An Apologia for
Roman Catholic
Traditionalism
Christopher Ferrara,
Esq.
REMNANT
COLUMNIST, New
Jersey
This installment is
supposed to be a reply to Part 4 of The
Wanderer’s tract (authored by Stephen Hand), but a systematic answer to what
Mr. Hand says there is beyond my limited powers of analysis and synthesis. Part
4 is essentially a rambling reiteration of everything Hand has already said in
the first three Parts. He flits
from subject to subject without logical connection, making one bare assertion
after another, so that if one were to reply to him in the order of his various
assertions, the reply would be as disorganized as the assertions
themselves. It is impossible to
find a line of argument in Hand’s various remarks.
First, Hand denounces unidentified “integrists” for denying the very
legitimacy of Vatican II as a council of the Church; then he accuses them of
interpreting the Bible on their own, just like the Protestants; then he declares
that “every heretic thinks the Pope is a heretic and every schismatic thinks the
Pope has departed from the Deposit of Faith.” Are you keeping a
tally?
Next, Hand offers the curious observation that he finds it difficult to
conceive “that laymen sitting in front of the TV eating their pretzels and
watching their games can feel confident in opposing the Successor of Peter
without severe angst.” Now, I have heard of the argumentum ad hominem, but this is the
first time I have seen the argumentum ad
pretzelem. What do the snack food preferences of “integrists” have to do
with the merits of their arguments—none of which Hand really addresses? Hand adds that he is astonished that
“they” do not fear schism, and that “they” have “grotesquely inflated egos.”
Who? You know—they.
From there Hand jumps to the claim that the ISOCC video and certain
“traditionalist personalities and
papers” declare “that the visible Church is no longer the Church” and that they
are guilty of “heretical sedevacantism.” This charge Hand bases entirely on a
false characterization of the ISOCC video, which says nothing of the kind. To address this mischaracterization, the
video’s producers have published a statement in the Remnant of August 15th which should make
it clear to anyone who is not comatose that the phrase “it is a new Church and a
new religion” is used in the same relative sense that Hand’s own tract uses the phrase “the
fact is, it simply didn’t seem like
church anymore” to describe the unrecognizable travesty of a Mass he
encountered when he returned to the Faith after a long absence. The ISOCC’s
August 15 statement also affirms—precisely as they told me, and as I reported in
my first installment—that the visible Church is still the Church, and that John
Paul II is its head. Only the
malicious will refuse to accept their affirmation. Enough, already, about the
ISOCC video.
Hopping about like a frog on a series of lily pads, Hand next denounces
both The Remnant and Catholic Family News for “attacks
against the Indult Mass and the approved Traditional Catholic orders.”
[Editor’s Note: For some reason, Mr. Hand has recently begun to pretend
that he doesn’t understand the difference between us warning against what we
have consistently called the “indult mentality” (i.e., the unspoken pact which some
Traditionalists seem to make with their bishops, whereby they swap their silence
against the revolution in exchange for permission for the Tridentine Mass) and
attacking the Indult Mass itself which, as we have repeatedly pointed
out, would be to denigrate the Tridentine Mass. We have said, again and again,
that the word “indult” in front of the word “Mass” cannot possibly change the
essence of the Mass. The “indult mentality,” on the other hand, is an entirely
different matter and should be strongly warned against, as we continue to do.
This warning, however, is directed at ourselves—at Traditionalists—as the
“mentality” is self-imposed. Why would Stephen Hand fail to make this
distinction and instead accuse us of attacking the Mass itself? Readers will
have to ask him that question, as I have no idea why he does anything he does.
MJM] Not only does Hand cite no evidence for the charge—because he has
none—but he deliberately suppresses
key evidence that exonerates The Remnant
and its editor: Though taking issue with certain recent FSSP tendencies
towards unjust compromise, The
Remnant has repeatedly affirmed its support of the Priestly Fraternity of
Saint Peter, as recently as the August 15th issue; Michael Matt himself
organized the American Chapter on the Pilgrimage to Chartres, France, each and
every year for the past ten years, and this Pilgrimage has the priests of the
FSSP as its official chaplains; and Michael Matt himself attends a
diocesan-approved Indult Mass.
Hand next offers the rather abstruse accusation that The Remnant and Catholic Family News “deflect” what he
claims is their obligation to “repudiate with great regret such audacity.”
(Which audacity? I’ve lost track.)
Hand laments that “this deflection is tragic in the extreme.”
Having lamented this extremely tragic deflection, Hand observes, quite
irrelevantly, that the Church fathers who taught on licit resistance to the Pope
under certain circumstances did not “believe that it was possible to attribute
heresy or grave errors to the teaching Magisterium or that the Church could
defect from the Faith and make void the promises of Christ.” By this remark Hand
evidently means to suggest that somebody or other among the “integrists”
believes that these things are
possible, although he identifies no one who actually says
so.
As Hand rambles on toward the end of Part 4, he offers the insight that
piety does no good if “it is severed from Catholic dogmatic certainties”—you
don’t say!—and that if “piety is used against the Church” then the bishops will
be “more and more suspicious of us all as we are broad-brushed together.” Hand
somehow fails to notice that it is he
who is wielding the broad brush.
However, I can certainly agree with Hand that Catholic piety makes
bishops suspicious.
Next, Hand leapfrogs to the odd non sequitur that the traditional Latin
Mass is “no guarantee of right theological thinking” because the modernists
offered the traditional Mass at the turn of the century. From this brilliant insight one could
just as easily deduce that the Catholic Church itself is no guarantee of right
theological thinking, as the modernists all belonged to it before they defected
from the Faith.
From there Hand jumps to the claim that traditionalists, like
Protestants, “call one another heretics or dangerous, ad nauseam” and that this is what
happens when “Peter the Rock is rejected.” Excuse me, but the only one who is
accusing his fellow Catholics of heresy, a la the Protestants, is Stephen
Hand. Traditionalists certainly
have disputes among themselves, but I don’t recall any responsible
traditionalist, such as Michael Matt, denominating any fellow traditionalist—or,
for that matter, any “conservative”—a heretic.
As Part 4 finally sputters to a conclusion, Hand contends that canon law
allows one to make “constructive criticism of ill-considered directions and
poorly formulated teaching at the local levels”—why only “local levels”?—but
never by way of “private judgment and rejecting the most basic truths of the
Catechism.” Which “basic truths” of the Catechism does Hand claim
traditionalists reject? Naturally, he doesn’t say.
Nowhere in this hopeless jumble does Hand provide a single quotation to demonstrate that anyone in
particular holds any of the views he condemns. Nowhere does he attempt any analysis or
refutation of the actual statements of real people. But then, his whole tract
suffers from the same fatal deficiency.
The whole thing is a kind of extended rhetorical wink at the
“conservative” gallery: We know who they
are, don’t we? And we know what they
believe, don’t we?
In reviewing Hand’s haphazard and exceedingly slim presentation, I am
reminded of Cardinal Newman’s Apologia
Pro Vita Sua, in which he gave this assessment of the infamous pamphlet
written against him by his justly forgotten accuser, Charles Kingsley: “[T]he
Pamphlet . . . is as slovenly and random and futile in its definite charges, as
it is iniquitous in its method of argument.” Slovenly, random and futile are apt
descriptions of Hand’s own pamphlet, in which he whirls about and fires off his
blunderbuss at various ill-defined targets, none of which he manages to hit with
even a single pellet of hard evidence.
The word “iniquitous” also applies to Hand’s method of argument, as shown
by his suppression of key evidence, noted above. (I will give other examples of
Hand’s deliberate suppression of evidence further on.)
In short, I have nothing much to say about Part 4 of Hand’s “monograph,”
except to make clear that I do not use my by-line to defend sedevacantists, or
those who say that the Second Vatican Council was not a valid council of the
Catholic Church, or those who accuse the conciliar Popes or the Council of
teaching actual heresy, as that term is properly understood (the denial of an
article of divine and Catholic faith), or those who affirm that the New Mass or
the new rite of priestly ordination are invalid, meaning that we would now have
no Masses and no priests in nearly the entire Catholic Church.
My friends Michael Matt and John Vennari have never held such views, nor,
to my knowledge, have they ever been held by the other signers of We Resist You (henceforth the Statement).
It is not my burden to defend nameless phantoms summoned by Hand from
the periphery of the post-conciliar debacle, and I do not defend them here. Rather it is Hand’s burden to show that
the particular people I defend—the ones he has accused by name—have advocated
such things; and he has not shown this because there is no evidence of it. That is precisely why Hand’s entire
tract is devoid of quotations from the written and oral statements of the
accused. Hand offers us nothing but 63 pages of vaporous
innuendo.
I hasten to add that those who have adopted such extreme positions are
for the most part merely victims of the unprecedented state of confusion in the
Church today. When the
1,500-year-old liturgy of the Roman Rite is tossed aside in favor of an entirely
new rite of Mass concocted by a committee with the aid of six Protestant
advisors, under the tutelage of a suspected Mason later sacked and sent off to
Iran; or when the reigning Pope celebrates solemn liturgies in St. Peter’s
Basilica and many other places with pro-abortion laymen in bishop’s costumes; or
when His Holiness says such things as “May Saint John the Baptist protect Islam
. . .”—when strange, shocking, utterly unprecedented things like these happen
again and again in the post-conciliar Church, it is hardly surprising that some
shocked and rightfully scandalized people will come to the wrong conclusions,
having simply failed to make the
right distinctions.
As I said at the beginning of my reply to Hand, if one wishes to be
honest, one must look to Rome for the ultimate cause of the post-conciliar
crisis. The Pope is our father in
the faith, and we must revere him as
such, but we can no longer pretend that the state of the household of the Faith
has nothing to do with the head of the household. Now, there is no question that
it is a gravely difficult thing for a layman to undertake what he believes is
due criticism of the Pope’s stewardship of the Church without undermining
respect for the institution of the papacy itself. That the task is difficult, however,
does not excuse us from undertaking it. Obsequious silence is not an option when
we are confronted with what Paul VI himself described as the auto-demolition of
the Church. If we say we love the Holy Father but do nothing to make known to
him our concerns or to resist actions we believe are deeply injurious to the
Church, we have ignored the voice of conscience and failed in our obligation in
charity. For this reason Saint Thomas teaches that “the fraternal correction
which is an act of charity is within the competency of everyone in respect of any person to whom one is bound by
charity, provided there is something in that person which requires
correction.”[i]
Here the Angelic Doctor was speaking precisely of St. Paul’s public rebuke of
the first Pope for his scandalous conduct in betraying his mission to the
Gentiles.
