After examining the principal manualists, canonists, and contemporary arguments, I have yet to see anyone identify the public, tradition-grounded rule the sedevacantist argument requires.
The missing rule would have to do more than describe a grave crisis or establish serious doctrinal disorder. It would have to authorize the reclassification of the ordinarily visible Roman hierarchy as non-Catholic, identify who is competent to make that judgment, determine what ecclesial body remains in its place, and explain how a private theological conclusion acquires binding force in the Church’s external order.
That is the burden. Without such a rule, the argument may express a theological judgment about the crisis, but it cannot nullify the visible Church’s public reception of a pope.
Dear Mr Moyer, thankyou for your essays! You adress the heart of the issue which has evolved as the open question to my thought process. And so it's the missing link for me to mearn about UPA.
Still the question that is becoming more alert with each sentence I read is: where is the limit? Could the Pope shoot down all SSOX members? Could he perform a sacrificial babykilling on St Peter's square? Could he invite Madonna into the vatican to perform a crucifixion?
I get the impression, there is no limit and I would very much appreciate an answer. Thankyou
Thank you for the thoughtful question. It is exactly the right limiting question, because if Universal Peaceful Acceptance meant that everything a universally accepted pope might later say or do must be Catholic, UPA would collapse into papal impeccability. It means nothing of the kind.
There may be no physical or psychological limit to the evil a pope could attempt, but there are strict limits to what he can accomplish morally, doctrinally, and authoritatively. He cannot make murder, idolatry, sacrilege, blasphemy, or any other intrinsically evil act lawful. If he ordered the killing of SSPX members, no one would be bound to obey. If he conducted a human sacrifice or sponsored a deliberately blasphemous spectacle in St. Peter’s Square, the papal office would not transform that atrocity into a legitimate exercise of authority. Catholics would have to refuse participation, condemn the evil, protect its victims, and seek whatever lawful remedies remained available.
Vatican I did not teach that every papal statement, decision, disciplinary measure, or personal act is infallible. It defined infallibility under specified conditions, when the pope acts as pastor and teacher of all Christians and definitively teaches a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church. It also taught that the Holy Spirit was not promised to Peter’s successors so that they might reveal new doctrine, but so that they might preserve and faithfully expound the apostolic deposit.
Catholic ecclesiology does not require anyone to call evil good. St. Paul publicly resisted St. Peter when Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentile Christians endangered the truth of the Gospel. St. Thomas Aquinas cited that episode to show that a subordinate may publicly correct a prelate when there is an imminent danger of scandal concerning the faith. Recognition of authority is not blind obedience, moral approval, or silence before scandal.
But once an act has been identified as evil, a second question arises: what precise ecclesiological consequence follows from it?
A monstrous crime or public sacrilege is not, as such, formal heresy, apostasy, or loss of office. It could, however, manifest heresy or apostasy if the act objectively and publicly expressed an obstinate denial of revealed truth or a total repudiation of the Christian faith. Whether that would entail loss of papal office is a further and disputed ecclesiological question requiring its own criteria concerning manifestation, pertinacity, recognition, and public ecclesial effect. I address that distinct issue in Essay 6, “Bellarmine and the Vacant See: Manifest Heresy, Ipso Facto Loss, and Why Later Loss Does Not Undo Universal Peaceful Acceptance.”
UPA answers only the antecedent question. It establishes that a man universally and peacefully received by the Church was truly pope at the time of that reception. It does not mean that he can never sin, govern disastrously, abuse his authority, speak imprudently, err outside protected conditions, or possibly become the subject of a later loss argument.
History confirms the importance of this distinction. Gnostic movements attacked the apostolic faith near the Church’s beginnings. During the Arian crisis, grave doctrinal confusion implicated numerous bishops, synods, political authorities, and large portions of the Christian world. During the Great Western Schism, Catholic nations, saints, bishops, and theologians adhered to rival papal claimants. The identity of the true pope became profoundly obscured.
Those crises were real, and indefectibility did not make their errors or betrayals harmless. Yet their severity did not establish that the Church had ceased to be the Church or that each believer could reconstruct her visible constitution according to his own threshold of scandal. The Petrine office endured because Christ’s promises attach to the constitution of the Church, not to the personal holiness, prudence, or good government of every officeholder.
What cannot be done is to move silently from “this act is gravely evil” to “therefore UPA never occurred, the pope was never pope, and the visible Church is not the Catholic Church.” A private person’s correct judgment that an act is evil does not by itself establish any of those conclusions. They require additional premises and a public, tradition-grounded rule. The gravity of the scandal cannot substitute for the missing rule.
Amen
Well put again man
Thank you very much.
Will the rule ever be supplied? Probably not.
I don’t think so either.
