Audio only:
Joe responds to the SSPX claims about Vatican II and it’s position on religious liberty, ecumenism and collegiality.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heshmeyer and I want to address three alleged errors of Vatican II. Now last week I looked at some of the legitimate critiques made against the council. For example, some of the texts were ambiguous and heretics made use of some of those ambiguities in propagating false teaching. As I pointed out then, those critiques are largely true, but you can say the same thing about many councils and it doesn’t impugn the council itself. The fact that a council can be misread heretically doesn’t mean the council is actually teaching heresy or error. But today I want to look squarely at three areas in which the Society of St. Pius a 10th claims that a hermeneumuk of continuity does not work because they say that the actual texts of Vatican II contradict the perennial teaching of the church on the questions of religious liberty, accumanism and collegiality.
So we’re going to look at all three of those. In my view, their weakest case is against collegiality and their strongest case is against religious liberty. So I’m going to take them in ascending order as it were. So the first doctrinal disagreement the SSPX has with Vatican II is on this concept of what’s called collegiality. Now the SSPX’s basic argument is that the unique authority of the Pope is undermined in Vatican II in favor of a college of bishops. Now, some of the arguments they make are kind of technical, so I want you to bear with me on this one because the subject matter is really important in determining the divinely ordained structure of the church. Now the word collegiality doesn’t appear in the second Vatican council, but that is the general shorthand way that everybody kind of uses to describe the teaching on the church given in Lumengensium paragraph 22.
So in an SSPX video called What’s the Problem with Collegiality? Father Stephen McDonald claims…
CLIP:
The modernist concept of religious collegiality stemming from a faulty understanding of liberty and individual rights threatens this clear hierarchical structure. It insists that a strict democratic process should govern the church at all times. The Pope is thus free to have his say, but his cardinals and bishops must always be allowed to voice their own opinions as well.
Joe:
In addition to claiming that collegiality teaches that a strict democratic process should govern the church at all times, Father also claims that collegiality destroys the authority of the Pope, the bishop, the individual, and even destroys the authority of God himself.
CLIP:
Collegiality is the destruction of personal authority, the authority of God of the Pope and even of the bishops themselves.
Joe:
Compare these claims to Lumengenzium 22, the text being criticized. It begins by saying that as vicar of Christ, the Pope has full supreme and universal power over the church. She is always free to exercise. It then says that the College of Bishops is also the subject of supreme and full power over the universal church, provided we understand this body together with its head, the Roman Pontif, and never without this head. Now you’ll notice there’s nothing there about a strict democratic process and the existence of a Pope and bishops being ordained by the Pope. He’s actually pretty anti-democratic. It’s certainly nothing like congregationalism. The authority structure here is top down and is top down in a collaborative way though. Now I suspect the SSPX would actually grant. The Consulate does not itself teach congregationalism or direct democracy. It’s more that there’s something that may be ambiguous in the text that could lead to those negative things as a result of maybe an inadvertent consequence.
But Lumenginsim’s actually unique in that it comes with an official explanatory note, a note that explains what it does and does not mean. Now the note eliminates many of the ambiguities. It refutes many of the things the SSVX claims that it teaches. For instance, it is quite clear that it remains the discretion of the Pope to, in a particular case, proceed in a personal or a collegial way. His authority is not hemmed in at all by the existence of a college of bishops. Strikingly, in Archbishop Lefev’s own commentary in his book, I Accus the Council, he writes about how he’d intervene to challenge some of the original language of Lumengensium that had been proposed. And he says that the result of these interventions was an important modification of the text, but he says that time it was still not completely satisfactory. And so they asked Pope St. Paul VI to make a clear statement which would avoid any ambiguous interpretation of the note.
And so Uslaphev says was the insertion of this explanatory note that restored the traditional teaching. So no matter how bad you think the original drafts of Lumenginsium were, the text that was actually promulgated by the council and approved by the Pope, which includes this explanatory note. It faithfully presents the church’s traditional teaching on the relationship of the Pope to bishops. So you might be wondering why we needed anything like that in the first place then if we’re just reaffirming the traditional teaching. Well, for context here, the first Vatican council had explained the theology of the papacy, but before it had a chance to unpack the theology of the episcopacy or its relationship to the papacy, the first Vatican council was interrupted by the rancoprusian war. So its work was left incomplete. So in some ways, Vatican II is picking up where Vatican one left off.
