As Pope Leo XIII, citing his predecessor Felix III, teaches: “An error which is not resisted is approved; a truth which is not defended is suppressed.” (Inimica Vis [1892]). That is why this article has been written. For the bad news concerning this pontificate shows no signs of abating. On the contrary, it seems to worsen by the day. This lengthy piece will consider troubling developments that occurred in rapid succession during a span of less than three weeks: from February 14 to March 5. I felt compelled in conscience to write it because I must agree with what the prominent moral theologian German Grisez wrote about this pontificate: “Pope Francis has failed to consider carefully enough the likely consequences of letting loose with his thoughts in a world that will applaud being provided with such help in subverting the truth it is his job to guard as inviolable and proclaim with fidelity.”
My purpose is two-fold: First, to attempt to give an overview of how serious our situation has become. Second, to clarify what is at stake for the Church in the controversies now swirling about Francis, lest the true teaching of the Magisterium be lost in all the confusion. The controversies to be discussed here—all erupting during the three-week period in view—include:
- Francis’s apparent endorsement of the neo-Modernist drive to admit divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion via “pastoral solution;”
- His intimations of a “pastoral” relaxation of the teaching of Humane Vitae;
- His apparent opening to “gay marriage” in the form of “civil unions;”
- His personal endorsement of the multi-denominational, doctrinally indifferent Protestant “Pentecostal” movement, which Francis gave in a video created for the benefit of a breakaway Anglican “bishop” in that movement;
- His continuing disparagement of the traditional liturgy and the growing numbers of the faithful devoted to it, including young people.
I hope in this way to render a service to the readers of this newspaper. Before I present the details, however, I will address a threshold question: Does a Catholic even have a right to publish an article of this sort?
On Public Criticism of Popes
Some Catholics hold that we must never engage in public criticism of the Pope—no matter what he says, no matter what he does. “We must not incite indignation concerning the Holy Father” say these people, even as they themselves—quite rightly—call for indignation concerning wayward prelates such as Cardinal Dolan, publicly criticizing them without reserve for doing nothing other than what the Pope has done, authorized, encouraged or tolerated himself.
But “incitement” is not my intention here. I write because the Pope’s own words and deeds have already aroused indignation among the faithful. Indignation is not a sin when it is warranted. On the contrary, it is a Catholic’s natural reaction to conduct that threatens the good of the Church and the welfare of souls. The Bishop of Rome is no more exempt than any other member of the hierarchy from the indignation of his subjects when he wounds them or the Church of which he is head. Indignation over a prelate’s behavior—even if that prelate were a Pope—is not to be confused with hatred or rancor toward the one who holds the office; it is, rather, an appropriate reaction to a wrong and a natural impetus for seeking its redress. Nor is seeking redress to be confused with a lack of “charity,” as it so often is in this age of emotivism. One is of course obliged in charity to forgive a wrong, but there is nonetheless a duty to repair it, especially when it harms the common good of the Church.
The origin of the pious prescription “no public criticism of the Pope” is mysterious, as it is certainly not to be found in the official teaching of the Church or the common opinion of theologians. Nor is there any sign of a theology of abject silence in the face of papal wrongs throughout the long history of public opposition—often fierce—to wayward Popes, beginning with Paul’s public rebuke of Peter for his scandalous refusal to eat with Gentiles: “But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed (Gal. 2:11).” To the facile objection that saints may criticize erring Popes, one might offer the facile reply that we ought to imitate the example of the saints. Nowhere, however, does the Church impose any “saints only” limitation on objecting publicly to what a Pope has said or done in public.
There were no known saints involved, for example, in the public opposition to John XXII (r. 1316-1334) when he insisted in a series of Sunday sermons that the blessed departed do not see God until after the General Judgment—thus, among other dire consequences, nullifying the traditional teaching on the efficacy of prayers for the souls in Purgatory. Theologians at the University Paris concurred that, while the matter had never been defined as dogma, the Pope was in error, and they petitioned him to recant his opinion. The Pope ultimately did so, noting that he had never imposed his view upon the Church and that everyone had been free to disagree with him. John XXII’s more energetic opponents, including Cardinal Orsini and King Louis of Bavaria, called upon the cardinals to convoke a council to condemn him as a heretic. None of the papal critics in this affair stands condemned by the judgment of the Church.
