The Non-Catholic Pope, cont.
March 18, 2015
BILL writes:
I have no idea how you can say the current pope is not Catholic, as it logically leads to certain contradictions. By what authority do you declare yourself Catholic and the pope not Catholic? And how does this not make you a Protestant?
Laura writes:
To recognize a non-Catholic as pope leads to impossible contradictions. To recognize that the papacy is temporarily vacant, as sedevacantists do, is difficult, distressing and disorienting, but not contradictory. A Protestant does not recognize the authority of the papacy. The Catholic sedevacantist does recognize papal authority, so much so that he understands it cannot be wielded by a non-Catholic.
The Catholic Church is not a club, whereby once you enter you are in no matter what you believe. Sinners can stay in forever, not those who reject part or all of the faith. The Catholic faith is a body of dogmas and objective truths, defined and clarified over and over again since the Incarnation. One of those dogmas is that the faith is an immutable whole, a fabric that cannot be cut up without changing the fundamental nature of the whole. As Leo XII wrote in Satis Cognitum:
Hence as the Apostles and Disciples were bound to obey Christ, so also those whom the Apostles taught were, by God’s command, bound to obey them. And, therefore, it was no more allowable to repudiate one iota of the Apostles’ teaching than it was to reject any point of the doctrine of Christ Himself.
Another of its dogmas is that the Church is indefectible and cannot teach error. So if we see anyone in authority teaching obvious error again and again on fundamental matters of the faith, normally a rare thing, we know he does not profess the Catholic faith, however much he may accept some elements of it, and thus cannot hold legitimate authority. (Go here for a quick summary of Francis’s heresies. Remember that heresy is not total rejection of the faith; it is rejection of part of it.) This is not something that any true Catholic desires. This is not a situation that any Catholic relishes.
Neither I nor anyone other than a future pope can authoritatively declare that a man elected pope has ceased to be a Catholic and a pope, but we can refuse submission (see the Cekada article linked below) to an anti-pope on the basis of what we are obliged to know about the faith. If a pope is saying that the Jewish Covenant is not over, which is basically a denial that Christ is the Messiah and the Redeemer of humanity, or if a pope is saying that marriage can indeed be dissolved, and thus John the Baptist died in vain, all of our alarm bells should be sounding. We are required, after all, to love God not just with our hearts, but with our minds as well. We are sheep figuratively, not literally.
It is not permissible to refuse submission and reverence to a true pope. It is not permissible to go around complaining about and pontificating, so to speak, against the pope. Leo XIII in Epistola Tua (June 17, 1885):
When these principles are forgotten there is noticed among Catholics a diminution of respect, of veneration, and of confidence in the one given them for a guide; then there is a loosening of that bond of love and submission which ought to bind all the faithful to their pastors, the faithful and the pastors to the Supreme Pastor, the bond in which is principally to be found security and common salvation.
For elaboration on this point, I recommend this episode of Tradcast, which clearly explains in the last 15 minutes or so why those who recognize Francis as pope and yet endlessly criticize him are, despite noble intentions and heroic concern, lacking in proper submission and reverence. Imagine teaching a child or teenager to revere the papacy and then saying to him, “Oh, but not this pope.” A child who grows up or an adult who develops his faith under that permission to judge a sitting pope must adopt a critical stance in general toward the papacy. He must always be wary of popes. That is dangerously close to the Protestant way! Such a stance can do nothing but erode the Catholic sense of the papacy. It doesn’t make sense. Catholics don’t think that way.
As the Rev. Anthony Cekada writes:
Put simply, on one hand we know that the Church cannot defect. On the other, we know that theologians and even popes teach that a pope as an individual can defect from the Faith, and thus lose his office and authority.
Once we recognize the errors and evils of the post-Vatican religion, two alternatives thus present themselves:
(1) The Church has defected.
(2) Men have defected and lost their offices and authority.
Faced with such a choice, the logic of the faith dictates that we affirm the indefectibility of the Church, and acknowledge the defections of men.
Put another way, our recognition that the changes are false, bad and to be rejected is also an implicit recognition that the men who promulgated them did not really possess the authority of the Church. All traditionalists, one might therefore say, are in reality “sedevacantists” — it’s just that not all of them have realized it yet.
Here’s a good summary from a blog Introit Altare Dei:
Let it first be noted that Traditionalists do NOT “deny the pope.” We deny that the post-Vatican II “popes” are, in fact, the pope[s] because they are notorious and contumacious heretics. A heretic cannot be pope. The papacy will endure until the end of the world but we don’t need to have an actual man filling the position at all times. According to theologian Dorsch:
“The Church therefore is a society that is essentially monarchical. But this does not prevent the Church, for a short time after the death of a pope, or even for many years, from remaining deprived of her head. [vel etiam per plures annos capite suo destituta manet]. Her monarchical form also remains intact in this state.…
“Thus the Church is then indeed a headless body.… Her monarchical form of government remains, though then in a different way — that is, it remains incomplete and to be completed. The ordering of the whole to submission to her Primate is present, even though actual submission is not…
“For this reason, the See of Rome is rightly said to remain after the person sitting in it has died — for the See of Rome consists essentially in the rights of the Primate.
“These rights are an essential and necessary element of the Church. With them, moreover, the Primacy then continues, at least morally. The perennial physical presence of the person of the head, however, [perennitas autem physica personis principis] is not so strictly necessary.” (de Ecclesia 2:196–7)
Also, according to theologian Salaverri, instead of being a “primary foundation… without which the Church could not exist,” the pope is a “secondary foundation,” “ministerial,” who exercises his power as someone else’s (Christ’s) representative. (See De Ecclesia 1:448)
Traditionalists are either sedevacantists or sedeprivationists; both of whom deny that Jorge Bergoglio (Francis) is a true pope, but neither deny the institution of the papacy as defined by the Church’s own approved pre-Vatican II theologians. As to Traditionalists having disputes (as to sedevacantism, sedeprivationism, “recognize and resist” of the pseudo-Traditionalist SSPX, etc) this is to be expected because when “the Shepard is struck, the sheep will scatter” (See Zechariah 13:7).