It is unpacking this theology of bishops, of the episcopacy. So for example, do bishops derive their authority from Christ directly or from the Pope? What is the relationship of the bishops around the world? And what is the scope of their authority individually and collectively? The key line in Lumengensium 22 is this. Just as in the gospels, the Lord so disposing, St. Peter and the other apostles constitute one apostolic college. So in a similar way, the Roman Pontif, the successor of Peter and the bishops, the successors of the apostles are joined together. Of course, the Pope and bishops today don’t share the apostles extraordinary powers, but that’s still a helpful analogy to understand the structure of the church. So let’s think about the biblical model. The first thing we notice when we’re looking at the biblical model of the church is that Jesus doesn’t just call St. Peter and then has Peter choose 11 deputies or vicars.
No, Jesus calls all 12 of the apostles. And he’s very explicit about this fact saying, did I not choose you the 12? But notice that second point. He doesn’t just call 12 different people to follow him individually. He calls them and then forms them into a body or a college that he calls the 12 in which we sometimes refer to today as the college of the apostles. Now the term college there is drawn from Roman law. And as the Catholic Encyclopedia explains, it just means they’re working together under one head and for one purpose. So when you hear college here, don’t think university, think like colleagues. But this College of Apostles, of course, it’s not above Peter in such a way that they could overrule him or work around him or order him around. In fact, it’s not even entirely distinct from Peter since Peter is both a member of the 12 and their earthly head.
And so in the book of Acts, Peter sometimes acts in his personal capacity as head of the church. For example, and opening the doors of salvation to the Gentiles in Acts 10. Other times he acts in what we might call a collegial way. He’s acting in concert with the other apostles. Now that happens in a kind of extraordinary way at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, but even apart from the existence of a council like the Council of Jerusalem, we see the College of Apostles existing as a college, as a standing body. For example, in Acts chapter six, the 12 summoned the body of the disciples and gave them instructions on the calling of the first deacons. But whether it’s Peter acting in his individual capacity or the 12 acting collegially, we’re witnessing in each case the highest level of authority in the church.
Does that mean then that there are two heads of the church? Peter in the 12? No, because Peter is head of the 12. The other apostles are distinct from Peter, but their authority is inseparable from his own authority. Okay. So that’s the biblical kind of model of Peter and the apostles. If you apply that biblical model to the church today, the result is that the Pope is able to act in his own capacity. He does not have to await the approval of his brother bishops any more than St. Peter needed to send out a group memo before eating with Cornelius. But the bishops are nevertheless to remember that they are all successors of the apostles and they’re all called to be in college together. Now for some people, the idea of the bishops making up a global college of bishops sounds like something Vatican II is just inventing, but that’s not the case.
We find Leo the 13th talking that way about the Pope’s authority over the Episcopal College back in 1896. And as the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia mentions, the College of the Apostles lives forth in the Episcopate, which gradually took its place and filled its functions. So none of these are novelties of Vatican II. Even when the exact wording of college of bishops isn’t used, that theology, we still find it going back into the early church. St. Saprine of Carthage writes that this unity we ought firmly to hold and assert, especially those of us that are bishops who preside in the church, we may also prove the episcopate itself to be one and undivided. And there are countless examples of the bishops, usually the bishops of a particular country taking concrete steps to live this out, to show their unity with one another and with the Pope. Now as Catholics, we believe the episcopacy is of divine origin since the bishops are the successors of the apostles.
If Bishop X is bad, that’s not an argument that the episcopacy is bad. So similarly, pointing to the bad things sometimes done in the name of collegiality in the modern age does not disprove collegiality itself because the truth is that there is a longstanding Catholic tradition of what we might call collegiality and even synodality. For instance, St. Bonafus, the so – called apostle to the Germans, writes the following in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. We decreed and acknowledged in our Senate that we wish to preserve to the end of our lives the Catholic faith and unity and submission to the Roman Church, that we bowed to St. Peter into his vicar, that we should call a Synod together every year, that the metropolitans would seek their palls, that’s pallia, from the Holy Sea, that we desire to follow in everything the precepts of St. Peter so as to be numbered among the sheep and trusted to him.