To address another facile objection, some Catholics maintain that even if it may be permissible to express criticism of a Pope in given circumstances, one must never do so on the Internet or in the press. But it is precisely on the Internet and in the press that Pope Francis has insisted on making his opinions and gestures known to all of humanity. The Pope has the whole planet buzzing about the latest thing he has said or done—all of it broadcast worldwide nearly every day with the assistance of a public relations team headed by PR “wizard” Greg Burke, a former Fox News and Time magazine correspondent and a member of Opus Dei.
One must dismiss as simply ludicrous the idea that in an age of mass communications the only Catholic way to express an objection to what a Pope has deliberately broadcast to the world is some sort of private entreaty. Reflecting the reality of modern social communications, the 1983 Code of Canon Law provides that the faithful, “according to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess… have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful…” (CCC § 212(3)). The canon does not provide “except when it comes to the Pope.”
Recognizing the right and duty of the faithful in this regard, Pope Francis personally telephoned the late traditionalist writer Mario Palmaro after he and his co-author had published a newspaper article leveling a scathing assessment of the publicity-seeking aspect of this pontificate under the bold title “We Do Not Like This Pope.” During the conversation, after expressing concern for Dr. Palmaro’s health (he would soon succumb to liver cancer at the age of 45), the Pope thanked him for his criticisms, assuring him that he “understood that those criticisms had been made with love, and how important it had been for him to receive them.” Further exercising his right and duty, Palmaro later told the press “he cannot ‘state objectively that Pope Francis met our criticisms.’” Palmaro added the caveat that must guide any Catholic who raises a public objection to a Pope’s actions: “we did not want to judge the Pope as a human person. We distinguish the action from the person.”
How odd it is that neo-Catholic proponents of the opinion that the Pope may never be criticized in public, who generally tend to be au courant with “the modern world,” blithely ignore the modern reality of instantaneous worldwide communications, exploited by the Pope himself, and insist upon a way of proceeding that was not even morally obligatory in the days of quill pens, parchment paper, and letters delivered by horseback and ship. With all the world agog at Pope Francis, and with damage to the Church’s image mounting in proportion to the praise he garners from her worst enemies, the proponents of this novel ban on public criticism of Popes now find themselves constrained to remain silent about matters uppermost in the public consciousness of virtually the entire human race! Their pious notion, utterly without foundation in Church teaching, confines them—and them alone—to a kind of deep sea diving bell, submerged beneath tempestuous waters, wherein the storms whipped up by Francis cannot reach them, while every other happening in the Church is received loud and clear and is fair game for comment and the harshest of criticism from inside the diving bell, especially the doings of those dastardly bishops, who are to blame for everything. This is the absurdity they imagine is enjoined upon the faithful by a duty that turns out to be nothing more than their view of how things should be.
Paradoxically enough, this notion of papal immunity from public criticism has arisen precisely during an unparalleled epoch—our own—in which a series of Popes has said or done things that have caused public scandal. The idea, I suppose, is that objecting to these scandals publicly might threaten the faith of Catholics who are not equipped to handle such commentary, so that the better approach is to say nothing at all. On the contrary, the better approach is not to ignore papal scandals but to educate Catholics to the historical reality that the history of the papacy is riddled with the scandalous acts and omissions of errant Popes and that this reality does not undermine, but rather demonstrates, the indefectibility of the Church, for not even the worst of Popes has been able to destroy her or to negate any part of the deposit of the Faith. Those who take upon themselves the task of commenting on Church affairs do not serve the Church by hiding historical reality from the faithful, who will learn of the current scandals anyway from the mass media and may suffer a loss of faith precisely because they do not understand that Popes can and do err in matters not within the limited scope of papal infallibility.