I
am writing, then, to defend nothing more or less than
Roman Catholic traditionalism of the sort practiced by my friends Michael Matt
and John Vennari, who have had the courage to exercise their duty as they see
it, even if it involves criticism of the Roman Pontiff. Let Hand and The Wanderer prattle on about phantoms
holding positions the accused and I do not defend. I could not care
less.
Summary JudgmentSummary Judgment
In law there is a procedure called the motion for summary judgment. When a claimant manifestly has no real
evidence for his claim, a trial is not necessary and the claim is dismissed upon
the opposing party’s motion for summary judgment. It is time for summary judgment in the
case of Stephen Hand and The Wanderer vs. Michael Matt, et
al.
There is no reason to keep the reader in suspense any longer: Although
this article nominally concerns Part 4 of Stephen Hand’s rant against the
“integrists,” the entire tract has already been published by The Wanderer
Press. Just as I predicted in the
first part of my reply to the tract, Hand has failed to produce a single
quotation from the oral or written statements of the accused to prove his
original charge that “Modernists and Integrists are actually twins. Both thrive
on opposition to the living Magisterium.”
What is more, the Magisterium deals not with vague notions or new
ecclesial orientations, but with specific doctrinal teaching which Catholics are bound to
accept. Hand has never specified in the first place which doctrines of this “living Magisterium” Michael Matt, John Vennari,
et al. are alleged to oppose.
Hand’s failure is easy to explain: the accused do not oppose any Catholic
doctrines. If they did, Hand would
have identified them. As I said at
the beginning of my defense, Hand’s accusations have nothing to do with
doctrine, but rather ecclesial attitudes of the accused, which he and Al Matt do
not like. So much for the charge of opposing “the living Magisterium.” Let us enter summary judgment in favor
of the accused. Claim
dismissed.
As for the charge of schism, Hand has not lifted a pinky to demonstrate
that the accused have committed any act which constitutes a breaking of
communion with the Roman Pontiff.
Oddly enough, while the Statement
was identified in Alphonse Matt’s preface as Exhibit A in Hand’s case
against the “integrists,” Hand fails to discuss it anywhere in his 63 pages of
rambling observations and tendentious characterizations of what he claims other
people believe. Further on I will
demonstrate that the Statement is
easily defensible as an expression of opinion within the due liberty of
discussion in the Church, no matter how strenuously Hand and Al Matt may
disagree with it. First, however, I
will address some recent developments in this controversy, and further develop
the broader case for the traditionalist position, as our Remnant defense has been attempting to
do since this Wanderer attack was
initiated.
Meanwhile, Out in the
HallwayMeanwhile, Out in the
Hallway
Having failed to prove his case when he was in the courtroom, Hand keeps
trying to continue the argument outside in the hallway. His increasingly frantic Website raves
on, describing Michael Matt, John Vennari, Atila Sinke Guimarães and Marian
Horvat as “the schismatic four” and myself as “the defender of the schismatic
four.” Pretty compelling
argumentation, eh? Hand has even added my photograph to his ever-growing rogue’s
gallery of schismatics.
In a shockingly crass provocation, Hand recently published on his Website
the commentary of a pro-abortion
activist, who condemns me for having acted as lead defense counsel for a
group of pro-lifers who were sued by Planned Parenthood and a gaggle of
abortionists under the ridiculous theory that protest posters against named
abortionists are “death threats” in violation of RICO. On Hand’s supposedly Catholic Website,
this pro-abort recounted the joyous victory celebration she and the abortionists
attended after the jury (having practically been ordered to do so by the jury
instructions) found in favor of the abortionists, one of whom specializes in
third trimester abortions. (The verdict is now on appeal in the 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals, with arguments set for September 12. Even liberal commentators are saying
that the verdict is a threat to the First Amendment. Please pray for me.) Hand tried to pass off this
incredibly shabby trick as an effort to stimulate legitimate debate on the First
Amendment limits of pro-life protest. But after someone objected that Hand was
trying to get at me by climbing on the backs of aborted babies, he removed the
pro-abort’s vile excrescences from his Website.
In his effort to continue the case he failed to prove in The Wanderer, Hand is now resorting to
outright trickery. A piece on his
Website proclaims the shocking news that the signers of the Statement “suggest conciliar Popes are
heretics to be deposed.” To prove
his latest accusation Hand relies upon a highly selective quotation from the Statement:
In our view, a
possible future declaration of a sede vacante (papal chair empty) would take
place automatically when the Church would become aware of the gravity of the
present day errors and who is responsible for them.
Hand’s deception is revealed by the full context of the quote, which conveys precisely the opposite of what Hand suggests:
This resistance
statement does not
imply:
The desire to judge the Pope, but only to compare his teaching with the prior Magisterium of other popes and of the Church.
The desire to declare that the Apostolic
See is vacant. In our view, a
possible future declaration of a sede vacante (the period of time when the
Apostolic See is empty, as a consequence of the heresy of the Pope) would take
place automatically when the Church
would become aware of the gravity of the present-day errors and of who is
responsible for them. Should such a situation not become public and notorious, the
declaration of the aforementioned judgment would fall to future pontiffs.
If anything, the full quotation makes it clear that the conciliar popes
cannot be judged by anyone but
future pontiffs because they have not engaged in the sort of public and
notorious heresy which (according to accepted theological opinion) would make it
manifest that a pope has defected from the faith and thereby lost his office.
Hand not only conceals the context of the quote, he deliberately obscures the
truth that the signers unquestionably recognize John Paul II as the validly
reigning Roman Pontiff because the Statement is addressed to him precisely
as the Pope and they appeal to his papal
authority in the Statement’s
conclusion.
As for the theoretical possibility that the See of Peter could become
vacant due to papal heresy, Hand’s hysteria aside, this is a perfectly
permissible theological speculation in the Church, even if present-day
sedevacantists have failed to prove that the conciliar popes or the Council have
taught heresy in the proper sense: that is, an obstinate denial of some article
of divine and Catholic faith. (See
Canon 751)
If Hand were not so busy blasting away with his blunderbuss, he might
have found the time to do a little research on the sedevacantist hypothesis. As
no less than Saint Robert Bellarmine observes:
A pope who is a manifest heretic automatically (per se) ceases to be pope and head, just
as he ceases automatically to be a Christian and member of the Church. Wherefore
he can be judged and punished by the Church. This is the teaching of all the ancient Fathers who teach that
manifest heretics immediately lose all jurisdiction.[ii]
Had he done some reading on
the topic from current Church sources, Hand would have discovered that even the
commentary to the 1983 Code of Canon Law recognizes the long pedigree of
theological opinion on the possibility of the See of Peter being vacant due to
papal heresy:
Classical
canonists discussed the question of whether a pope, in his private or personal
opinions, could go into heresy . . . If he were to do so in a notoriously and
widely publicized manner, he would break communion, and according to an accepted opinion, lose his office
ipso facto . . . Since no one can judge the pope (c. 1404) or depose a pope for
such crimes, the authors are divided as to how his loss of office would be
declared in such a way that a vacancy could then be filled by a new election.[iii]
The problem is not that present-day sedevacantists have embraced a
theologically inadmissible opinion—an opinion Hand seems to think is heretical
in itself—but rather that they have failed to prove their claims of actual
heresy in the teaching of the
Council or the conciliar popes.
Indeed, Bellarmine taught that we should piously presume that God would
never allow a reigning Pope to become a formal heretic, even if the theoretical
possibility exists. Since solid
evidence has not been supplied to prove the contrary, Michael Matt and John
Vennari so presume, as do the other traditionalists whom I would
defend.
At any rate, we can see that on the one occasion when Hand does actually
quote from a statement of the accused, he carefully crops the quotation to
convey a false impression. To my mind, this is even worse than his enlistment of
pro-aborts to provoke his targets.
Tactics like these belie the professed nobility of Hand’s crusade. In candor I must observe that we are
confronted with a juvenile and vindictive debater who has access to some very
dangerous toys. And now he has
found himself a new playmate: the self-styled Catholic apologist from San Diego,
Karl Keating.
Keating and Hand: Perfect
TogetherKeating and Hand: Perfect
Together
I suppose it was only a matter of time
before we heard from Karl Keating in this controversy. A little background on this gentleman is
in order.
My relations with Mr.
Keating date back to my defense of Gerry Matatics against Keating’s outrageous
accusation, published in The Wanderer
five years ago, that “Gerry Matatics is a sad example of how schism leads very
quickly to heresy.”[iv]
Gerry and I challenged Keating to prove his accusation, but as with Mr. Hand’s
charges against Michael Matt, et al. the evidence was never forthcoming. Keating promised to provide “the
testimony of several dozen people” and quotations from Gerry’s “own words, taken
from his own talks and other writings,”[v]
but neither the witnesses nor the quotations ever materialized. Keating also announced at a “Defending
the Faith” conference that he was writing an entire book on “extreme
traditionalists.” Like the
witnesses and the quotations, however, the book has never seen the light of
day.
Those who remember Keating’s gratuitous
denunciation of Gerry Matatics in The Wanderer and elsewhere understand that
Keating has arrogated to himself the role of grand inquisitor of the
traditionalists. (This is perhaps because Keating needs something to do, given
the general slowdown in the apologetics industry now that the “ecumenical
venture” has made it unfashionable to “refute” the “errors” of Protestantism.)
In explaining why he just had to denounce Gerry as a heretic and a schismatic to
the whole Catholic world, Keating publicly professed great anguish over the task
he had assigned himself: “This is not something I look forward to doing; it is
something I prayed would pass me by.”[vi]
Keating decided on his own initiative to issue false accusations against a
fellow Catholic, and then tried to make his malicious behavior sound like the
Agony in the Garden. No delusion of grandeur here. (Readers who are interested
in the whole history of Keating’s bizarre campaign against Gerry Matatics and
the effects it had on him and his family can read my apologia for Gerry at
www.aclainc.org.)