So St. Bonafist’s synodal way was to hold annual sinods of the bishops of Germany to show their unity, their brotherhood, and also their union with the Holy Sea. That’s what true collegiality looks like. The bishops act, but they’re acting in union with one another and united with and under the leadership of the Pope. So if Synodality has become kind of a bad word today, it’s worth recognizing this is owing to the bad theology and bad intentions of many of those involved in it rather than any kind of problems with synods or colleges of bishops themselves. In fact, many of the objections to collegiality and to synodality reveals something that I think is often the critic’s own understanding of the church. And I mean to critique something broader than just the SSPX here because many Catholics, including I fear many bishops have internalized this idea that the role of the bishop is to be a kind of middleman or just a vicar of the Pope.
When Bishop Strickland tweeted that bishops are not the Vatican’s regional managers, they’re successors to the apostles in their own right. The response from many online Catholics was outraged accusing him of disloyalty to the Pope or denying Catholic doctrine. But while the words he was quoting there were theologically imprecise, Vatican II quite plainly does say bishops are not to be regarded as vicars of the Pope. Remember, Christ called all the apostles. He didn’t just call Peter. And even though Vatican II says that, it’s not the first to say that. Pope Leo the 13th had said the exact same thing back in 1896. Okay. So I want to turn now to a very subtle argument about collegiality. This is an argument about the distinction between jurisdiction and order. As I say, it is a subtle distinction, but basically a priest becomes a bishop by virtue of his consecration.
That’s orders, holy orders. But to be a bishop of a particular place, that requires jurisdiction. The Pope can regulate where he’s bishop of. He can move him to a different diocese. He can even depose him entirely. But he can’t change the indelible fact that the man is now a bishop. The Pope can make the Bishop of Tyler no longer the Bishop of Tyler, but he can’t make him no longer a bishop. But the SSPX claims that Lumengensium denies this distinction.
CLIP:
Finally, I’ll just mention very briefly collegiality. Vatican II in Lumengensium asserts that bishops receive jurisdiction immediately from God at their Episcopal consecration, but that goes directly contrary to what Pius the 12th had taught.
Joe:
Now this is a common misreading of Vatican II, but I think it’s still a misreading. The text never asserts that bishops receive jurisdiction immediately from God at their Episcopal consecration. It seems to say the exact opposite in fact. What Lumenginsian says is that a bishop receives what are called munera, not jurisdiction when he’s consecrated. Through Episcopal consecration itself, bishops receive with the function munis of sanctifying also the functions munera of teaching and governing. As Christ is priest, prophet and king, so every bishop is called to act as priest by sanctifying prophet by teaching and king by governing. But this theology, as Lumenginsian’s explanatory note points out, is absolutely clear from tradition, liturgical tradition included. For example, in the traditional rite of consecration of bishops, the priest about to be consecrated as a bishop is told it is the duty of a bishop to judge, to interpret the scriptures, to consecrate, to ordain, to make ablation, to baptize and to confirm.
That sevenfold calling is the calling of the Episcopal office itself. And that office is what is received in the sacrament of holy orders quite apart from the question of jurisdiction. But here’s the crucial distinction many of the SSPX critiques omit. The explanatory note was very clear that they intentionally used the term munera rather than a stronger term like Potestastes for powers because for the power being described as being received in holy orders there, to be fully ready to act, something else is needed, canonical or juridical determination through the hierarchical authority. So typically in the West, that’s going to be the Pope. So Bishop Johnston is the shop of Kansas City because one, he shares in the triple mooner of priest, prophet and king through consecration. But two, he was named Bishop by the Holy Father. The first of those is orders and the second is jurisdiction.
And that appears to harmonize with the teaching of Pius the 12th perfectly. There is no contradiction there unless you read a contradiction into the text. But the final SSPX argument that I want to address on collegiality is that of Dom Tranquilo, who accuses the council of actually teaching heresy. Now usually the society shies away from such an accusation because once you begin to accuse the Pope and all the world’s bishops of being manifest heretics, it raises a specter of state of contents. But his argument is that Vatican II contradicts the infallible dogma of Vatican I.
