuous of them to refer to with a capital C, would have to build its own 'tradition' and 'magisterium'.
Under 'new church' tradition, we would have the Novus Ordo and all its manifold abuses, and all the practices carried out and endorsed by adherents of this 'new church'. like Bologna-school bishops, priests, male and female religious (e.g., LCWR), all the priests who left the Church to get married (and whom the spiritists would want now to be allowed to say Mass and administer the sacraments), the women claiming to have been ordained as 'priests', remarried divorcees with un-annulled church marriages, practising homosexuals and unmarried cohabitating couples - all of whom Cardinal Bergoglio generously allowed communion in Buenos Aires and would like to do so now on a universal basis - and all bishops and priests who have routinely defied Church teaching to exercise their pastoral ministry as they see fit, thus breaking their formally avowed communion with the Successor of Peter.
A significant number, probably - all assuming that the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Roman Church is no more, and yet, no one having the foolhardy courage to declare the See of Rome 'sede vacante' under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who were both committed to Vatican II in the correct hermeneutic, and who therefore were Pontiffs of the Church as it has always been.
The spiritists could have joined the ranks of ultraright sedevacantists who believe there has been no legitimate Pope since Pius XII, but obviously the spiritists have not been stupid enough to make any such preposterous claim about John Paul II and Benedict XVI whom they did continue to recognize as Popes even if more in the breach.
In other words, the courage of their convictions has not reached the logical end point. They can't declare 'schism' because they think the 'new church' has taken over from the 'pre-Vatican II Church' and that therefore, they are rightfully in the saddle ("We are Church") - except that their 'new church' did not and does not have the infrastructure nor the wherewithal to be in the saddle, and they still have to work with and through all the institutions of the one Church about which Benedict XVI said, "The Church, both before the Council and after the Council, remains the one, true, catholic and apostolic Church, journeying through time".
Perhaps the spiritists believe that their time has finally come - that the 'new church' they've professed to have since December 1965 will materialize substantially in the 'church of Bergoglio' that their progressivist brother in the spirit (of Vatican-II) is intent on creating in place of the one, true Church of Christ (which, contrary to the Great Jubilee year reaffirmation of Dominus Iesus, Bergoglio does not think she is. "All ways to Christ are valid", he tells the Protestants, while in his catecheses, he pays lip service to the fact that Catholics must practice their faith 'within the Church'. Which 'Church' he means is something else.)
As for the 'Magisterium' of the 'new church', only the bishops among the spiritists have any magisterial authority, and what dissident bishops have been teaching is not in communion with the Successor of Peter, which is a prerequisite to the validity of any teaching they make. Everything else - the history of Vatican-II through the progressivist prism of the Bologna school, the torrents of 'dissident' theology and commentary that have been written and spoken since December 1965 - has no magisterial status.
Though they may certainly claim, as many of them have done, that Evangelii gaudium is the greatest papal document ever issued, in which case it would count as their fundamental Magisterial document. (Cardinal Burke cites Pope Francis himself as saying that EG is not a magisterial document - but how can it not be? It is a formal Apostolic Exhortation by a duly-elected Pope. Not to mention the daily-growing number of the Casa Santa Marta homilettes that do constitute 'teachings' by the duly-elected 266th Successor of Peter. regardless of whether you think they are magisterial or not, effectively they are - the public considers them to be 'teachings' of Pope Francis, not just of one Jorge Mario Bergoglio.)
Of course, in parts, EG refers to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and I don't think the 'new church' would consider that Catechism - prepared under Cardinal Ratzinger - as the catechism it would adopt. (Nor do I think anyone of them has bothered to write an alternative Catechism - other than the 'Dutch catechism' published in 1966 by the bishops of the Netherlands. Paul VI named a cardinals' commission to review the adequacy of certain doctrinal statements in the text, such as those on the nature of creation and of original sin, Christological issues, the nature of the Mass and the Eucharist, the Church's infallibility, the nature of the priesthood, and various other points of moral and dogmatic theology. The problems of the Church in the Netherlands were such that John Paul II convened an extraordinary synodal assembly just about them in 1979.]
As even JMB/PF will find, it's not that easy to create a whole 'new church' out of scratch, even when necessarily utilizing huge chunks of the old structure to build the new one. So it's more convenient to simply say he is 'fundamentally transforming the Church' - as if 'fundamental transformation' did not mean creating a new entity altogether. (When JMB's Spanish transsexual fan Diego decided to 'fundamentally transform' from a woman to a man, the resulting transgendered individual is a new entity altogether, albeit artificially created through genital plastic surgery and penile prosthesis, that 'he' must support all his life with hormones that will keep 'his' secondary female sexual characteristics like breasts from reappearing.)