Keating has been nibbling around
the edges of this current controversy for some time now, as if waiting for the
right moment to sink his teeth into it. He has been commenting about me and
Gerry Matatics, the ISOCC video and the Statement in his “Catholic Answers” Q
& A forum on the EWTN Website. (In his Q & A on the controversy, Keating
simply invents the claim that I criticized the ISOCC video because it was
“promoting schism,” which is something I never said or suggested in my
critique.)
Keating has also been providing
advice to Hand behind the scenes. It certainly appears that Hand has mastered
Keating’s technique for bashing traditionalists: characterize what they believe, but
never, no never, actually quote them.
And if you must quote them, never provide the full context. Keating surely appreciates what a
tricky business it is to quote such articulate traditionalists as Gerry
Matatics, for what they say makes a great deal of sense when it is honestly
presented in its full context.
(This is exactly why Hand goes on for 63 pages in his tract without ever
once quoting the views of the people he condemns.)
Now it seems it is my turn for the
Keating Treatment. Hand has
publicly posted on his Website what I thought was a private email from Keating
to me, dated July 21, 2000. In this
marvelously pompous communication Keating informs me as follows (my
emphasis):
You and your friends must
choose. You need to be honest with yourselves and with your public. You must make clear your entry into schism
or you must reject schism not just in
theory but in fact—and that means rejecting the video and the manifesto and the
entire course you have been on for a long a time. Chris, it’s time to fish or cut
bait.
It is difficult to believe that Keating could expect such statements to
be greeted with anything but uproarious laughter. For one thing, even if I were a schismatic, what could be more
ridiculous than asking me to “make clear” my “entry into schism”? The history of the Church is not exactly
chock-a-block with schismatics who say: All right, you’ve got me, I’m a
schismatic. What would Keating propose that I do? Perhaps he thinks I should accede to his
demand by way of a reply email:
Dear
Karl:
In
reply to your email of July 21, 2000, this will confirm my entry into
schism. Thank you for helping me
clarify my canonical situation.
Formerly yours in
Christ,
Chris
Ferrara
How is it possible for anyone to take himself that seriously? Naturally, I was
dismayed when Keating published such silliness on the Internet, especially when
I had thought his email was for my eyes only—you know, private fraternal
dialogue among Catholics, that sort of thing. In fact, when I replied to Keating
I told him that I considered our correspondence confidential. How naive of me.
However, we must at least admit that Keating is quite the prose stylist:
“Chris, it’s time to fish or cut bait” has that je ne sais quois which distinguishes
merely adequate from truly elegant prose.
Keating’s style rather reminds me of the great 16th century
disputations of eminent Churchmen with the Protestants; those of Johann Eck or
Edmund Campion come to mind. One
can easily imagine the scene in the crowded and hushed aula of Pleissenburg Castle, as Eck
rises to reply to Luther on the question of the papal primacy: “Martin, it’s
time to fish or cut bait!” No wonder Keating thought his literary gem of an
email needed to be published to the whole world.
Of course, Keating did not trouble himself to demonstrate from a single
thing I have ever said or written that I have entered into “schism.” Since he
concludes that the ISOCC video and the Statement are “schismatic”—a proposition
he does not bother to prove—it follows as night follows day that anyone who
defends the authors of these documents against the charge of schism is a
schismatic by association. Like Hand’s tract, Keating’s email heaps conclusion
upon conclusion without any evidentiary foundation, culminating in his demands
that I must do this and I must do that in order to save my
membership in the Holy Catholic Church.
Moreover, His Eminence is not satisfied that I have publicly critiqued
what I believe to be the problems in the ISOCC video, and that its “schismatic”
producers shipped a copy of my critique with each copy of the video. No, he
demands more! And what would
satisfy him? Clearly, nothing would
satisfy him. For it is plain that
Keating is not interested in my welfare or my membership in the Church, which I
suspect he does not doubt for a moment.
He is interested only in splashy denunciations of traditionalist
Catholics before the general public, which makes his entrance into this most
recent Wanderer controversy not surprising in the least.
To be perfectly fair to Keating, he did also suggest that I have entered
into schism because of “the entire course you have been on for a long
time.” As to what Keating means by
“the entire course you have been on for a long time,” that is anybody’s
guess. Perhaps Keating expects me
to make a catalogue of my writings and speeches for him to review, so that he
can produce of a list of the propositions I must recant in order to prove to him
that I am still a member of the Church.
Or perhaps he is expecting another email:
Dear
Karl,
In reply to your email of July 21, 2000, this will confirm that I have
rejected “the entire course [I] have been on for a long time.” Since you did not specify what you mean
by “entire course” or “a long time,” I assume it will suffice if I reject, say,
everything I have believed and said for the past ten
years.
Since I have now rejected the
entire course I have been on for a long time, I would appreciate it if you would
approve my readmission into the Catholic Church at your earliest
convenience.
Yours
truly,
Chris
Ferrara
There you have it: the Keating Treatment. Isn’t the man just precious? Over the
years Keating seems to have slipped into the delusion that his title as
President of Catholic Answers, which he conferred upon himself, lends a kind of
self-proving quality to his mere ipse
dixit. There is no need for him
to prove his charges against traditionalists; it is sufficient that he has made
them. Let lesser men stoop to the burden of proof. The wonder is that anybody
takes Keating’s accusations
seriously. In fact, when Keating made
gratuitous accusations against Gerry Matatics to one of America’s foremost
Churchmen, he learned that his imperious manner does not play well outside the
little kingdom he has fashioned for himself:
Have you lost
your grip on the larger world? You imply, astonishingly that because you and Mr.
Matatics do not get along . . . that I should have assumed that he is wrong and you right
when, even in the recent letter you wrote, you did not mention the subject of
dispute, much less why Mr. Matatics is wrong. Grow
up. Fight your
battles and indeed win them if you can. But contain your disappointment that the
whole world is not afloat in your teacup.
Sad to say, Keating still seems to think his teacup is a very big
place. You just can’t put a dent in
some people.
Keating/Hand on
SchismKeating/Hand on
Schism
Keating’s email demonstrates that he (like Hand) has a manifestly shaky
grasp on the whole concept of schism—a remarkable state of affairs, given the
amount of time Keating spends talking about the schismatic status of “extreme
traditionalists.” As Keating
further informed me in his July 21 email:
By the way, there is no requirement under
canon law that the refusal of submission be in all things; one is still a
schismatic if one refuses submission in fewer than all
things.
Keating really seems to believe that if one were to disobey the Pope in,
say, two or three things, or even one thing, that would constitute schism. In short, for Keating disobedience =
schism. Karl, Karl, Karl. Five years have passed since he
denounced Gerry Matatics for schism and Keating still does not quite understand what the
term denotes.
Contrary to what most “conservatives” assume, schism is not disobedience
to certain papal commands, but rather a rejection of the Pope’s authority in itself. As the Catholic Encyclopedia
notes:
[N]ot every disobedience is
schism; in order to possess this character it must include besides the transgression
of the commands of superiors, denial of
their divine right to command.[vii]
Thus, for example, there
was no schism involved in the refusal of Polycrates of Ephesus and the synods of
Asia Minor to obey the command of Pope Victor I that they abandon the
quartodeciman Easter. Polycrates and his fellow bishops resisted—as in “we resist you”—on the
grounds that they had adjudged— as in “private judgment”—that the Pope had no
right to order them to abandon a custom they claimed was descended from St. John
himself. The Catholic Encyclopedia
makes the very distinction Keating/Hand recklessly ignore:
The resistance of the Asiatic bishops
involved no denial of the supremacy of Rome. It indicates solely that the bishops
believed St. Victor to be abusing his power in bidding them renounce a custom
for which they had Apostolic authority.8
Likewise, there was no act
of schism when, in 1331, certain French theologians and Cardinal Orsini
denounced Pope John XXII as a heretic after he preached and developed in a
series of sermons the thesis that there is no particular judgment immediately
after death, but that the Beatific vision of the saved and the eternal
punishment of the damned await the final judgment of God on the Last Day. Cardinal Orsini even called for a
council to pronounce the Pope a heretic, yet Church history does not record that
Orsini or those who agreed with him (including King Louis of Bavaria) were in
schism, even though their motives were evidently more political than
religious.8A On the contrary, history records that when he was resisted in his novel teaching, John
XXII replied that he did not intend to bind the whole Church, and he impaneled a
commission of theologians to consider the question. The commission informed the Pope that he was in
error.
A well-known modern
example of licit resistance even to papally approved doctrinal novelties is the
public furor over the astoundingly defective definition of Holy Mass in Article
7 of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal, prepared by Bugnini for the
promulgation of Pope Paul’s new rite of Mass:
The Lord's Supper
or Mass is the sacred assembly or congregation of the people of God met
together, with a priest presiding, to celebrate the memorial of the Lord. For this reason Christ's promise applies
supremely to a local gathering together of the Church: ‘Where two or three come
together in my name, there am I in their midst.’ (Mt. 18:20)
Any Protestant would be
quite pleased with this definition.
It was only after publication of the Ottaviani Intervention, which
exposed this outrage, that Paul VI was forced to rescind this quasi-heretical
definition of the Mass and order it replaced with one which made some mention
that the Mass is the unbloody Sacrifice of Our Lord on Calvary, made present on
the altar by the priest acting in
persona Christi. There were no “conservatives” like Mr.
Hand around in those days to accuse Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci of schism for
protesting this atrocious definition of the Mass, not to mention the whole
theology of the new rite itself.
It is not surprising that Mr. Hand failed to acquaint himself with the
precise nature of schism and the facts of Church history I have just cited, but
it defies belief that Mr. Keating, who purports to give the world Catholic
answers, is unaware of these things.
I won’t bore the reader with all the details of my reply to Keating’s
email. I do note that I provided him with an additional vivid example to
illustrate how the Church views the
crucial canonical and theological difference between schism and simple
disobedience: Hans Küng is very, very disobedient to the Pope; he has even
condemned John Paul II as a despot who “rules in the spirit of the Spanish
Inquisition.” Yet the Vatican does not consider Kung to be a schismatic. On the
contrary, he remains a priest in good standing in the Diocese of Basle, and
Cardinal Ratzinger has referred to him as “a great scholar.” Why is this? Because Küng does not deny the papal office itself, so he cannot be
convicted of schism, which involves a positive breaking of communion with the
See of Peter. Thus, while Küng is no longer allowed to call himself a Catholic
theologian, he is allowed to remain a
Catholic priest. I asked Keating by
what right he condemns me and my friends as schismatics, when the Vatican
regards the likes of Küng as being in communion with the Holy See. I suspect the
answer will come no sooner than the several dozen witnesses, the Matatics
quotations and the book on “extreme traditionalists.”
