Thank God for Francis!

(What We Have Learned from Jorge Mario Bergoglio)

By Christopher A. Ferrara

Remnant Columnist | Virginia

Whether the Catholic Church is the one true Church of Christ depends entirely upon her infallibility as an organ of truth, for if she were not such then she would not be indefectible, Christ’s promise of indefectibility (cf. Matt. 28:20) would be void and He himself could not, therefore, be what he claimed to be: the God who can neither deceive nor be deceived.

Infallibility of teaching on faith and morals is intrinsic to the divine commission, for without it the Church could not make of all nations disciples of Christ but only disciples of human teaching which may or may not correspond to the revealed truth of the Gospel. This was the lot of the nations that became disciples of Luther and his progeny before any form of the Christian religion was finally banished from all nations by

~ See Thank God for Francis/ Page 8

Thank God for Francis!

C. Ferrara/ Continued from Page 1

the terminal secularism of political modernity.

As Cardinal Newman put it: "If Christianity is both social and dogmatic, and intended for all ages, it must humanly speaking have an infallible expounder." [ An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, II.13] But who or what in the Church is the infallible expounder?

It can only be the Church as a whole, whose supreme leader on earth is indeed the Pope, but whose head is Christ and Him alone.

The infallible expounder cannot be the Pope alone, even if his authority is supreme, universal and direct as to every member of the Church, for it is not the Pope alone who received the divine commission. And while Our Lord said to Peter "thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church (Matt 16:18)," He also said to him almost immediately thereafter, when Peter balked at the Passion: "Go behind me, Satan, thou art a scandal unto me: because thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things that are of men (Matt. 16:23)."

This would be followed, on the night of the Last Supper, by the prophecy that Peter would deny Him thrice and by the admonition applicable not only to Peter but to all his successors: "Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren (Lk 22:31-32)."

Our Lord’s promise of divine assistance to the papacy is not a divine guarantee of inerrant Popes. The Pope is, after all, a man, and a man is always subject to human frailty and the possibility of error that comes with every exercise of free will, which is not lost upon election to the papacy.

Hence Saint Paul’s famous rebuke of the first Pope at Antioch on account of his cowardly feigned adherence to Jewish dietary laws, which threatened the entire mission of the Church to the Gentiles by suggesting that they ought to follow the Mosaic law:

But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.

For before that some came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them who were of the circumcision.

And to his dissimulation the rest of the Jews consented, so that Barnabas also was led by them into that dissimulation.

But when I saw that they walked not uprightly unto

the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all: If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, and not as the Jews do, how dost thou compel the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? [2 Gal 1 114]

The Church, however, is not a man or even a mere collective of men, but the Mystical Body of Christ whose subsistence cannot be destroyed by any human error. Lost in the current mania of hyper-papalism is the infallibility of the Church as a corporate whole, extending even to the faithful as a body, which obeys what has always been taught by the Church as a whole and rejects what is foreign to that teaching. As Ludwig Ott explains:

One may distinguish an active and a passive infallibility. The former belongs to the pastors of the Church in the exercise of their teaching office (infallibilitas in docendo), the latter to the faithful as a whole in its assent to the message of faith (infallibilitas in credendo) Active and passive are related as cause and effect.

During the Arian crisis this "passive" infallibility of the faithful was crucial to the Church’s survival—that is, to the maintenance of her indefectibility. As Cardinal Newman famously explains, the laity were more faithful than their teachers to what their teachers had always taught them in the light of Revelation:

[I]n that time of immense confusion … the body of the episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism;… at one time the Pope, at other times the patriarchal, metropolitan, and other great sees, at other times general councils, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth; while, on the other hand, it was the Christian people who, under Providence, were the ecclesiastical strength of Athanasius, Hilary, Eusebius of Vercellae, and other great solitary confessors, who would have failed without them. [On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine (1859)]

So, the Church’s infallibility pertains to the whole of her divine constitution: both the hierarchy and the laity which together comprise the Mystical Body.

And there are times—our time is one of them—when at least a remnant of the laity keeps the faith they were taught even though the hierarchy has generally failed in its commission to defend and protect it. This is not to deny that there are still many among the hierarchs who believe what they were taught. To quote Newman again apropos the Arian crisis:

… I am not denying that the great body of the Bishops were in their internal belief orthodox; nor that there were numbers of clergy who stood by the laity, and acted as their centres and guides; nor that the laity actually received their faith, in the first instance, from the Bishops and clergy; nor that some portions of the laity were ignorant, and other portions at length corrupted by the Arian teachers … but I mean still, that in that time of immense confusion the divine dogma of our Lord’s divinity was proclaimed, enforced, maintained, and (humanly speaking) preserved, far more by the "Ecclesia docta" than by the "Ecclesia docens"…

What is "the faith" the faithful remnant are preserving far more than the generality of the hierarchy in our current "time of immense confusion"? It is nothing other than the total ensemble of doctrines the Church as a whole has taught and believed since apostolic times, otherwise known as the deposit of faith, developed and applied to particular circumstances as necessary but never contradicted.

Too little attention has been paid in our day to the one criterion by which the validity of all Church teaching is judged: the constancy of what she has handed down in her corporate function as teacher versus the novelty of some particular pronouncement extrinsic to the depositum fidei. Blessed Pius IX, the very Pope who narrowly defined papal infallibility by approving the Vatican I decree, was at pains to make clear in answer to Johannes Dollinger, before Dollinger’s apostasy and ultimate excommunication, that the teaching Church as a whole is infallible, not only as to "dogmas expressly defined by the Church" but also when it comes to "matters transmitted as divinely revealed by the ordinary Magisterium of the whole Church dispersed throughout the world and, for that reason, held by the universal consensus of Catholic theologians as belonging to the faith."

[DZ 2879] It is of decisive importance in our current circumstances to recall how Vatican I’s definition of papal (versus ecclesial corporate) infallibility was strictly limited to the rarity of singular and solemn papal pronouncements commanding universal assent on a matter of faith and morals. The Council’s conditions for papal infallibility are that the Pope: (1) "when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, acting in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians," (2) "defines, by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority," (3) "a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church…" [DZ 3074] Only then, the Council declared, can it be said that the Pope in his singular definitions "possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals." But even in the exercise of this extraordinary Magisterium, the Pope can do nothing but define solemnly as dogma matters already "transmitted as divinely revealed by the ordinary Magisterium of the whole Church dispersed throughout the world"—including, of course, Popes and Councils presided over by Popes and the body of bishops as a diachronic moral totality. (The body of bishops does not mean episcopal conferences in particular countries, which are no part of the divine constitution of the Church and were not even given formal juridical status until the Second Vatican Council’s decree Christus Dominus, which Paul VI implemented in 1966 with his motu proprio Ecclesiae sanctae— one of his many prudential blunders.) In short, the Pope has absolutely no power to define a novel doctrine that was never a part of the Church’s

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In short, the Pope has absolutely no power to define a novel doctrine that was never a part of the Church’s Magisterium, either ordinary or extraordinary.'

"

To deny that a given Pope can ever depart from orthodoxy by proclaiming his own ideas is to argue implicitly that every utterance of a true Pope touching on faith and morals must be accepted

without question.'

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No Catholic is obliged to believe in ecumenism, dialogue, interreligious dialogue or collegiality, whatever these notions might mean, for the simple reason that the Church had never heard of them

before 1962.'

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