The first leg of the trinity of truths - along with but preceding Tradition and Magisterium - upon which the one, holy, catholic, apostolic and Roman Church rests is Revelation or Scripture. Even the new-churchers cannot change that, but they certainly can impose their own idiosyncratic interpretations or selective reading, as JMB/PF consistently does about mercy, forgiveness, and 'the poor'. Can any Christian really accept his obsessive and exclusivist tunnel view that the Gospel is about 'the poor' and that the center of the Gospel is 'the poor'? (Yet hardly any one protests when he makes such statements! It must be that JMB/PF is applying a basic propaganda principle - that if you say something often enough, it becomes established in the public mind as 'fact' or 'truth', and that in the past 23 months, he has managed to condition the public mind to accepting his most questionable statements as 'fact' or 'truth' - the gospel according to Bergoglio.)
Related to the limits of papal authority is the dissent and criticism made by orthodox Catholics to some of this Pope's statements and actions. What distinguishes current dissent with Pope Francis is that with previous Popes in the modern era, the dissenters always protested that the Popes were being orthodox, or too orthodox - as if orthodoxy in the faith were objectionable, erroneous, sinful and/or criminal. This time, orthodox Catholics are protesting the current Pope's apparent heterodoxies and heterodox tendencies.
I find the following article by Church historian Roberto De Mattei another useful contribution to the growing literature about why orthodox Catholics, lay and clergy alike, have the duty to speak out against a Pope they perceive to be straying from the 'deposit of faith' that he is sworn to uphold, defend and protect.
St. Bruno’s filial resistance
to Pope Paschal II
by Roberto De Mattei
Translated by Francesca Romana for Rorate caeli from
CORRISPONDENZA ROMANA
March 4, 2015
Among the most illustrious protagonists of Church reform in the XI and XII centuries, one that stands out is the figure of St. Bruno, Bishop of Segni and Abbot of Montecassino.
Bruno was born around 1045 in Solero, near Asti, in Piedmont. After his studies in Bologna, he was ordained a priest of the Roman clergy and enthusiastically adhered to the Gregorian reform. Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) appointed him Bishop of Segni and had him among his most faithful collaborators. his successors, Victor III (1086-1087) and Urban II (1088-1089) ALSO availed themselves of the Bishop of Segni’s assistance, who combined his scholarly work with an intrepid apostolate in defense of the Primate of Rome.
Bruno participated in the Councils of Piacenza and Clermont, when Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade and in the following years he was legate for the Holy See in France and Sicily. In 1107, under the new Pontiff, Paschal II (1099-1118), he became Abbot of Montecassino, an office which made him one of the most authoritative ecclesiastical personalities of his time.
A great theologian and exegete, resplendent in doctrine, as Cardinal Baronio writes in his
Annali (Tome XI, year 1079) he is considered one of the best commentators of Holy Scripture of the Middle Ages (Réginald Grégoire, Bruno de Segni, exégète médiéval et théologien monastique, Italian Centre of Studies on the High Middle Ages, Spoleto 1965).
It was an age of political disputes and deep moral and spiritual crisis. In his work,
De Simoniacis, Bruno offers us a dramatic picture of the disfigured Church of his times. Already at the time of Pope St. Leo IX (1049- 1054) “
Mundus totus in maligno positus erat(The whole world lay in evil): there was no longer any holiness; justice was failing and truth buried. Iniquity reigned, avarice ruled; Simon Magus possessed the Church, the Bishops and priests were given over to sensual pleasure and fornication. The priests were not ashamed of taking wives, of celebrating their weddings openly and contracting nefarious marriages. (…) Such was the Church, such were the Bishops and priests, such were some among the Roman Pontiffs” (S. Leonis papae Vita in Patrologia Latina (= PL), vol. 165, col. 110).
At the centre of the crisis, besides the problem of simony and the concubinage of priests, there was the question of the investiture of bishops. The Dictatus Papae (1075), wherein St. Gregory VII had affirmed the rights of the Church against imperial demands, constituted the magna carta to which Victor III and Urban II referred, but Paschal II abandoned the intransigent position of his predecessors and tried in every way to come to an agreement with the future Emperor Henry V.
At the beginning of February 1111, at Sutri, he asked the German sovereign to renounce the right of investitures, offering him in exchange the Church’s renunciation of all temporal rights and goods. The negotiations went up in smoke, and, yielding to the king’s intimidations, Paschal II accepted a humiliating compromise, signed at Ponte Mammolo on April 12th 1111. The Pope conceded the privilege of the investitures of bishops, prior to their pontifical consecration, to Henry V, with the ring and the crosier which symbolized both temporal and spiritual power, promising never to excommunicate the sovereign. Paschal then crowned Henry V Emperor in St. Peter’s.