CLIP:
And that’s another problem. The other error or heresy even, because it is defined that God, our Lord, gives only to Simon Peter the power of governing the church, the supreme power. Vatican I doesn’t say gives to Peter, which would be okay to Peter and to somebody else. We define that afterwards. Patikan I says only to Peter. And this is successors obviously. So this is absolutely something wrong.
Joe:
Now Vatican I says that it was to Peter alone that Jesus after his resurrection confided the jurisdiction of Supreme pastor and ruler of his whole fold saying, feed my lambs, feed my sheep. And so the argument is that Vatican II contradicts this by saying that there’s another supreme power, the College of Bishops. But again, the explanatory note is explicit that Lumen Jinseman’s not talking about a distinction between the Pope and the bishops because you can collectively talk about a distinction between the Pope taken by himself and the Pope together with the bishops. And Vatican one ironically illustrates this point perfectly. The dogma of papal infallibility isn’t defined by a Pope operating alone by an ecumenical counsel and yet it’s still received at the highest level of authority as a dogmatic definition. So if you want to see why Vatican I isn’t contradicting Vatican II or contradicting itself by heavenly council, I would suggest you look at the work of Cardinal Jornay.
He was a theologian Lephev himself, raised as a deep thinker and a great theologian. And he explicitly taught what SSPX priests are now claiming is heresy. In his 1941 book, The Church of the Word Incarnate, Jornay explicitly teaches that the power to rule the universal church resides in one, the Pope and two, the Episcopal College united with the Pope and that it can be exercised either way. But he stressed that these are not two entirely distinct powers, but on sole supreme power exercised in two different ways. So it’s the same authority, whether it’s the Pope acting alone or with the College of Bishops. And Cardinal Billot actually goes further writing that there’s nothing more explicit in the Catholic faith from the beginning than the dogma of the supreme authority of the whole episcopate, whether united in an ecumenical council or dispersed throughout the world. Now that’s an important distinction because the SSPX will actually grant that yes, an ecumenical council shares in this supreme authority, but it denies that to the College of Bishops dispersed throughout the world and united as a college of bishops.
And Billet isn’t some modernist looking to change the church. Quite the opposite. He was literally the man who drafted Pashindi, Dominique, Gregus, which was St. Pius intense, famous antimodernist and cyclical. And yet SSPX priests are publicly accusing the church of heresy for teaching what Billet called the most explicit dogma in the Catholic faith known from the beginning. So on the question of collegiality, I think the SSPX argument simply misunderstands both the teaching of limanginsium and also the traditional ecclesiology of the church on this question. But I want to turn to the secondary issue where I think they have a somewhat stronger case. This is the idea of accumanism. Now on the one hand, I sympathize with the frustration many Catholics feel in response to vague feel good statements from church leaders about non-Catholic, even non-Christian groups. And I think we should be very careful in distinguishing the actual teaching of Vatican II on ecumenism from these sometimes scandalous things that we might see done in the name of ecumenism.
Think about it this way. You can find plenty of bad Catholic Protestant debates, but that by itself doesn’t mean debates bad or that this is somehow contrary to what it is to be Catholic. It might just be a sign that the Catholic side needs better debaters. Well, similarly with Accumanism, I agree with the evangelical Timothy George who remarked that for too long, accumanism has been left to left-leaning Catholics and mainline Protestants. So it might not be a problem with accumanism itself. We might just need better accumanists. So okay, what are the arguments against Vatican II’s teaching on accumanism itself? Now, unfortunately, many of the arguments against many of the critiques both within the SSPX and from others, they’re often confused about what accumanism even is. As in they’ll simply misdefine it. For example, the society put on a video called What Is the Problem with Modern Accumanism in which Father McDonald offers this definition of accumanism.
CLIP:
The recent popes have participated in even organized many ecumenical events. Yet ecumenism raises both doctrinal and pastoral problems. Accumanism denotes the search for worldwide religious unity.
Joe:
And the SSPX article, What Is Accumanism? Claims that the Vatican II document on ecumenism that’s Unitatis Red and Grazio is based upon the belief that all religions are more or less praiseworthy. And you can find the SSPX making these kind of claims in a lot of their materials. The idea that modern ecumenism is about trying to get Buddhist to be good Buddhists and Protestants to be good Protestants and that it’s not concerned with conversion, all of this. Now, none of this is remotely true. Unitatist Redangracio, the document being critiqued, is explicitly about the restoration of unity among all Christians. Those are literally the opening words of the documents. That is the reintegration being talked about. It’s a restoration of full communion and it’s based on the idea that Christ the Lord founded one church and one church only. In other words, ecumenism is only possible with groups that believe in the Trinity and confess Jesus as Lord and Savior.