To assist Keating further in this area, I referred him to the
above-quoted sections of the Catholic Encyclopedia. In a bit of supreme irony, the text I
quote from the online Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on schism is found
immediately adjacent to an advertisement for Keating’s book What Catholics Believe. Perhaps before the next edition is
published, Keating will have acquainted himself with what Catholics believe
about the nature of schism.
From all of this it follows that even if the signers of the Statement were wrong in their stated
resistance to certain post-conciliar novelties, they would not for that reason
be guilty of schism, because they have not denied the divine office of the
papacy in itself. As I have just
shown, the offense of schism does not arise merely because resistance to a
particular papal act is not successful
or especially well grounded. Rather, the offense depends upon on
whether the Pope’s authority is generally denied by the resistor. Like the
faithful Catholics who challenged teachings by John XXII and Paul VI, the
signers of the Statement have not
generally denied the Pope’s authority.
Quite the contrary, they have appealed to it:
Most Holy Father, the Catholic laity who
direct themselves to You in this declaration of resistance are among the most
ardent supporters of the papacy. For us, the monarchical institution of the
Church with the Pope at its apex is the perfect summation of the universe
created by God . . . And the Pope is the natural link that joins the Glorious
Christ with the Church, and the Church with heaven. We recognize, therefore,
that there cannot be a more elevated position than that of the Supreme Pontiff,
nor one more worthy of admiration. It is based on this premise that we
direct this document to Your Holiness.
We humbly beg the Incarnate Wisdom to illuminate your intelligence, and
guide your will to do what should be done
for the glory of God, the exaltation of Holy Mother Church, and the salvation of
souls.
Schismatics do not beg the Pope to exercise his supreme authority; they
do not recognize that authority in the first place. This passage from the Statement completely extinguishes Hand/
Keating/Matt’s frivolous charge of schism. Let us mark it dismissed—on summary
judgment.
Watchdogs of the
RevolutionWatchdogs of the
Revolution
At any rate, it occurs to me that Keating’s unsolicited advice—“You need
to be honest with yourselves and with your public. You must make clear your entry into
schism or you must reject schism”—would be very appropriately addressed to
numerous bishops and priests in the desolated vineyard of what even The Wanderer contemptuously describes as
Amchurch. But Keating is not
about to antagonize the decaying ecclesial establishment on which the existence
of his “conservative” apostolate depends.
It is a safe bet that Keating has never informed any neo-modernist priest
or bishop that he must be honest with his public and make clear his entry into
schism, or else reject schism and “the entire course you have been on for a long
time.” Like Hand, Keating typifies the “conservative” Catholic’s passivity in
the face of what Paul VI described as the auto-demolition of the Church—a
passivity punctuated only by occasional outbursts against traditionalists who
oppose the demolition vocally enough to remind the “conservative” that he
himself has done absolutely nothing to oppose it, and worse, that he has even
profited from it.
As I have written elsewhere, prominent “conservatives” like Keating serve
as the watchdogs of the post-conciliar revolution. They slumber peacefully while an army of
burglars ransacks the household of the Faith, but can always be counted on to
leap to their feet and run upstairs to yap at a few traditionalists huddled in
the attic with their remaining possessions, including some “illicit” Latin
Masses. Meanwhile, the burglars continue their work downstairs without
interruption. In his book The Remaking of the Catholic Church, the
arch-liberal Richard P. McBrien noted this very phenomenon: “Criticism of the
extreme right by moderate conservatives is far more effective than by moderate
progressives.”9 How right he is: The Church is infested with scandal
and neo-modernist heresy, and heterodox literature denying or undermining dogmas
and doctrines of the Faith abounds in Catholic seminaries and universities. But
Keating and Hand leap to action over a video produced by a retired couple in
Arizona and a Statement signed by
four traditionalist Catholics, while Al Matt devotes seven issues of his newspaper to these
items—yet manages to avoid any real discussion of their
contents!
Woof! woof!, goes Mr. Hand.
Arf! Arf!, goes Mr. Keating.
Yip! Yip!, goes Alphonse Matt.
Good boy!, says Richard P. McBrien.
As the present controversy demonstrates, the very existence of a large
body of quiescent “conservatives” has allowed the post-conciliar revolution to
advance so far into the structure of the Church. The basic function of the “conservative”
Catholic in the dynamic of the revolution has been the marginalization of traditionalists,
whom “conservative” leaders helpfully denounce for their simple refusal to cease
being what “conservatives” themselves were only 35 years ago. With the traditionalists safely marginalized, the soft wood of the
conservatives is the only resistance the termites have encountered. The results speak for
themselves.
This is not to say that “conservatives” as a group are subjectively
complicit in the advances of the post-conciliar revolution. Most “conservatives” have accepted all
the changes in good faith, hewing to the false notion of holy obedience peddled
by “conservatives” like Keating, who serve as de facto apologists for the revolution,
which they find a hundred ways to minimize and explain away. With the
pre-conciliar past now hazy at best, most “conservatives” do not recognize that
in the Church’s long history we have seen time and again a principled resistance
by loyal Catholics to sudden changes in the Church, even in relatively trivial
matters. Just as it was licit for
the Asian synods to refuse Pope Victor’s direct command to change the date on
which they observed Easter, so also is it licit to resist the unprecedented and
hugely destructive changes being imposed upon us in the post-conciliar period,
and to work and pray for the ultimate reversal of these changes.
I believe Keating and his fellow “conservative” traditionalist-bashers
know this in their heart of hearts.
If I may be permitted to indulge in a bit of amateur psychology, I would
venture that the strange preoccupation of certain “conservatives” with
traditionalists—whom they denounce far more often and far more harshly than any
true enemy of the Church—is but a reflection of their inner conviction that
traditionalists legitimately oppose the ruinous post-conciliar changes they should have opposed, but did not.
“Conservative” leaders understand, at least implicitly, that the very existence
of a traditionalist movement within
the Church demonstrates that they too could have resisted the changes without
ceasing to be Catholics, yet history will record that they did absolutely
nothing. It would be very
convenient indeed if traditionalists could somehow be declared non-Catholics, so
that the conservatives’ failure to act could thus be seen as exemplary “trust in
the Church” and the only Catholic way to behave. (Traditionalists will be spared
this treatment, however, if they meet two requirements: stay on the Indult
reservation and keep quiet about
the post-conciliar revolution.
Keating, et al. condescendingly describe these people as “responsible”
traditionalists. While I myself attend an Indult Mass, I am accused of “entry
into schism” because I do not fulfill the second
requirement.)
So, just as liberals in secular society employ epithets—“anti-Semite,”
“homophobe,” “racist”—to marginalize and destroy people whose arguments they are
unable to answer and do not wish to be heard, Keating and his fellows hurl the
epithet “schism” to marginalize and
destroy traditionalists. But worse
than the secular liberals, these conservatives use this demagogic trick against
their own brothers in the Faith.
I can think of no other answer to the mystery of why “conservatives” like
Karl Keating, Stephen Hand and Alphonse Matt are so eager to accuse
traditionalists of the crime of schism, yet so loath to make the same accusation
against any of the neo-modernists who are dismantling the Church before their
very eyes, often in direct disobedience to explicit papal commands to refrain
from what they are doing. (Despite its endless criticism of Amchurch scandals,
The Wanderer has never once, to my
knowledge, called even the worst neo-modernist Church-wrecker a schismatic.)
If there is another explanation for
the mystery, I would like to hear it.
Well, Mr. Keating?
The Problem of
NoveltyThe Problem of
Novelty
Our debate with the “conservatives” shows that the post-conciliar crisis
can be summed up in one word: novelty.
We have seen how the “conservative” Catholic tends to condemn the
traditionalist Catholic for the latter’s instinctive opposition to novelty,
failing to recognize that this instinct is as important to the health of the
Church as the instinct of self-preservation is to the health of living
creatures.
The Church’s perennial counsel against the embrace of novelties was
recapitulated by Pope Saint Pius X in his monumental encyclical Pascendi:
But for Catholics
nothing will remove the authority of the second Council of Nicea, where it
condemns those ‘who dare, after the impious fashion of heretics, to deride the
ecclesiastical traditions, to invent novelties of some
kind...or endeavor by malice or craft to overthrow any one of the legitimate traditions of
the Catholic Church’ . . . . Wherefore the Roman Pontiffs, Pius IV
and
Pius IX,
ordered the insertion in the profession of faith of the following declaration:
‘I most firmly admit and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and other observances and constitutions of
the Church.’
The
“conservatives” have no answer to the claim that Saint Pius X would be more
horrified than any traditionalist by the post-conciliar novelties. They have no
answer because they know it is true. The sensus catholicus abhors innovation; and
not just innovation in what “conservatives” misleadingly call the “substance” of
the Faith—as if everything else could be changed with safety. The teaching of
St. Pius X, echoed by all his predecessors, is that not only apostolic
Tradition, but all the ecclesiastical
traditions and customs which have been woven into the life of the Church over
the centuries must be defended against unnecessary and dramatic change, lest the
Church’s commonwealth be so disrupted that the faithful are thrown into a state
of confusion and alienation which endangers the Faith itself.
It is indisputable that since 1960 the Church has been overtaken by a
swarm of utterly unprecedented novelties: a new rite of Mass, a new liturgical
calendar, new sacramental rituals, a new ecumenism, a new rapprochement with
non-Christian religions, a new “dialogue with the world,” a new rule of life in
seminaries, priestly orders and convents, a “new evangelization,” and even an
entirely new vocabulary to replace what Hand belittles as “high metaphysical
abstractions” in the Church’s pre-conciliar teaching.
As Cardinal Newman showed in his Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine, the sudden emergence of some novelty in the Church which is not
the natural and almost imperceptible outgrowth of everything that came before it
would be a sign, not of life and growth, but of corruption—just as the sudden
emergence of a tumor is a sign of corruption in the human body. It is manifest
that every one of the suddenly emergent post-conciliar novelties has produced a
corresponding corruption in the Church:
§ The
new liturgy has produced a loss of Eucharistic faith and respect for the Blessed
Sacrament.