Indeed, the work of the Holy Ghost can be seen in the First Vatican Council’s narrow dogmatic definition of the Pope’s infallible teaching authority. The Pope is infallible only when he: “speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church…” (First Vatican Ecumenical Council, Sess. 3, cap. 4). Of course, the Pope has no power to define doctrines as he pleases, for as Vatican I also teaches: “the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.” A Pope, or a Council approved by a Pope, can define as dogma only what the Church has always believed as doctrine, albeit without a formal definition. Accordingly, even in defining the dogma of papal infallibility itself the Fathers of Vatican I were at pains to demonstrate that they were “faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith…”
Therefore, when a Pope is not defining dogma or simply repeating doctrine the Church has always taught, he is susceptible to errors of judgment, false opinions, and prudential blunders, as the long history of the papacy demonstrates. (Cfr. Dr. John Rao’s definitive historical study Black Legends and the Light of the World). Which brings me to the merits of this discussion.
Part II
“Let us make no mistake: Satan is right now shaking the Church to her very foundations over this divorce issue…” Father Brian Harrison, O.S., Inside the Vatican, Feb. 2014
A Warning Come True
Immediately after Cardinal Jose Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope, the Rorate Caeli blog site presented a dire report by an Argentinian journalist, who wrote that as Archbishop of Buenos Aires the Cardinal was a “sworn enemy of the traditional Mass,” that he was “[f]amous for his inconsistency (at times, for the unintelligibility of his addresses and homilies),” that he was “accustomed to the use of coarse, demagogical, and ambiguous expressions,” that he was “loose in doctrine and liturgy,” and that “he has not fought against abortion and only very weakly against homosexual ‘marriage’(approved with practically no opposition from the episcopate)…”
Honesty compels one to admit that every element of this grim assessment has been borne out by the brutal dismantling of the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate on the Pope’s direct order, and by his astonishing plenitude of disturbing statements and actions during the scant year he has been in office. These include the phrase that will be emblematic of his entire pontificate, which is now appearing on "Who am I to judge?" tee shirts marketed to gay-rights activists and assorted other radical liberals in order to taunt the Church.
Alarming Adulation by a Hostile World
In the case of Pope Francis the fallibility of Popes in matters not involving doctrinal definitions is remarkably evident. It does no good to deny this when the entire world is heaping praise upon him for his unheard-of pastoral novelties (e.g. the jailhouse foot-washing ceremony, including a Muslim woman), his numerous statements suggesting a revolutionary relaxation of Church discipline in the name of a false “mercy,” and his repeated public insults of traditional Catholics and the traditional liturgy, which he has cavalierly belittled as a “just a kind of fashion” to which certain members of the faithful are “addicted.” As if to reward his behavior, Francis has been lauded as “Person of the Year” by the world’s most prominent left-liberal news magazine (Time), the world’s leading “gay” magazine (The Advocate), the world’s leading “rock culture” magazine (Rolling Stone) and the world’s leading “rock culture” video outlet (MTV). Even the trashy libertine quarterly GQ Magazine joined the adulation by naming Francis “Best Dressed Man of the Year,” using the occasion to mock the overdressed Pope Benedict. All of these tributes, and innumerable others of like kind, have been bestowed explicitly at the expense of Francis’s predecessor and the Church’s teaching on faith and morals. Any Catholic who still retains the sensus catholicus must view with alarm this unprecedented torrent of praise from the realm of Belial. Something is seriously amiss.
The Pope’s Praise for Cardinal Kasper’s Attack on Holy Matrimony
Over the past few weeks Francis has continued to delight the makers of world opinion with one bombshell after another, the explosion of which our brethren in the diving bell resolutely refuse to mention. Let me begin with Cardinal Kasper’s keynote address to the College of Cardinals on February 20—the only address the Pope called for. Pope Francis later praised this two-hour oration as “a beautiful and profound presentation that will soon be published i...…” Kasper is one of the Church’s most notorious post-conciliar Modernists, who, among other heresies, has denied the historicity of the Apostolic Succession. Not surprisingly, then, his address to the cardinals calls for a “pastoral solution” that would allow certain divorced and “remarried” Catholics, living in a state of public adultery, to receive Holy Communion.