The term ecumenical comes from the Greek word for house or household. Same root as ecumenical council, of course. So we’re dealing with the household of God, those connected to the church in some way through baptism. As Pope Francis pointed out a few years back, ecumenism is essentially baptismal because it is in baptism that we find the basis of the communion between Christians and are yearning for full visible unity. Now it’s true that the church also engages in a religious dialogue, but that’s a completely different thing. As the dicastery for promoting Christian unity points out, these contacts we sometimes have with non-Christian groups, they differ radically from the context we have in ecumenical dialogue with other Christian groups because it’s only with other Christians that we’re striving for the restoration of the unity Christ willed among all his disciples. And only that intra-Christian dialogue can be properly called ecumenical.
So if your idea of ecumenism is like that scene in the last battle at the end of Chronicles of Narnia in which shift in gender are preaching that Aslan and the demon tash are really the same God, fear not. That is not what ecumenism actually is and it’s not what Vatican II taught. Instead, as St. John Paul II would later explain in utunum sent, the goal of accumanism is full communion among Christ disciples. Now full communion understood this way is marked by a shared Eucharist in union with the Bishop of Rome the Pope. So the root of ecumenism is our common baptism and the goal of ecumenism is full Eucharistic and ecclesial communion in union with and under the Pope. So with that in mind, let’s look at two related questions. One, why does Vatican II describe Orthodox and Protestants as separated brethren? And two, why does it talk about degrees of communion?
There’s a lot of misconception on this point, for example, and this idea that when we talk about the Orthodox and Protestants as separated brethren, that this is some kind of Vatican II novelty. It’s a repudiation how we spoke about them in the past. Now you can see this presented positively, for example, by some Protestants.
CLIP:
Vatican II. In that council, they said for the first time ever they called Protestants separated brethren. That is a firestorm of controversy in the Catholic church because up until that point, there had been official council declarations that people who say and believe the things I believe and say, that we are excommunicated, that we are anathema.
Joe:
And you’ll see the same argument often being made, but as a negative by some traditional Catholics. The term often appears in scare quotes in SSPX writings, including those of Lephev himself, or we’ll find the use of the phrase so – called separated brethren. But whether you’re a Protestant who thinks this was a good novelty or a traditionalist who thinks it’s a bad novelty, the truth is that it wasn’t a novelty at all. Terms like separated brethren to describe heretics and schismatics are older than Vatican II. They’re even older than Protestantism. And they’re based upon the theology of baptism. So let me explain. The 1917 Code of Canon law is they were very explicit. By baptism, a man has constituted a person in the church of Christ. When Popeis the 12th appeared to contradict that point in Mystici Corporate Christi, he quickly clarified in Mediatra Day that by the waters of baptism, as by common right, Christians are made members of the mystical body of Christ, the priest.
They’re made members even in the priesthood of Christ. That’s Christian doctrine. It’s rooted in the words of St. Paul that by one spirit, we were all baptized into one body. Jews are Greeks, slaves are free and all were made to drink of one spirit. So the Catholic church recognizes the validity of Orthodox and Protestant baptism so long as they’re done in the proper way and with the proper intention. The Council of Florence is even explicit that pagans and heretics validly baptize. And so there’s this sense in which we regard even baptized heretics and schismatics as our brothers. This was a point that the church father stressed. St. Optatus of Molevas rebuked the Donates schismatics by saying, “You will not have peace with us that is with your brothers. For you cannot escape being our brothers. Yo, whom together with us, one mother church, is born from the same bowels of her mysteries and whom God the Father has received in the same manner as sons of adoption.” And so we find Pope Lou the XII speaking of the Orthodox back in the late 1800s as our dissident brethren and expressing his hope that they may seek out more readily the embrace of their mother, the church.