§ The
new liturgical calendar and cycle of readings have produced (as Msgr. Klaus
Gamber noted) a loss of the sense of place and a diminished inculcation of
Scriptural lessons, especially the “hard sayings” of Scripture, which have been
largely eliminated or neutralized by tendentious translations that are really
dishonest paraphrases.
§ The
new ecumenism has produced a relative protestantization of the Catholic liturgy
and faithful, accompanied by the confirmation of Protestants in their errors and
the accelerated moral and doctrinal decomposition of Protestant sects over the
course of the “ecumenical dialogues.” (Ironically enough, the evangelical sects
which have shunned the ecumenical venture are those which remain closest to
Catholic moral teaching.)
§ The new
rapprochement with non-Christian religions has produced the near-extinction of
the traditional missionary activity of the Church which aimed at saving souls
whose false religions imprisoned them in darkness (as Pius XI described Islam,
for example); and this development has been accompanied by the perception that
good hope is to be entertained for the salvation of all non-Christians—precisely
the proposition condemned in Pius IX’s Syllabus of
Errors.10
§ The new
sacramental rituals have produced a loss of the understanding of what the
sacraments mean, baptism in particular having become a mere initiation rite,
with the subject of original sin never mentioned.
§ As
Paul VI admitted, “the opening to the world has produced a veritable invasion of
the Church by worldly thinking;” the world, on the other hand, has
only hastened to descend toward utter barbarity, while Church authorities
continue to insist upon “dialogue” rather than teaching with the authority of
God, condemning error and warning the world that its sins merit eternal
damnation.
§ The
reform of the seminaries, the priestly orders and the convents has produced an
emptying of all three, and a deeply neo-modernist formation in the few men and
women who still enter. (Only a return to the traditional rule and formation in
some places has produced new vocations in any great numbers.)
§ The
“new evangelization” (in conjunction with the new ecumenism and the new liturgy)
has produced a profound loss of conversions and vocations compared with the
immediate pre-conciliar period, but also a great number of semi-autonomous
“ecclesial movements” of bizarre character, which have sprouted like weeds in
the devastated vineyard. These include a frenzied, pan-denominational,
charismatic gnosticism, horrifying to behold, which replaces the sound piety and
inward composure exemplified by the saints of the Church.
On the matter of the Church’s new vocabulary, the search for new way of
“speaking to the world” has produced a mind-boggling collection of buzzwords
lacking any of the classical precision of Catholic doctrine: “ecumenism,”
“ecumenical venture,” “dialogue,” “ecumenical dialogue,” “interreligious
dialogue,” “responsible parenthood,” “solidarity,” “collegiality,”
“partial communion,” “imperfect communion,” “sister churches,” “reconciled
diversity,” “what unites us is greater than what divides us” (divided unity in
the Faith being impossible), “inculturation,” “Church of the new Advent,” “the new Springtime,” “the civilization of love,” and so on
and so forth. Never in Church history has the thinking of Churchmen been so
dominated by neologisms which have no precise meaning. And never has the Church’s message been
so uncertain, as even the recent Synod of European bishops was forced to
admit.
In sum, the historical record of the post-conciliar novelties is indisputably a record of corruption, failure and confusion in every area those novelties have touched. As Cardinal Ratzinger has candidly admitted:
“The results of the Council seem cruelly
to have contradicted the expectations everybody had, beginning with John XXIII
and Paul VI . . .[W]e have been confronted instead with a continuing process of decay that has
gone on largely on the basis of appeals to the council, and thus has discredited
the council in the eyes of many people.”11
Cardinal Ratzinger went on to say: “It is my opinion that the misfortunes
the Church has met with in the last twenty years are not due to the true council
itself, but to an unleashing within the
council of latent, aggressive, polemical and centrifugal forces.” Some
sixteen years after the Cardinal’s remarks, however, the evidence of an even
deeper “process of decay” permits us to advance beyond the Cardinal’s opinion to
say that the “true council” is indeed part of the problem. And the problem is
novelty.
In
Part 4 of his tract Hand claims that John Paul II has decreed definitively that
the Council and all the innovations it engendered are perfectly in line with
Tradition, and that no one may suggest or even think otherwise. To support this
wildly extravagant claim he quotes, not an encyclical, a motu proprio or some other formal papal
teaching addressed to the universal Church, but a single sentence from a speech
by John Paul II to a symposium on the
implementation of Vatican II: “To read the council assuming it supposes a
rupture with the past, when in reality it is aligned with the everlasting faith,
is clearly erroneous.”12
In the first place, Hand
exhibits typical “conservative” confusion about the scope of the Magisterium
when he asserts that a papal speech to a symposium means that “Rome has spoken”
and that “the question is closed for any Catholic.” If papal speeches to
particular groups could bind the universal Church, then it would be inevitable
that the Pope would bind the Church to error. For example, every Catholic would now be
required to believe, as the Pope declared in a sermon on January 27, 1999, that
“the dignity of human life must never
be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil” and that the
death penalty should be abolished as “cruel and unnecessary.”13
Clearly, no Catholic is obliged to believe that the death penalty may never be imposed or that it should be
abolished as a moral evil. Such a teaching is manifestly contrary to all
Tradition—as was the repeated sermonizing of John XXII on the particular
judgment.
Moreover, to say that the Council is “aligned with the everlasting Faith”
or that the Council as a whole does not “suppose a rupture with the past” is not
quite the same thing as saying that every formulation in the conciliar texts is
perfectly in line with Tradition.
We recall that in the nota
praevia to Lumen Gentium the
council expressly disclaimed any intention to formulate binding doctrine unless
it openly declared such intention. The Council wished to have the freedom to
indulge in non-traditional “pastoral” formulations whose very novelty alarmed a
number of the council fathers, leading to the nota praevia. On this point we have the
posthumously revealed testimony of Bishop Thomas Morris, a council
father:
I was relieved when we were told that
this Council was not aiming at defining
or giving final statements on doctrine, because a statement of doctrine has
to be very carefully formulated and I would have regarded the Council documents
as tentative and liable to be
reformed.14
Once
the Council was over, however, we were suddenly told that it had been a
veritable Vesuvius of Catholic doctrine.
This hardly seems fair to the council fathers who were assured otherwise
by the Council’s theological commission.
Considering the Pope’s symposium statement further, it does not seem to me that the Holy Father was saying exactly what Hand claims he said. Here we find, once again, that Hand has carefully cropped a quotation to avoid certain words he wishes to conceal. In the immediately preceding sentence in the Zenit news account from which Hand quotes, the following appears:
“[I]t is
necessary not to lose the genuine intention of the Council Fathers; on the
contrary, it must be recovered, overcoming cautious and partial interpretations
that impeded expressing to the maximum the novelty of the Council Magisterium.”
In other words, the Pope
said that the Church has been too
cautious in applying the novelty
of conciliar teaching. Here John
Paul echoes the sentiment of Paul VI, who declared that: “The important words of
the Council are newness and updating
... the word newness has been given
to us as an order, as a
program.”15
And, when one consults the original text of the Pope’s symposium remarks,
one finds the following sentence immediately after the one selected by Hand:
What has been
believed by ‘everyone, always and everywhere’ is the authentic newness that enables every era to
perceive the light that comes from the word of God’s Revelation in Jesus
Christ.
Hand’s misuse of this text
is shameful, but it serves as a good example of how “conservatives” try to
conceal the full import of what the Pope says so often about Vatican II in order
to maintain the fiction that it fits seamlessly into the line of all the other
councils. It cannot be denied,
however, that Vatican II is the first Council in the history of the Church whose
strict continuity with Tradition is not self-evident. If it were self-evident, Cardinal Ratzinger
would not be making comments like the following:
The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as part of the entire
living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from
zero. . . . That which was previously considered most holy—the form in which the
liturgy was handed down—suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things,
the one thing that can safely be prohibited. It is intolerable to criticize
decisions which have been taken since the Council; on the other hand, if men make
question of ancient rules, or even of the great truths of the faith . . . nobody
complains or only does so with great moderation . . . .All of this leads a great number of people
to ask themselves if the Church of today is really the same as the Church of
yesterday, or if they have changed it for something else without telling
people. The one way in which Vatican II can be made plausible is to present
it as it is; one part of the unbroken, the unique tradition of the Church and of
her faith.16
But why should
the Council have to be “made
plausible” if, as the “conservatives” would have it, the Council’s
plausibility—that is, its complete harmony with Tradition—is already perfectly
clear?
Some
“conservative” commentators are a bit more honest than Mr. Hand. Taking the bull by the horns, they
openly admit that John Paul II is an innovator who sees in Vatican II (as did
Paul VI) a mandate for progressivist undertakings. Leading “conservative” George
Sim Johnston, for example, refers to the “historically radical ecumenism of John
Paul II,” and (speaking of a compendium of his fellow conservatives’ writings)
admits that:
[B]y any historical measure, the
‘conservatives’ in this volume are progressive Catholics. Unlike the
Sadducees on the Catholic left and the Pharisees on the truly Catholic right,
the ‘conservatives’ in this volume understand the pontificate of John Paul
II because they understand the Second Vatican Council. They understand that
Christ founded a teaching Church whose doctrines are not subject to whim and
manipulation. But they also realize that the Church, being human and organic, has to
change.17
There we have it all: To follow the “historically radical ecumenism of
John Paul II” and the teaching of the Second Vatican Council is to be a progressive, leaving behind forever the
Pharisees who have refused to “change.”
The Council, which only the progressives and John Paul II really
understand, has become the new hermeneutical key to the practice of the
Faith—because, you see, the Church just “has to change.” (At least Johnston has
the decency to acknowledge that traditionalists comprise the “truly Catholic
right.” Unlike Hand, Keating and Al Matt, Johnston does not stoop to the cheap
trick of positing a false equivalence between heretics and loyal
Catholics.)
