February 2024
Hopeful History
| Perhaps one takes refuge in safety zones, like the habitual repetition of things one always does, or in the alluring calls of an intimist spirituality, or even in a misunderstood sense of the centrality of the liturgy. They are temptations that disguise themselves as fidelity to tradition, but often, rather than responses to the Spirit, they are reactions to personal dissatisfactions. |
| - Francis (6/12/23, Wednesday General Audience) |
| Every Holy Mass, heard with devotion, produces in our souls marvellous effects, abundant spiritual and material graces which we, ourselves, do not know... It is easier for the earth to exist without the sun than without the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass! |
| - PADRE PIO (6/12/23, Wednesday General Audience) |
So, now we know. Throughout his life the holy friar of Pietrelcina harboured and preached a "misunderstood sense of the centrality of the liturgy." And how! Holy Mass more important to life on earth than the sun?! Poor, utterly deluded St. Pio.
But wait .... Who are we to believe? The only priest in the history of the Church to receive the stigmata (St. Francis was a deacon)? Or a pathological bully illicitly manoeuvred onto the papal throne by a cabal of Modernists: the self-professed St Gallen "mafia"?
Pitting oneself against St, Pio is of course a no-contest. Nonetheless, one might have taken for granted that a pope would at least approximate the Faith preached by one for whom the power and authority vested in the divine and sacrosanct papal office was as palpable as the sacred wounds he shared with his crucified Lord and Saviour; lifelong suffering that informed his dutiful respect and submission to the papal office-bearer. As underlined by the above juxtaposition, however, this is not only no longer the case, it is so very far from the case that we find ourselves forever contrasting the light of the saints with the current papal darkness; a tyrannical reign that has institutionalised pontifical aberrations once reserved for medieval rarities like John XXII.
Hopeful history
The poster-boy of papal limitations, Pope John remains the first port of call when perceived pontifical missteps or outright errors elicit discussion about infallibility and the conundrum of a heterodox and/or apparently heretical pope. Amid the encircling gloom of the Bergoglian pontificate, therefore, his history, outlined in this instructive January 2015 summary by Professor Roberto de Mattei, sheds hopeful light on our dire predicament:
Among the most beautiful and mysterious truths of our faith is the dogma of the Beatific Vision of the souls in Heaven. The Beatific Vision consists in the immediate and intuitive contemplation of God reserved for souls who have passed to the after-life in a state of Grace and have been completely purified of every imperfection. This truth of faith, enunciated in Holy Scripture and confirmed over the centuries by Tradition, is an unreformable dogma of the Catholic Church. The new Catechism restates it in n.1023: "Those who die in God’s grace and friendship and are perfectly purified live forever with Christ. They are like God forever for “they see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2), “face to face” (1Corinthians 13:12)"
At the beginning of the XIV century, a Pope, John XXII, contested this thesis in his ordinary magisterium and fell into heterodoxy. The most fervent Catholics of that time corrected him publically. John XXII – Cardinal Schuster wrote –“has the gravest responsibilities before the tribunal of history" since “he offered the entire Church, the humiliating spectacle of the princes, clergy and universities steering the Pontiff onto the right path of Catholic theological tradition, and placing him in the very difficult situation of having to contradict himself.” (Alfredo Idelfonso Schuster o.s.b. Jesus Christ in Ecclesiastical History, Benedictine Publishing House, Rome 1996, pp. 116-117)
... When the Pope tried to impose this erroneous doctrine on the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the King of France, Philip VI of Valois, prohibited its teaching, and, according to accounts by the Sorbonne’s Chancellor, Jean Gerson [even] reached the point of threatening John XXII with the stake if he didn’t make a retraction. John XXII’s sermons totus mundum christianum turbaverunt ["disturbed the whole Christian world"],so said Thomas of Strasburg, Master of the Hermits of Saint Augustine (in Dykmans, op. cit., p. 10).
Pope John's error, according to which the Beatific Vision of the Divinity would be conceded to souls not after the first judgment, but only after the resurrection of the flesh was an old one, but in the XIII century it had been rebutted by St. Thomas Aquinas and now it had created a furore that erupted against the erroneous pontiff. His papal successor, Cardinal Fournier who took the name of Benedict XII (1335-1342), wanted to close the issue with a dogmatic definition, which he duly did with the constitution, Benedictus Deus of 29 January 1336. The Bull, Laetentur coeli of 6 July 1439then re-referenced this article of faith at the Council of Florence. Prof. de Mattei explains that:
Following these doctrinal decisions, the thesis sustained by John XXII must be considered formally heretical, even if at that time the Pope sustained that it was still not defined as a dogma of faith. St. Robert Bellarmine who dealt amply with this issue in De Romano Pontifice (Opera omnia, Venetiis 1599, Book. IV, chap. 14, coll. 841-844) writes that John XXII supported a heretical thesis, with the intention of imposing it as the truth on the faithful, but died before he could have defined the dogma, without therefore, undermining the principle of pontifical infallibility by his behaviour.
[...] The heterodox teaching of John XXII was certainly an act of ordinary magisterium regarding the faith of the Church, but not infallible, as it was devoid of a defining nature. If we had to apply the Instruction, Donum Veritatis (May 24th 1990) to the letter, this authentic teaching, even if not infallible, would have had to be received as a teaching given by Pastors, who, through the Apostolic Succession, speak “with the gift of truth” (Dei Verbum n.8), “endowed by the authority of Christ” (Lumen Gentium, n.25), “by the light of the Holy Spirit” (ibidem). His thesis would have required, the degree of adhesion called “offering the full submission of the will and intellect, rooted in trusting Divine assistance to the magisterium” and thus “within the logic of faith under the impulse of obedience to the faith.” (Monsignor Ocariz Osservatore Romano, Dec. 2nd 2011).
The defenders of Catholic orthodoxy instead of resisting the Pope’s heretical doctrines openly, would have had to bend to his “living magisterium” and Benedict XII would not have had to oppose his predecessor’s doctrine with the dogma of faith which declared that the souls of the just, after death, enjoy the Divine Essence with intuitive and direct vision. But thanks be to God, some good theologians and prelates of the time, moved by their sensus fidei, publically refused their assent to the supreme authority. An important truth of our faith was thus able to be conserved, transmitted and defined.
Faithful remnant
Faced with the thuggish cruelty that defines the current pontificate and its ripple effect throughout the Western hierarchy, above all in the merciless assault against the glorious Mass of the saints and martyrs, John XXII confirms our instinctive knowledge (sensus fidei) that Jorge's "living magisterium" — an elastic band of heterodoxies, heresies and scandals stretched to more or less grave or formal degrees — can and will be overturned in time, by the grace of God according to His most perfect designs.
To that end, the same outcry against papal errors is required from modern-day successors of those "good theologians and prelates" who denounced Pope John out of hand. In which hopeful light, the episcopal and priestly protests recounted last month, against the latest papal touch-paper Fiducia supplicans, mirror the fidelity and hope expressed by millions in their adherence to the Old Mass; being righteous personifications of Romans 11:5:
"Even so then at this present time also, there is a remnant
saved according to the election of grace."
Of course, until their last breaths, there is also hope for our papal oppressor and his aiders and abettors. De Mattei concludes:
On the eve of John XXII’s death, he stated that he had expressed himself simply as a private theologian, without any binding to the magisterium he held. Giovanni Villani reports in his Chronicle, the retraction the Pope made on his thesis on December 3rd 1334, the day before his death, at the solicitation of Cardinal Dal Poggetto, his nephew, and some other relatives.
Oremus.