Already then the Orthodox are understood in some sense as being brothers and true sons of Holy Mother Church. In the next year, he speaks the same way about the Anglicans. He ends an encyclical with a prayer. Oh, sorrowful mother intercede for our separated brethren. With us in the one true fold they may be united to the Supreme Shepherd, the vicar of thy son. In 1928, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical called mortalium animos, which I’m going to look at more closely because in it, he condemns some bad forms of ecumenism. We have a sort of unity of the expense of truth. But even in that document, he talks about how these separated children should return to the Apostolic Sea. And he speaks of our children both as those who belong to the Catholic community, but also those who are separated from us. So it is perfectly traditional and doctrinally Orthodox to recognize that Orthodox and Protestants are united to the church in one way through the sacrament of baptism.
And much more than that in the case of the Orthodox, but that this union is not yet complete. So is it messy to talk about full communion and elements of communion? Sure. But that’s just a reflection of the messiness of the situation. And frankly, the SSPX should be able to relate. Their own relationship to the Catholic church is similarly kind of famously messy, but the underlying doctrine of the church is the same. On the one hand, Vatican II explicitly reams an Orientalium Ecclesiorum that the holy Catholic church, which is the mystical body of Christ, made up of the faithful who are organically united in the Holy Spirit by the same faith, the same sacraments and the same government. On the other hand, in Lumenginsium, which was released the same day, the council also recognizes that many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of this visible structure of the church, but that those elements aren’t meant to just be like, okay, you’re good enough.
Instead, those elements outside the church or outside the visible bounds of the church impelled toward Catholic unity. So there’s a shift in emphasis there, but there’s not a change in the doctrine of the church. It’s the same doctrine before and after. Instead, what we do have, we do have some shifts, but as Father Brian Harrison puts it, we’re dealing here not with doctrinal changes. We’re dealing with changes to the church’s policy, discipline and pastoral strategy. In Father’s words, between Piusy 11th and Vatican II, there’s an undeniable and very marked change of direction, indeed practically a U-turn. Pius the 11th flatly forbade any Catholic participation and interchurch or inter-religious meetings and activities motivated by the desire for restoring Christian unity. Vatican II, on the other hand, authorizes and positively encourages Catholic participation in such activities within certain limits. Now, all of that is true, but I would say here, the U-turn isn’t maybe quite as abrupt as you might be imagining.
Now remember, the ecumenical movement is still very young. It started, most people dated to the 1910 World Missionary Conference. So it’s only the early 20th century that even the Protestants and Orthodox world gets serious about ecumenism. And the church’s initial reaction to the ecumenical movement was one of caution, even one of suspicion. Pius the 11th, as I said, quickly recognized that there’s a kind of shallow ecumenism that easily leads to indifferentism and to relativizing of doctrine. And the Pope condemns specific liberal Protestant doctrines that many ecumenists held to. But as the ecumenical movement itself grew and matured, the church’s response to it softened. And this had already begun prior to Vatican II. In 1949, for example, the Holy Office described the ecumenical movement’s longing for unity as the consequence of the common prayers of the faithful through the grace of the Holy Spirit. And it relaxed some of the prohibitions on ecumenical collaborations between Catholics and non-Catholics.
It was even permitted, for example, to pray the Lord’s prayer or some prayer approved by the Catholic church at the beginning or ending of these meetings. Normally that was a line we didn’t cross, but here they recognized this can be done safely without fear of indifferentism. Ultimately of ecumenical efforts, the holy office said all, especially priests and religious, should be exhorted and warmly encouraged to be zealous by their prayers and sacrifices to ripen and promote this work. So again, the U-turn wasn’t quite as abrupt as you might imagine, but there is certainly a shift in large ways and in small ways. We see the magisterium already even prior to Vatican II starting to take a warmer stance towards the ecumenical movement and certainly Vatican II continues that trajectory. Now we still need to avoid errors like relativizing dogma or falling into the trap of indifferentism, but it sure Church has, I think, properly recognized that there is an appropriate role for ecumenical dialogue in promoting the unity of the church.
Now, one of my favorite quotations from Blaise Pascal is that when we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. So if you want to correct Protestants and Orthodox, what we do well to first recognize what perspective they’re looking at things, to affirm what it is that they’re getting right, and then to show the side on which their beliefs are false or incomplete. Now, is that always well done? Of course not. But the doctrine and the theory are sound even when the execution falters. Okay. So now I want to turn to the third and final of the SSPX’s doctrinal disagreements. And this is the one that I think they make the strongest case for.