Kasper’s proposal comes in the section of the address entitled “The Problem of the Divorced and Remarried.” In the first place, a divorced Catholic, married in the Church, cannot “remarry” as any subsequent civil ceremony is not a marriage. I will put that obvious point aside for the sake of discussion.
Now, whenever a Modernist contrives to undermine some aspect of the Faith, he labels it a “problem” for which there must be a new “solution.” In this case, Kasper advocates a “change of paradigm” respecting the Church’s perennial practice of excluding the divorced and remarried from Holy Communion to protect the sanctity of the Blessed Sacrament. According to Kasper, “between the Church’s doctrine on marriage and the family and the ‘real life’ convictions of many Christians, an abyss has been created.” But today this same “abyss” exists between all manner of Church teaching and the “real life” of “Christians.” The name for this abyss is apostasy, as in the “silent apostasy” John Paul II lamented not long before his death. For a Modernist like Kasper, however, the proper response to apostasy is to accommodate it.
With all the deviousness of the ecclesial termite he is, Kasper begins by arguing that if a divorced and remarried Catholic can make a spiritual communion “why can he not then receive Sacramental communion? If we exclude divorced and remarried Christians from the sacraments (…) do we not perhaps put up for discussion the fundamental sacramental structure of the Church?” The outrageous implication of Kasper’s “beautiful and profound presentation” is that the Church has unjustly denied the sacraments to the divorced and remarried for centuries, indeed throughout her history.
Kasper introduces his revolutionary proposal for a change in practice with the disclaimer: “I wish only to pose questions, limiting myself to indicating the direction of possible answers.” The Modernist typically employs “questions” to sow doubts about what the Church has always taught, only to supply an “answer” that destroys fidelity by suggesting that the Church has erred. Thus did Satan proceed in the Garden of Eden, opening his deadly dialogue with a seemingly innocent query to Eve: “Why has God commanded you that you should not eat of every tree in paradise?” followed by the suggestion that Eve has been misled: “No, you shall not die the death…. (Gen. 3:1-5).”
One of the “questions” Kasper poses involves another outrageous implication: “The question that is posed in response is: is it not perhaps an exploitation of the person who is suffering and asking for help if we make him a sign and a warning for others? Are we going to let him die of hunger sacramentally in order that others may live?” In other words, the Church has cruelly inflicted spiritual starvation on the divorced and remarried by not allowing them to receive Communion because of their adultery, sacrificing these poor souls for the benefit of the pious. This rank calumny of Holy Church is Kasper’s “beautiful and profound” assessment of her perennial practice for protection of the Holy Eucharist from sacrilege by open adulterers.
Kasper praises the “heroic virtue” of abandoned spouses who never remarry, only to declare immediately that, nevertheless, “many abandoned spouses depend, for the good of the children [!], on a new relationship and a civil marriage which they cannot abandon without committing new offenses.” These new relationships, Kasper declares, “prove their new joy, and even sometimes come to be seen as a gift from heaven.” So Kasper’s “profound and beautiful” view of divorce and remarriage is that the good of children is served when a parent takes up with a new lover and brings him or her into the former marital home, destroying the children’s respect for the sanctity of marriage while inflicting profound trauma and often permanent psychological harm upon them, and that this adulterous relationship can even be seen as a gift from heaven. How can any Catholic remain silent in the face of this despicable subterfuge, which conceals the terrible evil of divorce behind a lie about its “benefits”? “Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil… (Isaiah 5:20).”
Kasper then discusses “two situations” involving the divorced and “remarried.” The first concerns those whose marriages in the Church might well have been contracted invalidly but who have not obtained a decree of annulment and are now in second “marriages” by way of civil ceremony. Showing just how devious he is, Kasper argues that the Church cannot simply make annulments easier to obtain because, as he rightly observes, the spouse opposing annulment justly protests that “we lived together, we had children; this was a reality that cannot simply be declared null…” So Kasper proposes, not to avoid laxity in granting annulments, but rather to dispense with the traditional annulment process altogether.