Similar admissions come from “conservative” commentator John Beaumont in
his review of George Weigel’s new biography of the Pope:
One possible
cause for concern in relation to the phenomenon of Pope John Paul II is the
sometimes breathtaking nature of his
innovative teaching. It is natural for Catholics to be wary and
wonder whether all of this can fit in with the
tradition.18
Yes,
it would be only natural for
Catholics to be wary of breathtaking
innovations in the teaching of a Pope on faith and morals! Beaumont lets this bomb drop without
seeming to notice the explosion. He contents himself with the observation that
since we have a “guaranteed Church” we should simply assume that breathtaking
innovations are merely “developments” of settled doctrine.
Such
explanations are simply not satisfactory.
They offer no answer to the sedevacantists, who know a lame argument when
they see one. There must be a more sensible explanation for the “phenomenon of
John Paul II” and the post-conciliar developments as a whole than: “All these
breathtaking innovations are traditional, don’t worry about it.”
Let
me propose an explanation here.
Doctrine or Not?Doctrine or Not?
When the Holy Father used the
phrase “everyone, always and everywhere” in the address to the symposium on
Vatican II, he was referring to the criterion by which the Church knows that a
doctrine is Catholic: that everyone, everywhere in the Church, has always believed it. To use the formula
of St. Vincent Lerins: quod ubique,
quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum
est (what has been believed everywhere, always and by all). Even papal
pronouncements respect this criterion, and in cases of the infallible definition
of doctrine are aimed precisely at settling once and for all what the Church has
always believed. John Paul II here proposes a resolution of the apparent
oxymoron of novel tradition by suggesting that the Church has always believed in
“authentic newness.” But if the Church has always believed in authentic newness,
then why has the Church not always said so? And in what, exactly, does this
authentic newness consist in terms of Catholic doctrine? Is there any real doctrinal content to the conciliar
“program” of “newness” remarked by Paul VI?
That the Council and the
conciliar popes have given us something utterly novel is admitted in the Pope’s
inaugural encyclical, Redemptor
Hominis. Referring in part to
“the new ecumenical orientation” of the Church introduced by the Council and the
conciliar popes, His Holiness declared:
Entrusting myself fully to the Spirit of truth, therefore, I am entering
into the rich inheritance of the recent pontificates. This inheritance has
struck deep roots in the awareness of the Church in an utterly new way, quite unknown
previously, thanks to the Second
Vatican Council, which John XXIII convened and opened and which was later
successfully concluded and perseveringly put into effect by Paul VI . .
.19
Before Vatican II, when has a pope ever proclaimed a whole “new
orientation” of the Church, ecumenical or otherwise? And what other council in
Church history disclosed anything “utterly new” and “quite unknown previously” in the realm
of doctrine? How can a doctrine of
the Church, if it is a doctrine, be
at one and the same time always believed, yet something “quite unknown” before
1965? Are we now to understand that
the Holy Spirit could have left the Church unaware of some important truth of
the Faith for nearly 2,000 years?
Or is the Pope referring to Catholic doctrine at all when he speaks of
such things as the “awareness of the Church” and her “new ecumenical
orientation”? What is the import of such phrases, and all the other ones I have
mentioned above, if they are not doctrines a Catholic must believe?
As
the First Vatican Council solemnly declared, not even the Pope can give us new
doctrines of the Faith:
For, the Holy Spirit
was not promised to the Successors of Peter that by His revelation they might
disclose new doctrine, but that by His help they might guard the revelation transmitted through
the apostles and the deposit of faith, and might faithfully set it
forth.20
The Pope is
divinely appointed to guard, explicate and pass on the content of Revelation
descended from the Apostles, but he is incapable of discovering therein any new
doctrines because they have not been revealed to us by God. No one denies that
there has been legitimate development of doctrine over the centuries, and more
explicit and binding statements of what has always been believed. But “breathtaking” doctrinal innovations
in the space of a single pontificate, or “developments” of doctrine which are
“utterly new” and “quite unknown previously,” have never been seen in Church
history.
Therefore, it
would appear to me to be impossible that the post-conciliar novelties in
teaching (we are not here considering disciplinary measures or canon law which
are subject to change) could be Catholic doctrines in the proper sense. Yet we
have before us today a multitude of seemingly novel teachings on everything from
“ecumenism,” to “dialogue” to relations with non-Catholic religions, to the
death penalty. What, then, are we dealing with in the midst of this
unparalleled profusion of ecclesial
novelties? Is it doctrine which we
must believe, or is it something less than that?
In my article “Viruses in the Body of Christ” (The Latin Mass, Fall 1998), I offered a
layman’s view that in the post-conciliar period the Devil has unleashed his most
brilliant stratagem against the Church: the introduction of purely notional teachings which convey
particles of an idea but do not actually contain a coherent doctrine, just as
viruses are particles of DNA or RNA but do not comprise a coherent living
thing. Like viruses, these notional
teachings contain just enough information to reproduce themselves and infect
genuine concepts, which are the “cells” of the Church’s perennial teaching. By means of these verbal viruses
(“ecumenism,” “dialogue,” etc.) the human element of the Church can be thrown
into confusion and disarray without any pope or council having taught any
explicit error against the Faith.
For example, where is the Catholic doctrine in the new notion of
“ecumenism,” which seems to be nothing more or less than a new ecclesial
attitude combined with an assortment of activities such as interfaith
“dialogues,” common prayer with non-Catholics and joint liturgical services, in
none of which we are required to engage ourselves. True, the Pope teaches that
these activities are good, that they promote “Christian unity,” and that the
Church is “irrevocably committed” to them, but the Pope’s factual appraisal of
the success of the ecumenical venture and its future are not doctrines of the Catholic faith. Nor is what the Pope does in the name of
ecumenism possessed of a doctrinal character.
I
invite the reader to consider whether any of the post-conciliar novelties are
reducible to a concrete statement of Catholic doctrine that would bind the
universal Church to adhere, with a religious assent or the assent of faith, to a
proposition Catholics had not always believed before Vatican II. I am convinced that no such discrete
doctrinal propositions can be found anywhere in the teaching of the Council or
the conciliar popes. Rather, it
seems to me that the post-conciliar novelties all operate below the doctrinal
level and are to be found entirely in the realm of the pastoral in various
forms: activities, “orientations,” undertakings, initiatives, dialogues,
exhortations, opinions, observations, predictions and statements of fact, and
ambiguous new expressions, all of which lack the character of binding Catholic
doctrine.
The Sedevacantist
QuestionThe Sedevacantist
Question
As a
matter of fact, the failure of the post-conciliar novelties to rise to the level
of formal, binding doctrine, even though they are “teachings” of a kind, is
precisely why the sedevacantists are wrong to accuse the Council and the
conciliar popes of heresy and to declare the papal throne empty. As already noted, there can be no heresy
without the obstinate denial of some article of divine and Catholic faith, and
this cannot be found in any of the pronouncements of the conciliar popes; nor
can their conduct, as such, constitute a formal heresy, for heresy is a propositional offense, not a form of
physical misconduct.
This
is not to say that one cannot find numerous apparent propositional
contradictions between pre- and post-conciliar teaching on a number of lesser
matters, and the “conservatives” are dreaming when they deny this. (I say apparent, because only the Church
herself can finally resolve these matters, and this is one reason the authors
have issued their Statement calling
for “respectful discussion with Church authorities.”) But none of these contradictions
involve the formal repudiation of any article of divine and Catholic faith, even
if it can be shown that the new teachings tend materially to oppose Catholic
tradition. It is no use ignoring
such things as the following:
§ A line of pre-conciliar popes
condemned any collaboration with communists or participation in communist
movements because of danger to the faith of Catholics from any close cooperation
with atheists, but Pope John XXIII taught the novel distinction that one could
join a communist movement, so long as one did not become a communist, because
the “good” social elements of a movement can be considered apart from its
immoral founding principles—precisely the distinction rejected as a trap for the
faithful by Pius XI in Divini
Redemptoris.21
§ The pre-conciliar popes, especially
Saint Pius V, uniformly condemned the notion of tampering with the received and
approved rite of Mass, but Paul VI approved an entirely new rite which Cardinals
Bacci and Ottaviani were constrained to protest was “a striking departure from the theology of the Mass”
as taught by Trent.
§ The
pre-concilar popes taught that the Latin liturgy must be preserved as a barrier
against heresy, but Paul VI taught that it must be abandoned because
“understanding of prayer is more important than the silken garments in which it
is royally dressed . . .”22
§ The
pre-concilar popes condemned the idea of an all-vernacular Mass in which the
Roman Canon is said aloud, but Paul VI approved it and pronounced it good, as
does his successor.23
§ The
pre-conciliar popes forbade women altar servers, as did John Paul II himself,
but he later reversed his own decision to defend the tradition, and now teaches
that altar girls are good for the liturgy.24
§ The
pre-conciliar popes and canon law condemned any common worship with Protestants
as a danger to the Faith, but the council opened the door to it and John Paul II
often engages in it and commends it.25
§ The
pre-conciliar popes taught unanimously with Pius XI that “the union of
Christians can only be promoted by
promoting the return to the one true Church of those who are separated from
it . . .”, yet this teaching has
been abandoned in favor of an ecumenical “search for unity” with Protestant
sects. Cardinal Ratzinger has made it clear that ecumenism does not seek the
dissolution of non-Catholic “confessions” or the conversion of all the
Protestants to Catholicism, which he describes as a “maximum demand” that offers
“no real hope of unity.”26
§ The
pre-conciliar popes taught that the schismatic Orthodox must return to the
Catholic Church, but the Balamand Statement, whose teaching is commended by the
Pope in Ut Unum Sint, 60, states that
thanks to “radically altered perspectives and thus attitudes” engendered by
Vatican II, the Catholic Church will train new priests “to pave the way for
future relations between the two Churches, passing beyond the out-dated ecclesiology of return to the
Catholic Church . . . .”27
§ The
pre-conciliar popes taught that the Catholic Church and the Mystical Body of
Christ are one and the same thing and that that the Catholic Church is the one
true Church, but the Balamand Statement declares that “the Orthodox Churches
recognize each other as sister Churches, responsible together for maintaining
the Church of God in fidelity to the
divine purpose...”27A What exactly is this Church of God? How can this Church of God be faithful
to the divine purpose if it contains schismatic churches within
itself?
§ The
act of consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart promulgated by Pius XI only
35 years before Vatican II, prays for the deliverance of souls from “the
darkness of idolatry or of Islamism,” but Vatican II teaches in Lumen Gentium, 16 that the Muslims
“‘together with us adore the one merciful God.” It is difficult to see how the
Muslims could be in spiritual darkness while adoring the same God together with
us.