It’s the doctrine of religious freedom. Because at a surface level, there certainly appears to be a contradiction between what Pope said throughout the 19th and the early 20th century and what the second Vatican Council and every subsequent Pope has had to say. For example, Pope Gregory XVI wrote an entire encyclical against liberalism and religious indifferentism, Morari Vos, in which he denounces as absurd, the idea that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. Gregory warned that this idea spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs since when all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. And Pope Pius the 9th similarly warned in his 1864 encyclical Quanticora against those who dared to teach that the best form of society is one in which the state made no distinction between true religion, false religions, or who contradicted scripture, the magisterium and the church fathers by teaching that the ideal civil society is one in which no duty is recognized as attached to the civil power of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.
Now alongside Quantacora, Pius also released his famous syllabus of errors. And in the syllabus of errors, one of the errors condemned is the idea that every may free to embrace and profess that religion, which guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true. Now, I want you to compare that language with the language of the Vatican II document, Dignitatus Imane, which teaches that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power in such ways that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others within due limits. At first glance, that looks like just a blatant contradiction. That appears to be the very kind of teaching that Gregory XVI and Pius 9th condemned.
And if we interpret phrases like religious freedom to mean the way we use them in a secular context, then I think there really does seem to be a contradiction. But is that what the fathers of Vatican II actually meant? Because remember, the mere fact that two things sound contradictory doesn’t mean that they are contradictory because the very fact that two things might sound the same doesn’t mean they are the same. As I pointed out last week, third century bishops condemned Paul of Samosada’s doctrine of Christ being Homouseus with the Father. And then the bishops in the fourth century teach that Christ is Homouseus with the Father. That looks like a blatant contradiction, but it’s not a real contradiction because Paul had meant something different by the term than the Nyacin bishops did later. So even though critics accused them of contradiction and of the later council of contradicting the earlier teaching, the reality is that they’re just using the same word to describe two things, a true thing and a false thing.
So similarly, how do we distinguish the true version of religious liberty taught by Vatican II from the illegitimate version of religious liberty or freedom of conscience condemned by 19th century popes? Well, as Professor Michael Dunigan points out, the so – called right that the 19th century popes had condemned was this false vision of religious liberty really proposed by enlightenment thinkers. And it was this idea of religious liberty as a positive right to error and a right that had no real limitations beyond perhaps public peace. And it was rooted in true indifferentism. The idea that one religion was as true and as good as another, or at least that the truth of religion was too difficult to ascertain.
CLIP:
To really understand what the Popes are kind of rejecting in the 19th century, you need to look at the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which came out in 1789 the same year as the Revolution itself. And the key point there was that when they talked about rights and the right to conscience or right to worship, their idea of those rights was as a positive authorization that you had a positive right to worship or believe or pretty much say anything that you wish to say or believe, et cetera.
Joe:
Gregory XVI is actually explicit that the form of religious liberty that he’s condemning is one which arises from that shameful font of indifferentism. And so the Popes rightly reject this false right to religious freedom. And to their credit, the SSPX I think will acknowledge that what Vatican II affirms is not this indifferentist version of religious freedom that Gregory and Pius condemned. Because what Vatican II affirms is something more nuanced. It’s quite different. First, it’s actually not a positive right at all. Instead, it is an immunity from coercion. And second, it’s an immunity that is limited not only by public peace, but also by the good of society.
CLIP:
The right to religious liberty is a right to immunity. It’s a right not to be interfered with for the most part, again, within two limits.
Joe:
We see these two distinctions in Dignitanas Himanei itself. The Declaration rejects indifferentism. It reaffirms the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ. Instead, what it calls religious freedom is specifically immunity from coercion in civil society. Now the distinction here between positive rights and immunities or sometimes called negative rights is a critical one. In American law, for example, you have illegal immunity from unreasonable searches and seizures.That’s a very different thing from saying that you have a positive right to carry drugs or illegal weapons or something. Even if some people will misuse their legal immunity in just that way, they don’t actually have a positive right to it. There’s an important distinction there. I hope it’s clear. Similarly, the catechism is very clear that the church and parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer baptism shortly after birth.