Many pastors, he argues, are “convinced that many marriages celebrated in a religious form were not contracted in a valid manner” and the traditional presumption of validity should now be viewed as a “fiction.” But, without an annulment, how can a marriage in the Church be ignored at the “pastoral” level? Kasper proposes that since the annulment process is only a matter of ecclesiastical law, the Church could simply allow a local bishop to empower a priest “with spiritual and pastoral experience” or the diocesan penitentiary or episcopal vicar to make some sort of “pastoral” decision that the prior marriage in the Church ought not to impede reception of the Blessed Sacrament because it was probably invalid. But, under this absurd proposal, who would defend the marital bond against such “pastoral” determinations and who would review the local “pastoral” decision? Apparently nobody. The potential for marital chaos and the destruction of the divinely ordered nuclear family is self-evident.
The second situation Kasper presents is that “most difficult situation” of a marriage that was “ratified and consummated between baptized persons,” yet “the communion of married life is irremediably broken and one or both of the spouses have contracted a second civil marriage.” In other words, a valid Catholic marriage followed by a civil divorce and an adulterous civil union on the part of one or both spouses. Here Kasper contends that “[t]he early Church gives us an indication that can serve as a means of escape from the dilemma.” Dilemma? What dilemma? The one Kasper has invented.
As we know, when a Modernist wishes to attack some element of the Faith through a change in discipline, he typically appeals to some alleged practice of the Church around 2,000 years ago. I will not tarry over Kasper’s bogus Modernist scholarship, devoid of a single citation to a patristic source quoted in context, or his fraudulent claim that the Council of Nicaea (325) authorized the admission of the divorced and remarried to Holy Communion. Let the reader consult Roberto de Mattei’s demolition of Kasper’s specious arguments.
Having imagined an historical foundation in the always-useful “early Church,” Kasper calmly lays out his five-point plan for de facto approval of divorce and remarriage in the Catholic Church. He presents this as “a way beyond rigorism and laxity”—meaning, of course, a way to laxity:
If a divorced and remarried – 1. Repents of the failure in his first marriage, 2. If he has clarified the obligations of his first marriage, if going back is definitely excluded, 3. If he cannot abandon without other offences to his commitments in the second civil marriage, 4. If however, he makes an effort to live in the second marriage to the best of his possibilities, starting from the faith and bringing his children up in the faith, 5. If he has the desire for the sacraments as the source of strength in his situation, must we or can we deny him, after a time of a new course (metanoia) the sacrament of penance and then Communion?
Kasper claims this is not “a general solution,” or “a wide road for the great masses,” but rather “a narrow way on the part of probably very few of the divorced and remarried, interested in the sacraments.” If we would believe that, we would be prime customers for the purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge. Kasper assures us that this “solution” calls for “discretion” and is “not compromise between rigorism [i.e. what the Church has always required] and laxity [i.e. what Kasper wishes to achieve].” Kasper is right. This is not a compromise between rigorism and laxity; it is simply a prescription for laxity.
But Kasper’s “beautiful and profound” suggestion for authorizing mass sacrilege is neither profound nor beautiful; it is evil, as seen immediately from the obvious objections:
First, having “repented” of the “failure” of a sacramental marriage, the divorced and remarried person still remains in an adulterous second union based on nothing more than a civil ceremony. Here Kasper attempts to patch the gaping hole in his argument by defending civil marriage, arguing that a civil marriage “with clear criteria is distinct from other forms of ‘irregular’ cohabitation, such as clandestine marriages, common law couples, above all fornication and so-called primitive marriages.” Really? On what authority does Kasper so declare? On the authority of his own worthless opinion, which the Pope endorses as “beautiful and profound.”
Second, the idea that the Church could countenance “living in the second marriage to the best of [its] possibilities” without the traditional requirement of abstinence from sexual relations is nothing short of monstrous. Consider what Kasper is really saying: that a couple living in an adulterous union should “perfect” it and persist in it until death, thus defying Saint Paul’s very warning that “neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers… shall possess the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6-10).”