§ Although the Church has
condemned and opposed the diabolical religion of Islam since it was first
invented by a camel driver, John Paul II (citing Lumen Gentium, 16) recently declared
that “the two religions (Catholicism
and Islam) can be signs of hope, making the world more aware of the wisdom and
mercy of God,” and he further declared in February of this year “May Saint John
the Baptist protect Islam . .
.”28
§ In Quanta Cura and the appended Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX
condemned the errors of liberalism on which modern political societies are
based, including the principle that “liberty of conscience and of worship is the
proper right of every man, and should be proclaimed and asserted by law in every
correctly established society,” but in Dignitatis Humanae Vatican II taught
that “religious freedom must be
given such recognition in
the constitutional order of society as will make it a civil right.” Cardinal Ratzinger openly admits that Dignitatis Humanae (together with Gaudium et spes) is “a countersyllabus, a revision of the
Syllabus of Pius IX” which corrects “the one-sidedness (!) of the position
adopted by the Church under Pius IX and Pius X.”29
§ The
pre-conciliar teaching (repeated even in the 1992 version of the Catechism, but
since deleted) affirmed the right and duty of the state to impose the death
penalty for sufficiently grave offenses, but John Paul II has recently taught
that the death penalty is “cruel and unnecessary” and should never be imposed
“even in the case of someone who done a great evil.”30 He thus
contradicts the 1992 version of the Catechism he himself approved.
§ The
pre-conciliar popes, following the teaching of Saint Paul, taught that the wife
is subject to the authority of the husband and must obey him as the Church obeys
Christ (assuming the husband’s commands are just and moral), but John Paul II
has taught that St. Paul meant that this subjection is mutual and that he was merely speaking
in a way suited to the culture of his time.31
These examples of apparent
contradictions between pre and post-conciliar teaching could be multiplied. Added to these are utterly novel and
often scandalous papal actions in line with these notions which we have been
discussing throughout—actions which would have elicited screams of horror from
any pope before 1960.
Now, for someone who is willing to
overlook crucial distinctions and leap to unwarranted conclusions about the
present crisis, it would be easy to say that all of this is “heresy” and that we
have had no pope since John XXIII.
But a careful examination of these novelties and apparent contradictions,
one by one, shows that none of them involves the formal denial of an article of
divine and Catholic faith, nor an attempt to impose upon the Church, as a matter
to be believed by the faithful, any explicit theological error. Not even the statement “May Saint John
the Baptist protect Islam” is heresy, properly speaking, since the pope’s public
expression of a wish that a false religion receive divine protection, while
scandalous, does not translate into a direct denial of any article of
Faith.
The
sedevacantists can point to innumerable facts which justify the conclusion that
we are living through the worst crisis in Church history, but they cannot show
that the conciliar popes have lost their offices through heresy, which judgment
only the Church herself could make in any case. Yet in view of the mountain of
empirical evidence of precipitous ecclesial decline immediately following the
Council, can it be denied any longer that the swarm of novelties the council
engendered—that program and order of “newness” remarked by Paul VI—have tended
materially to oppose the
pre-conciliar teaching of the Church? What else could account for the “process
of decay” admitted by Cardinal Ratzinger?
As Paul VI
himself rightly observed (without yet admitting the cause of it all): “It is
almost as if the Church were attacking herself.”32 On another
occasion he admitted that “the opening to the world has become a veritable
invasion of worldly thinking. We
have perhaps been too weak and imprudent.”33 History has
demonstrated to anyone in possession of his senses that the word “perhaps” can
be omitted from Paul’s admission.
Whatever can go
wrong will go wrong, even in the Catholic Church. Our Lord’s promise of divine assistance
to His Church did not mean that her human members would be unable to inflict
upon her the gravest possible wounds, short of the fatal wound of a formal
defection from the Faith. That everything which can go wrong seems to have gone
wrong at once is no excuse for abandoning the Holy Father to the unproven
theological theory of the empty papal chair, or for leaving him to the tender
mercies of the “conservatives” who think that mindless applause for every papal
word and deed is the way to show true loyalty to our
father.
The
sedevacantists and the conservatives are animated by the same error: that the
Magisterium embraces whatever the Pope says or does that touches upon faith or
morals.34 Proceeding
from this error, they reach different but equally untenable conclusions: The
former insists that we believe in the oxymoron of novel tradition or a
“Magisterium” that contradicts itself, while the latter insists that we have had
no Pope since John XXIII. Thank
you, but no thank you. The
traditionalists I defend have been in just the right place all along: the
post-conciliar novelties are neither Magisterial nor heretical; they do not bind
the Church to an act of belief in what is wrong. The Pope is still the Pope, and yet this
is the worst crisis the Church has ever endured, precisely because the conciliar
popes have tried to deny its existence and have persisted in the manifestly
ruinous novelties which brought it about.
What are Catholics to do in the face of this terrible mystery? Shall we do nothing? Shall we applaud? Or shall we do what
the authors of the Statement have
done and declare our resistance to what is happening?
A Return to the
StatementA Return to the
Statement
Keeping in mind all of the considerations I have tried to present here,
we can return to the Statement and
confront its most controversial aspects in the proper perspective—the
perspective of an ecclesial crisis almost beyond imagining. The authors
declare:
In the face of the situation described in Items II, III
and IV, the lay Catholics who direct this document to Your Holiness are obliged
in conscience to declare themselves in a state of resistance relative to the
teachings of Vatican Council II, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and your
teachings and actions that are objectively contrary to the prior ordinary and
extraordinary papal Magisterium.
In conjunction with this, the authors also declare a “suspension of obedience to the aforementioned progressivist teachings and the authorities who desire to impose them upon us.”
It would be easy, if one were malicious, to extract these statements from
their total context—and from the entire historical context of the crisis
itself—and use them to attempt to indict the authors for “objective schism” or
some other trumped-up delict. As we
have seen with Hand’s, Keating’s and Alphonse Matt’s attacks, this exercise
involves deliberately overlooking the crucial point, made clear by the signers,
that they are resisting only certain post-conciliar novelties and have not
rejected papal authority in itself, but rather appeal to it for the undoing of
the novelties. Isn’t it odd how the accusers pay less attention to the actual
text in dealing with the Statement
than the Vatican does in dealing with the writings of flaming heretics? Isn’t
this reckless presumption of guilt all the more reprehensible when one considers
that among the accusers is Michael Matt’s own cousin, Alphonse Matt?
Michael Matt and John Vennari have confirmed to me that their thinking in
contributing to and signing the Statement accords with the case I have
made here for a balanced approach to the crisis, one that accounts for, rather
than ignoring, the empirical evidence: While the vast conciliar and
post-conciliar program of innovation tends materially to oppose the perennial
teaching of the Church in a number of areas, it does not involve any formal contradiction of an article of
divine and Catholic faith. The post-conciliar novelties have not been imposed
upon the universal Church as matters of Catholic doctrine and belief, so that
the indefectibility of the Church has not been implicated in the new teachings
and practices. The conciliar popes are valid popes.
As this entire discussion should make clear, moreover, the posited
“suspension of obedience” largely operates only in the potential. If one thinks about it for a moment, one
can see that there is no doctrinally binding papal command which the signers are
actually disobeying at present. Let us suppose, however, that the Pope were to
order everyone in the Church to attend joint liturgical services with
pro-abortion Protestants, such as the Vespers service His Holiness conducted
with Lutheran “Bishops” in St. Peter’s Basilica. Any reasonable Catholic could
see why such a command would have to be resisted. The “resistance” involved is
more a question prescinding from—not attaching oneself to—certain novelties which a Catholic
is not bound to embrace as doctrine or as practice in the first place. (For
example, no one is obliged to engage in “ecumenical activities” or to attend the
new Mass as opposed to some other rite of the Church.) This form of resistance also involves presenting
arguments against the novelties and petitioning for their rescission.
That the “suspension of obedience” does not relate to any concrete
doctrine is the very reason Hand failed to answer my challenge that he identify
in what respect exactly the accused are guilty of “opposition to the living
Magisterium.” There is no question,
however, that the phrase “suspension of obedience” serves to highlight the
gravity of our situation and to act as the vehicle by which the signers intend
to make known their resistance and their immediate desire for dialogue with
ecclesial authority.
What is more, concerning the “progressivist teachings” from which the
signers prescind—and we must remember that even the conservative George Sim
Johnston calls the Pope a “progressive”—they are careful to note that the sheer
volume of John Paul II’s pronouncements, in so many varied places and forms,
makes it impossible to know for certain which are doctrines for the Church and
which are the opinions of a private doctor, and that consequently “the clarity
of the degree of obedience has been lost...” Let the Church, then, not Messrs.
Hand, Keating and Matt, tell the signers (and us) what is the degree of
obedience, if any, owed to each of the “breathtaking innovations” in an
unprecedented corpus of papal pronouncements which occupies ten linear feet of shelf space,
according to George Weigel.
Mr. Hand Refutes
HimselfMr. Hand Refutes
Himself
In finally disposing of Hand’s arguments (if one can call them that), I
need only note that Hand is guilty of precisely what he condemns in the signers
of the Statement. In Part 3 of his own tract, Hand declares as
follows:
I myself consider the new rite of Mass inferior so far (we expect improvements
to come) to the Traditional Latin Mass . . .
And on his own Internet
site Hand further declares:
[O]ur real crisis
today focuses on the liturgy and in the dangerous ambiguity of Conciliar texts
and events.35
Thus,
the same man who demands absolute
obedience to “the living Magisterium” publicly declares that the Church is in
crisis because the conciliar popes imposed an inferior rite of Mass upon the Church;
he also dissents from the repeated and emphatic teaching of both popes that the
new rite is not inferior to the old but a great boon to the Church, and he accuses an ecumenical Council
of officially promulgating dangerously ambiguous texts which led to
dangerously ambiguous events in the Church.