After examining the principal manualists, canonists, and contemporary arguments, I have yet to see anyone identify the public, tradition-grounded rule the sedevacantist argument requires.
The missing rule would have to do more than describe a grave crisis or establish serious doctrinal disorder. It would have to authorize the reclassification of the ordinarily visible Roman hierarchy as non-Catholic, identify who is competent to make that judgment, determine what ecclesial body remains in its place, and explain how a private theological conclusion acquires binding force in the Church’s external order.
That is the burden. Without such a rule, the argument may express a theological judgment about the crisis, but it cannot nullify the visible Church’s public reception of a pope.
Dear Mr Moyer, thankyou for your essays! You adress the heart of the issue which has evolved as the open question to my thought process. And so it's the missing link for me to mearn about UPA.
Still the question that is becoming more alert with each sentence I read is: where is the limit? Could the Pope shoot down all SSOX members? Could he perform a sacrificial babykilling on St Peter's square? Could he invite Madonna into the vatican to perform a crucifixion?
I get the impression, there is no limit and I would very much appreciate an answer. Thankyou
Thank you for the thoughtful question. It is exactly the right limiting question, because if Universal Peaceful Acceptance meant that everything a universally accepted pope might later say or do must be Catholic, UPA would collapse into papal impeccability. It means nothing of the kind.
There may be no physical or psychological limit to the evil a pope could attempt, but there are strict limits to what he can accomplish morally, doctrinally, and authoritatively. He cannot make murder, idolatry, sacrilege, blasphemy, or any other intrinsically evil act lawful. If he ordered the killing of SSPX members, no one would be bound to obey. If he conducted a human sacrifice or sponsored a deliberately blasphemous spectacle in St. Peter’s Square, the papal office would not transform that atrocity into a legitimate exercise of authority. Catholics would have to refuse participation, condemn the evil, protect its victims, and seek whatever lawful remedies remained available.
Vatican I did not teach that every papal statement, decision, disciplinary measure, or personal act is infallible. It defined infallibility under specified conditions, when the pope acts as pastor and teacher of all Christians and definitively teaches a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church. It also taught that the Holy Spirit was not promised to Peter’s successors so that they might reveal new doctrine, but so that they might preserve and faithfully expound the apostolic deposit.
Catholic ecclesiology does not require anyone to call evil good. St. Paul publicly resisted St. Peter when Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentile Christians endangered the truth of the Gospel. St. Thomas Aquinas cited that episode to show that a subordinate may publicly correct a prelate when there is an imminent danger of scandal concerning the faith. Recognition of authority is not blind obedience, moral approval, or silence before scandal.
But once an act has been identified as evil, a second question arises: what precise ecclesiological consequence follows from it?
A monstrous crime or public sacrilege is not, as such, formal heresy, apostasy, or loss of office. It could, however, manifest heresy or apostasy if the act objectively and publicly expressed an obstinate denial of revealed truth or a total repudiation of the Christian faith. Whether that would entail loss of papal office is a further and disputed ecclesiological question requiring its own criteria concerning manifestation, pertinacity, recognition, and public ecclesial effect. I address that distinct issue in Essay 6, “Bellarmine and the Vacant See: Manifest Heresy, Ipso Facto Loss, and Why Later Loss Does Not Undo Universal Peaceful Acceptance.”
UPA answers only the antecedent question. It establishes that a man universally and peacefully received by the Church was truly pope at the time of that reception. It does not mean that he can never sin, govern disastrously, abuse his authority, speak imprudently, err outside protected conditions, or possibly become the subject of a later loss argument.
History confirms the importance of this distinction. Gnostic movements attacked the apostolic faith near the Church’s beginnings. During the Arian crisis, grave doctrinal confusion implicated numerous bishops, synods, political authorities, and large portions of the Christian world. During the Great Western Schism, Catholic nations, saints, bishops, and theologians adhered to rival papal claimants. The identity of the true pope became profoundly obscured.
Those crises were real, and indefectibility did not make their errors or betrayals harmless. Yet their severity did not establish that the Church had ceased to be the Church or that each believer could reconstruct her visible constitution according to his own threshold of scandal. The Petrine office endured because Christ’s promises attach to the constitution of the Church, not to the personal holiness, prudence, or good government of every officeholder.
What cannot be done is to move silently from “this act is gravely evil” to “therefore UPA never occurred, the pope was never pope, and the visible Church is not the Catholic Church.” A private person’s correct judgment that an act is evil does not by itself establish any of those conclusions. They require additional premises and a public, tradition-grounded rule. The gravity of the scandal cannot substitute for the missing rule.
If only we had a time machine, and we could fix our mistakes from the beginning
Thanks for posting
You’re welcome.