Third, even more monstrous is the idea that someone living in a continuous state of adultery, having repented only of the “failure” of a sacramental marriage, could be allowed to approach the confessional on a regular basis without having to confess, repent of, and promise before God to cease his continuing adultery.
Fourth, and most monstrous of all, is the idea that an adulterer in this situation should have recourse to Holy Communion as a “source of strength” while he continues to enjoy the fruits of an adulterous relationship.
In a most infuriating Modernist fashion, Kasper presents his suggestions for the subversion of Holy Matrimony under the guise of defending its indissolubility: “The indissolubility of sacramental marriage and the impossibility of a new marriage during the lifetime of the other partner is part of the tradition of the Church’s binding faith that cannot be abandoned or undone by appealing to a superficial understanding of cheapened mercy,” he piously affirms. He does so in the very process of outlining a plan to dispense cheapened mercy that would undermine the indissolubility of marriage. His proposal, he claims, would be a way for the Church “to tolerate that which in itself is impossible to accept.” Nonsense. Kasper is proposing to accept that which is impossible to tolerate.
Echoing the Pope’s own sentiments, Kasper declares that “[a] pastoral approach of tolerance, clemency and indulgence” would affirm that “the sacraments are not a prize for those who behave well or for an elite, excluding those who are most in need…” On that bizarre premise, everyone in a state of mortal sin would be entitled to receive Holy Communion because he is in a state of mortal sin, while those who “behave well” would be hogging spiritual goods they don’t require.
What Kasper is really after—as if anyone didn’t know it—is simply the Catholic Church’s practical defection from the indissolubility of marriage, while affirming it in principle (the defection in principle can always come later). Insulting Holy Church yet again, he declares that his “solution” is necessary to “give witness in a credible way to the Word of God in difficult human situations, as a message of fidelity, but also as a message of mercy, of life, and of joy.” In other words, until now the Church has been without credibility and mercy toward the divorced and remarried, her discipline joyless and lifeless, because she heeds Our Lord’s divine warning that the divorced and “remarried” are guilty of adultery! Kasper’s “beautiful and profound” conclusion is thus an implicit attack on God Himself. But that, after all, is what Modernism always involves.
Finally, consider the immense stakes involved in this insane pursuit of a way to admit public adulterers to the sacraments. Here I will quote from Father Brian Harrison’s recent letter to Inside the Vatican:
[W]on’t this reversal of bimillenial Catholic doctrine mean that the Protestants and Orthodox, who have allowed divorce and remarriage for century after century, have been more docile to the Holy Spirit on this issue than the true Church of Christ? Indeed, how credible, now, will be her claim to be the true Church? On what other controverted issues, perhaps, has the Catholic Church been wrong, and the separated brethren right? …
Admitting [the divorced and remarried] to Communion without a commitment to continence will lead logically to one of three faith-breaking conclusions: (a) our Lord was mistaken in calling this relationship adulterous—in which case he can scarcely have been the Son of God; (b) adultery is not intrinsically and gravely sinful—in which case the Church's universal and ordinary magisterium has always been wrong; or (c) Communion can be given to some who are living in objectively grave sin—in which case not only has the magisterium also erred monumentally by always teaching the opposite, but the way will also be opened to Communion for fornicators, practicing homosexuals, pederasts, and who knows who else?
Let us make no mistake: Satan is right now shaking the Church to her very foundations over this divorce issue….
Diabolical is not too strong a word for Kasper’s proposal. Yet our friends in the diving bell will pretend that the Pope did not solicit and then praise it. Meanwhile, the world exults over the potential for an overthrow of the Church’s uncompromising defense of Holy Matrimony. Will Kasper’s proposal become a reality? We must pray that the Holy Ghost prevents such a disaster. Nevertheless, Catholics deceive themselves, and each other, if they pretend it is not the Pope himself who—whatever his subjective intention—has stoked the fires of dissent and rebellion by commissioning and then lauding Kasper’s “profound and beautiful presentation.”