The
unfortunate Mr. Hand fails to recognize that not only the signers of the Statement but he himself, and millions
of other Catholics around the world, are more or less in a state of resistance,
either explicit or implicit, to the conciliar and post-conciliar agenda. As Hand’s entire position extinguishes
itself in this fatal self-contradiction, we may bid him goodbye. He has provided a useful provocation
with his diffuse little tract, but we may now say of him what Newman said of
Kingsley:
And
now I am in a train of thought higher and more
serene than any which slanders can disturb. Away with you, Mr. Kingsley, and fly
into space. Your name shall occur
again as little as I can help, in the course of these pages. I shall henceforth occupy myself not
with you, but with your charges.
Meanwhile, the evidence is
overwhelming that this is the ultimate crisis foretold in Holy Scripture and by
Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of La Salette. It was Pope Saint Pius X, arguably the
greatest Pope in Church history, who declared in E Supremi his moral certainty (only 55
years before the Council) that the world had entered into the beginning of the
last times foreseen in the Book of the Apocalypse. And was it not the present Roman Pontiff
himself who, in his beautiful sermon at Fatima on May 13, 2000, warned the
Church to avoid the dragon described in Chapter 12 of the Book of the
Apocalypse; the dragon whose tail sweeps one third of the stars, the consecrated
souls, from heaven? From deep
within the failing vision of a perfectible world in which he has immured
himself—the vision of Gaudium et spes
which he helped to craft—our Pope
cries out to his Church a warning, a warning which dispels the beguiling vision
and reminds us that he is, after all, our father and that we must love him.
Our Pope is a man of mystery and contradiction. The same Pope who ended
all further debate on women’s ordination also gave us the scandal of altar
girls. The Pope who has condemned “the culture of death” and fixed upon the
world a phrase that rebukes it in an unforgettable way, has also legitimated the
very preachers of the culture of death by giving them places of honor beside
himself in public liturgical ceremonies, without rebuking them at all. The Pope
who has presided over great liturgical destruction and called it a renewal, has
also given the banished traditional liturgy a precious and ever-widening
foothold within the official structure of the Church. The Pope who will beatify Pius IX, the
fierce opponent of “the modern world,” also wishes to beatify John XXIII, “the
first modern pope.” He is our Pope, our father, this man of
mystery and contradiction; and like any father he needs his children, just as
his children need him.
Sometimes the children must resist the father as an act of
charity. The
Statement, whatever its deficiencies,
ought to be seen as such an act. Those who condemn the signers so loudly have
willfully blinded themselves to the ultimate cause of the great crisis of which
the Statement is but a symptom. Four children cry out to
their wandering father in his travels throughout a disbelieving world which will
not even follow his teaching on the natural law—no matter how far he travels, no
matter how many crowds there are to cheer him on. Come home, father, they cry,
and put our house in order. But the accusers rebuke the children for crying out,
and they defend the absence of the distant father.
History will render the final verdict on whether the children who cried
out, or the children who remained silent, were the ones who served the father
most truly. But I think we know
already what that verdict will be.
So, I suspect, do our accusers; and this is what accounts for their
present discomfiture.
XXX
Notes
[1] Summa II, II Q. 33, Art.
4
2 De Romano Pontifice, II 30.
3 The Code of Canon
Law: A Text and Commentary, Canon Law Society
of America, c.
333.
4 The Wanderer, February 16,
1995.
5
This Rock “March” 1996, p. 22 (This
issue actually appeared in June 1996)
6 Id. p. 22-23
7 The Catholic Encyclopedia (1911). See, http:
//www.newadvent.org/cathen/13529a.htm
8 Catholic Encylopedia
(1911), p.
262, right-hand column.
8A John, Eric. The Popes: A Concise Biographical
History. Roman Catholic Books;
Original Edition, Burns and Oates, Publishers to the Holy See (1964), p.
253.
9 McBrien, Richard P. The Remaking of the Catholic Church.
(1973), p. 146.
10 “We must have a least good
hope concerning the eternal salvation of all those who in no wise are in the
true Church of Christ.” Syllabus, n.
17. It should be noted that the
doctrines of baptism of desire and invincible ignorance cannot allow one to say
that there is “good hope” for the salvation of those who belong to non-Catholic
religions, since Pius IX himself forbade any speculation to that effect in his
allocution Singulari quaedem:
Not without sorrow we have
learned that another error, no less destructive, has taken up its abode in the
souls of many Catholics who think that one should have good hope of the eternal
salvation of all those who have never lived in the true Church of Christ.
Therefore, they are wont to ask very often what will be the lot and condition
after death of those who have not
submitted in any way to the Catholic faith . . .Far be it from Us, Venerable
Brethren, to presume the limits of divine mercy which is infinite [His Holiness
then expounds the doctrine of invincible ignorance] but as long as we are on
earth, weighed down by this mortal mass which blunts the soul, let us hold most
firmly that, in accordance with Catholic teaching, there is ‘one God, one faith,
one baptism’ [Eph. 4:5]; it is unlawful
to proceed further in inquiry.
DZ 1646-1648
11 L’Osservatore Romano, November 9, 1984,
later to be known as The Ratzinger Report.
12 Zenit news report, February
27, 2000.
13 L’Osservatore Romano, weekly English
edition, N. 5- 3, February 1999, p. 8.
14 Catholic World News, January
22, 1997. This testimony was
confided to Catholic journalist Kieron Wood with the understanding that it would
not be published until after Bishop Morriss’ death, which occurred
recently.
15 L'Osservatore Romano, July
3, 1974, quoted in Iota Unum, by Amerio Romano, Sarto House [Kansas City, 1996],
p. 112.
16 Statement to the Bishops of
Chile, 1988.
17 Crisis, May 1996, p. 6.
18 “A Life for These Times,” CULTURE WARS,
May 2000, pp. 46-47
19 Redemptor Hominis, n.
6
20 Denzinger, 1836.
21 From Divini redemptoris: “In the beginning,
Communism showed itself for what it was in all its perversity, but very soon it
realized that it was thus alienating people. It has therefore, changed its
tactics and strives to entice the multitudes by trickery in various forms,
hiding its real designs behind ideas that
are in themselves good and attractive ... Under various names that do not
suggest Communism ... [t]hey try perfidiously to worm their way even into
professedly Catholic and religious organizations ... [t]hey invite Catholics to collaborate with
them in the realm of so-called humanitarianism and charity; and at times make
proposals that are in perfect harmony with the Christian spirit and the doctrine
of the Church ... See to it, faithful brethren, that the Faithful do not allow
themselves to be deceived.”
22 General Audience, November
26, 1969. Compare, Mediator Dei by Pius XII and even Veterum Sapientia by John XXIII, both
enjoining preservation of the Latin liturgy. Both documents were swept aside soon
after the Council.
23 Cfr. Auctorem Fidei, Pius VI, nn. 33,
66.
24 Angelus Address, September
3, 1995: “To a large extent, it is a question of making full use of the ample
room for a lay and feminine presence recognized by the Church’s law. I am thinking, for example, of
theological teaching, the forms of liturgical ministry permitted, including service at the altar . .
. Who can imagine the great
advantages to pastoral care and the new beauty that the Church’s face will
assume,
when the feminine genius is fully involved in the
various areas of her
life?”
25 Compare the 1917 Code of Canon Law,
forbidding any active participation by Catholics in worship with Protestants; Mortalium animos by Pius IX, and the
1949 Instruction of the Holy Office on the “ecumenical movement,” which forbade
any form of common worship at discussion groups authorized by the local bishop,
and which required that the Catholic doctrine on the return of the dissidents to
the one true Church be presented.
26 Ratzinger, Cardinal Josef. Principles of Catholic Theology.
Ignatius Press: San Francisco (1982), 197-198
27 Balamand Statement, nn. 13 and
30
27A Ibid.
28 General Audience Address,
May 5, 1999; Prayer and Exhortation on March 21, 2000 in Wadi
Al-Kharrar.
29 Ratzinger, op. cit., p. 381 Father Brian Harrison has argued
with great power that the apparent contradiction between Dignitatis Humanae and prior teaching is
not in the realm of doctrine but rather public ecclesiastical law, which can be
reversed. In correspondence with
him (which he has kindly indulged) I have focused on the Council’s teaching that
there is a natural right to immunity
from coercion even in the public
activities of non-Catholic religions. I do not see how the existence of this
natural right can be reconciled with the teaching of the pre-conciliar popes on
the errors of modern liberty, since none of these popes mentioned such a right,
but rather all of them spoke entirely in terms of a mere prudential tolerance of false religions by the
State, and the notion of tolerance by definition excludes a right to do what is merely
tolerated. Here, too, only the
Church can finally resolve the problem.
30 Sermon at World Trans Dome,
January 27, 1999 in L’Osservatore
Romano, Weekly English Edition, N. 5-3, p. 8.
31 It is impossible to see how, in
terms of authority within the family, there can be two subjects and no
ruler. Compare the
following:
Leo XIII On Christian Marriage, n 11: “The
husband is the chief of the family and
the head of the wife. The woman, because she is flesh of his flesh, and bone
of his bone, must be subject to her
husband and obey him; not, indeed, as a servant, but as a companion, so that
her obedience shall be wanting in neither honor nor dignity. Since the husband
represents Christ, and since the wife represents the Church, let there always
be, both in him who commands and in her
who obeys a heaven-born love guiding both in their respective duties. For
"the husband is the head of the wife; as Christ is the head of the Church. . .
Therefore, as the Church is subject to
Christ, so also let wives be to their husbands in all things."[18] . .
.”
John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, n. 24 : “The author
of the Letter to the Ephesians sees no contradiction between an exhortation
formulated in this way and the words: ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to
the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife.” (5:22-23). The author knows
that this way of speaking, so profoundly rooted in the customs and religious tradition of
the time, is to be understood and carried out in a new way: as a ‘mutual
subjection out of reverence for Christ’ (cf. Eph 5:21) . . . whereas in the
relationship between Christ and the Church the subjection is only on the part of
the Church, in the relationship between husband and wife the ‘subjection’ is not one-sided but mutual.”
32Speech of Dec. 8, 1968 to the
Lombard College, quoted in Amerio, op
cit. at p.6
33 Speech of
23 November 1973, quoted in Amerio, op. Cit.
34 This error is contrary even to the
teaching of Vatican II itself in Lumen
gentium 25, where the Council notes that a papal teaching is part of the
ordinary Magisterium only according to the pope’s “manifest mind and will. His mind and
will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his
frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of
speaking.”
35
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Itahaca/3251 /ecumod.html.