In his Consistory Allocution of 2 June 1944, "The mandate Confided to Peter", Pope Pius XII stated:

Mother Church, Catholic, Roman, which has remained faithful to the constitution received from her divine Founder, which still stands firm today on the solidity of the rock on which His will erected her, possesses in the primacy of Peter and of his legitimate successors, the assurance, guaranteed by the divine promises, of keeping and transmitting inviolate and in all its integrity through the centuries and millennia to the very end of time the entire sum of truth and grace contained in the redemptive mission of Christ.

Pope Pius XII was referring here to one of the greatest prerogatives of the Church, her indefectibility. The word indefectible means unable to fail. When used with reference to the Catholic Church it means that the Church will persist until the end of time, and that she will preserve unimpaired her essential characteristics. It can never become corrupt in faith or in morals; nor can it ever lose the Apostolic hierarchy, or the sacraments through which Christ communicates grace to men. The constitution received from her divine Founder must, as Pope Pius XII explained, remain firm. The Church will always remain faithful to it, particularly in the two aspects specifically mentioned by the Pope, the transmission of truth and grace. We can be absolutely certain of this because the constitution of the Catholic Church has a divine origin. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself founded His Church, and He imparted to her the divine constitution which He has solemnly guaranteed will remain essentially immutable until the end of time. The Church can never undergo any change which would make her, as a social organism, something different from what she was constituted by Our Lord. If any essential change took place in her constitution she would cease to be the Church which He had founded. It would mean that Our Lord had made promises which He could not fulfil, which would mean that He was not divine. This would make the entire Christian religion meaningless. It was explained supra that, in her innermost reality, the Church is Christ in the world today. If the Church required us to believe what is false, Christ would require us to believe what is false. If the Church offered us sacraments that are invalid, Christ would be offering us sacraments that are invalid. If the Church offered us sacramental rites that were explicitly or implicitly heretical, or were intrinsically evil and harmful to souls, then the responsibility for these aberrations would be that of Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. It is manifestly impossible that such a situation could ever occur if Our Lord is indeed divine, if He did indeed found a Church and did indeed endow it with an indefectible constitution. This is explained very clearly in The Catholic Encyclopedia:

For the Church must endure to the end the very same organization which Christ established. But in an organized society it is precisely the constitution which is the essential feature. A change in constitution transforms it into a society of a different kind. If the Church should adopt a constitution other than Christ gave it, it would no longer be His handiwork. It would no longer be the divine kingdom established by Him. As a society it would have passed through essential modifications, and thereby would have become a human, not a divine institution. None who believe that Christ came on earth to found a Church, an organized society destined to endure for ever, can admit the possibility of a change in the organization given to it by its Founder.

Those who claim that John Paul II is not a true pope, having vacated the Holy See through heresy, or make the same claim regarding either or both his immediate predecessors, cannot escape the fact that this means that the Catholic Church is no longer organized in the way that Our Lord constituted it, i.e. a visible, hierarchical Church in communion with the successor of Peter. In other words, Our Lord has been unable to keep His promise to be with His Church always, and therefore the Church that He founded has failed. This would also be the case if Pope Paul VI had mandated or authorized for universal use a sacramental rite that was in itself bad, evil, or harmful to the faithful. St. Pius X assures us in his Encyclical, Iucunda Sane, 1904, that Our Lord will never allow His Church to fail:

Never throughout the course of ages has supernatural power been lacking in the Church; never have the promises of Christ failed. They remain as powerful today as they were when they filled the heart of Gregory with consolation. Rather, having withstood the test of time and the change of circumstances and events, they possess even greater assurance.

© 1997 Michael Davies.

Last modified 27th October, 1997, by David Joyce.