This concession provoked a multitude of protests in Christendom, since it overturned the position of Gregory VII. According to the Chronicon Cassinense (PL, vol. 173, col. 868 C-D),the Abbot of Montecassino protested vigorously against what he defined as not a
privilegium, but a
pravilegium [a wrongful right], and promoted a movement of resistance against the papal compliancy.
In a letter addressed to Peter, Bishop of Porto, he defined the treatise of Ponte Mammolo as a “heresy”, by referring to the definitions [made] in many councils:
“Whoever defends heresy – he writes – is a heretic. Nobody can say that this is not heresy”(Letter Audivimus quod , in PL, vol. 165, col.1139 B).
Turning directly to the Pope, Bruno states:
My enemies say that I do not love you and that I am speaking badly of you behind your back, but they are lying. I indeed, love you, as I must love a Father and lord. To you living, I do not desire another Pontiff, as I promised you along with many others. Nevertheless, I obey Our Savior Who says to me: “Whoever loves father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me.” (…) I must love you, but greater yet must I love Him who made you and me.
With the same tone of filial candor, Bruno invited the Pope to condemn the heresy, as “whoever defends heresy is a heretic” (Letter Inimici mei, in PL, vol. 163, col. 463 A-D).
Paschal II did not tolerate this voice of dissent and removed him from his office as Abbot of Montecassino. However, St. Bruno’s example pushed some other prelates into asking with insistence for the Pope’s revocation of the pravilegium. Some years later, in a Council which met at the Lateran in March 1116,
Paschal II withdrew the agreement of Ponte Mammolo.
The same Lateran Synod condemned the pauperistic conception of the Church in the Sutri agreement. The Concordat of Worms (1122), stipulated between Henry V and Pope Callixtus II (1119-1124), ended – at least momentarily – the fight over the investitures.
Bruno died on July 18th 1123. His body was buried in the Cathedral of Segni and, through his intercession, there were immediately many miracles. In 1181, or, more probably, in 1183, Pope Lucius III placed him among the Saints.
There are those who will object [saying] that Paschal II (like Pope John XXII later on with regard to the Beatific Vision) never fell into formal heresy. This, however, is not the heart of the problem. In the Middle Ages, the term heresy was used in a wide sense, whilst theological language was becoming more refined especially after the Council of Trent, and precise theological distinctions were introduced among heretical propositions i.e. near to heresy, erroneous, scandalous, and so on.
We are not interested in defining the nature of the theological censures that would apply to Paschal II and John XXII’s errors, but in establishing if it be licit to resist these errors. Such errors certainly were not pronounced ex-cathedra, but theology and history teach us that
if a declaration by the Supreme Pontiff contains censurable elements on the doctrinal level, it is licit and may be right and proper to criticize it, even if it is not a formal heresy, solemnly articulated.
That is what St. Bruno of Segni did against Paschal II and the Dominicans in the 14th century against John XXII. They were not in error, but the Popes of that time were, and in fact withdrew their positions before their deaths.
The fact should be stressed, that
those who resisted with the most determination the Pope deviating from the faith, were precisely the most ardent defenders of Papal Supremacy. The opportunistic and servile prelates of that time, adapted themselves to the fluctuations of men and events, by placing the person of the Pope before the Magisterium of the Church.
Bruno of Segni, on the other hand, like many other champions of Catholic Orthodoxy, placed the faith of Peter before the person of Peter and reproached Paschal II with the same respectful determination which Paul had directed to Peter (Galatians 2, 11-14). [dim][
Two centuries later, St. Caterina of Siena would assert the right to protest the unorthodox actions of a Pope, even one whom she had addressed as 'dolce Cristo in terra'.]
In his exegetical comment on Matthew 16:18, Bruno explains that
the foundation of the Church is not Peter, but the faith confessed by Peter. Christ, in fact, states that He will build His Church, not on the person of Peter, but on the faith that Peter manifested saying: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” To this profession of faith, Jesus responds: “it is upon this rock and upon this faith that I will build My Church” (Comment. in Matth., Pars III, cap. XVI, in PL, vol. 165, col. 213).
By elevating Bruno of Segni to the honors of the altar the Church sealed his doctrine and his behaviour.
Pope Francis denounces 'worldliness' -
obviously not thinking that his continuing
'accommodation' with the world is worldliness at all
On the specific subject of Pope Francis himself, let me call attention to what Vatican Radio reports about his Casa Santa Marta homilette today, March 5:
http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-worldliness-blinds-us-to-the-needs-of
"Worldliness blinds us to the needs of the poor," he says. My problem with this, of course, is that in all the statements he is reported to have made in the homilette, he refers to worldliness as if it were only material worldliness, when he himself has been quoting Henri de Lubac all along about 'spiritual worldliness'.