You have no positive right to refuse to baptize your baby. You’re doing an injustice to your child, but you do have a negative right. We can’t force you to get your baby baptized. You have an immunity from coercion in this area. St. Thomas Aquinas actually taught this explicitly, that it’d be immoral for the state to baptize, for example, Jewish children against the will of their parents, arguing that to do so would be a danger to the faith and against natural justice. And he points out that even when the church had powerful princes on her side, it was never Christian practice to forcibly baptize. Well, use that as kind of a model for understanding this idea of religious liberty. Paragraph 2108 of the catechism is clear. The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error nor a supposed right to error.
Error has no rights. Religious liberty instead is a negative right. It is an immunity within just limits from external constraints in religious matters by political authorities. And those just limits, as I said, are more limited than in the false enlightenment version of religious liberty. Dignitanus Humane repeatedly stresses that this is a right within due limits, but the boundary there is not simply public order as the enlightenment thinkers though in public order in a kind of secular sense, but the higher standard of the objective moral order recognizing the state has a legitimate role as a proper guardian of public morality. And as the catechism points out, those due limits have to be determined in a particular social situation by the virtue of political prudence with a view toward the common good. So this right, the Vatican II right, is formulated specifically as a limitation upon the coercive power of the state.
Now here there’s been a lively debate between thinkers like Thomas Pink on one side, Michael Dunigan on the other. Pink argues that when earlier popes called for the state to crack down on heresy and false religion, the state was acting on the church’s behalf. Whereas Vatican II recognizes that the state does not have this coercive authority in its own right.
CLIP:
The 19th century popes must have envisaged the state as acting on an authority other than its own. There must be another authority, the church that can coerce religiously. And the 19th century popes must have been calling on the state to coerce religiously, not on its own authority, but as an agent of and in the service of the church. While by contrast, in 1965, Dignitarti Sumane must be adressing the state in a new context as acting no longer as an agent of the church, but on its own native authority an authority that does not extend to the direction of religion.
Joe:
Now that’s an intriguing hypothesis, although one that I have to say other scholars have pushed back against forcefully. But whether pink is right or not, it is certainly true that Dignitaris Humane is explicitly limited to an immunity against the coercive authority of the state or of society, the political authorities, and that the church retains its own proper coercive authority. Pope Benedict XVI reminded us of this in 2010 when he said that the church too must use the shepherd’s rod. The rod with which he protects the faith against those who falsify it against currents which lead the flock astray. The use of the rod can actually be a service of love. So I think it’s actually fair to say there are several plausible ways of harmonizing dignitatus humane with 19th century people teaching, even though they might look contradictory at the outset. I like the way that John DeRosa of the Classical Theism Podcast puts it.
CLIP:
But I also don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing to have more than one solution. Just like certain Bible difficulties we might be able to get to a set of options that okay, maybe this is the solution, maybe that, maybe we have two or three different options on the table. Maybe we’re not sure 100% which one is correct.
Joe:
If you’ve ever dealt with alleged Bible difficulties, I think you’ll know what John means. Sometimes there’s a clear answer as to how to make sense of two seemingly contradictory passages. Other times there are several possible solutions. Even if you’re not sure which one is correct 100%, it can be enough to show, well, there are several plausible harmonizations so it doesn’t seem like an obvious contradiction. Well, similarly here, while there are plenty of examples of people promoting the false version of religious freedom and the name of the council, when you look at the actual right to religious liberty described in Dignitas Imane and in the catechism, it’s significantly different than the false doctrines that are condemned in things like the syllabus of errors. Now, I’m admittedly, I’m only scratching the surface of this topic or really any of the three that we’ve talked about here. If you want to go much deeper on the alleged contradiction here, I recommend Thomas Pink’s debate with Father Martin Ronheimer as well as John DeRose’s two interviews with Michael Dunnigan.
I’m going to link to all three of those in the description below. And I know that Larry Chap is in the middle of working on his own essay form looking at harmonization there. So I’ll link to those as well. Finally, special thanks to Father Inan Palco of the SSPX. He reviewed the sections on religious liberty and collegiality, speaking of which, if you want to better understand the theological case for the papacy and why it is we believe that there is one Pope who has primacy within the church, I encourage you to check out this video right here. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.