Of course, the resounding irony to me is that JMB seems entirely unaware that his ongoing pas de deux with the world and its prevailing mentality - along with all the celebrity and media glorification that he gets for it - is worldliness of the worst kind! Adapting oneself to the mentality of the world and to its criteria is not what one expects of a Pope.
Clearly, JMB's worldliness does not blind him to the needs of the poor, but he is by no means the only person in the world, nor the only high-profile personality or agency, who thinks of the poor - and these others actually do what they can to materially help those in need, which is what he wants 'the world' to do.
To begin with, JMB/PF always seems to forget that the Catholic Church herself - with her associated charitable and social organizations - still constitute the largest ongoing effort at day-to-day humanitarian, charitable, educational and health assistance everywhere they can operate, and that the Church has been doing this long before he became Pope.
As for 'the world', there's the United Nations which does have many wide-ranging assistance programs, even if they may come with ideological strings attached. The same goes for philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates.
There are individuals like the singer Bono who has not only spearheaded fund-raising campaigns to benefit the needy but has also worked for years seeking to get the richer nations to condone Third World debt.
Yet no one would say that the UN, the Gateses and Bono are not 'worldly' in any sense!
Perhaps JMB wants all those now engaged in helping the needy to channel all their efforts through him? To give all the aid they mean to give, to Peter's Pence, so that the Successor of Peter alone can dispense all the material assistance possible?
In the two millennia of Church history, no one - not till now - has ever, ever interpreted Jesus's words to Peter to "Feed my flock" and "Feed my lambs" in the literal sense, because he clearly did not mean it in the literal sense.
However, if Jorge Mario Bergoglio does not think that his primary mission towards 'the poor' [and everyone else, for that matter, though he seems to consign all the 'non-poor' to a limbo beneath and beyond his consideration, and that's a considerable part of his flock!] is spiritual - to look after the salvation of their souls - then he is being consistent with his weird and clearly false notion that 'the poor' are virtuous and sinless simply because they are poor (therefore they do not need his spiritual assistance), whereas all 'the non-poor' are necessarily vicious and sinful simply because they are not 'poor', and worse, that their very existence is causing the miseries of 'the poor' (and therefore, they are not worthy of his consideration except as objects to vilify and condemn, even if he does not mind, and seems to enjoy, playing footsie with the powerful).
This notion equating poverty with automatic virtue - and the corollaries implied thereof - is one that no theologian, ethicist or sociologist in his right mind would even countenance. Yet this Pope's every word, no matter how patently absurd, is reported and widely accepted as if he were an omniscient oracle who could never say anything wrong! Yet, even in the best of times, that is not the reception that 'the world' has given to the Gospel! What does it say that the word of Bergoglio has the weight in the world today that the Word of God does not?
Entirely without meaning to, this post has turned into an omnibus 'the problem with JMB/PF' meme. Here's a provocative but academic thought from Fr. Blake. Not that I have ever thought JMB/PF would actually fall into heresy - I could be wrong, but he's much too astutely jesuitic and will make sure somehow that he does not cross the line from heterodoxy to heresy.
What if a pope commits heresy?
March 5, 2012
One of the meanders that seemed to fascinate Canon Lawyers was: who can depose a Pope, if he fell into heresy?
I was sent an article by Jacob Wood ("Can the Pope be a heretic?", CRISIS, March 4, 2015) that gives a brief summary of Suarez's and Bellarmine's arguments on the question.
[Francisco Suarez and St. Robert Bellarmine, both Jesuits, were the great canonists post-Trent.]
Basically canonists after Trent say that it is possible but there is no power to do it, either God removes him or 'the bishops' somehow do it. In previous age it might have been suggested, at least by certain schools of theology, that emperor could do it or I suppose the Roman mob. The problem was that although the Pope de jure, if he fell into heresy, might lose the Papacy, de facto he remained Pope.
The problem is of course no-one is able to judge the Pope, except the Pope. Up until the last Conclave that meant that only a successor who judge his predecessor. The arguments of the 16th-century canonists never of course envisioned the idea of a retired Pope. Does this change the situation?
Though I think the arguments put forward by some Italian authors that Benedict has retained something of the Papacy are more than cranky, the idea that a retired Pope might at some stage intervene in a crisis is an interesting idea.
[IMHO, should it happen, God forbid!, that JMB does commit an actual heresy, Benedict XVI would not hesitate to say so publicly - he would be dutybound to do it. The promise of obedience and reverence to a Pope no longer holds if that Pope commits heresy. In which case, Benedict XVI would not be 'judging' him but stating an objective fact. Because surely, if anyone knows what heresy is, it would be Benedict XVI.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/03/2015 15:45]