Tradcast Express.
Entitled, Can the Pope Do No Wrong?
And of course, with that kind of a title, you already know where this is going.
After first mischaracterizing ultramontanism as a kind of the Pope is always infallible position,
he writes, quote,
Sedevacantism is the shadow side of ultramontanism.
Like ultramontanes, Sedevacantists refuse to admit that the Pope can do serious wrong.
They differ merely in the conclusions to which
the Seremonians are referring.
When presented with evidence that a Pope has acted badly, ultramontanes deny that what
the Pope did was wrong.
Sedevacantists, presented with the same evidence, deny that he who did wrong is the Pope, unquote.
You know, we don't mind if people think they have a strong argument against Sedevacantism,
then we can talk about it.
But this just shows that Schmitz hasn't spent any time actually researching the Sedevacantist
position.
Where has any Sedevacantist ever argued that if a man thought to be Pope acts badly, then
he is not the Pope?
Schmitz totally fails to make some fundamental and most necessary distinctions.
The phrase acting badly is totally vague.
It could mean being morally bad, being a public sinner, for example, or it could mean teaching
error or heresy, or it could mean making bad decisions for the church, for instance.
Which of these is Schmitz talking about?
He doesn't say, of course.
He continues, quote,
As history and scripture both show, Popes can and do make grave errors, though never
ones that controvert the church's own claims about papal infallibility.
One need only consider the career of the first Pope, St. Peter.
Christ himself rebuked Peter, get behind me, Satan.
And still Peter went on to deny him.
On a later occasion, St. Peter said,
Paul, who was subordinate to Peter, nonetheless opposed him to his face because he was clearly
in the wrong.
St. Thomas explained the fittingness of Paul's action, saying that Paul opposed Peter in
the exercise of authority, not in his authority of ruling, unquote.
Are you done yawning yet?
Goodness gracious.
The oldest arguments in the book.
Let's respond to them very briefly one more time.
First, St. Peter was not Pope.
When he denied Christ, as Vatican I teaches and as St. Robert Bellarmine taught.
Simon Peter didn't become Pope until after the resurrection when our Lord said to him,
feed my sheep, feed my lambs.
Second, when St. Paul rebuked St. Peter, he wasn't refusing submission to any teaching
of his.
He simply rebuked him for his action, his personal venial sin of imprudence, according
to St. Augustine.
What had happened?
St. Peter had scandalized the Gentile converts by withdrawing from their table and eating
with converts from Judaism separately, thereby giving them the impression through his behavior
that it was necessary for them to observe the law of Moses, like the Jews.
Now, the converts from Judaism were still keeping the dietary laws of Moses, which at
the time was permissible for them to do.
And that's all it was.
St. Peter made the wrong decision.
He made the wrong decision, and St. Paul rebuked him for it.
It has nothing to do with the papal magisterium or with refusing submission to the Pope.
The Pope sinned, and he was fraternally corrected by another apostle.
That's it.
Now, back to Schmitz.
Not surprisingly, he reduces the whole issue to infallibility, when the real issue is authority.
And this has to be repeated again and again.
The obligation of adhering to all papal teaching is not based on the inability to err, which
is not guaranteed except for dogmatic definitions, but is based on the divine commission to teach
the faithful.
The Pope, more than anyone else, exercises Christ's command to teach all nations.
And because of that, he has the right to be heard and followed in his teaching, and therefore
the faithful have an obligation.
The Pope has the power from God to bind your conscience by his teaching, infallible or
not.
This is taught again and again in the Church's magisterial documents before Vatican II.
You can find a large number of quotes on the Pope's authority and the faithful's duty
to submit at our website,
www.novosordowatch.org.
That's the-catholic-papacy.
So, if the Pope teaches something that isn't infallible and actually happens to be wrong,
let's just say, even just theoretically, does that mean we'd have to submit to it?
The short answer is, yes.
But, don't you worry.
Such an error, even though conceivable, is not only highly unlikely, it is also guaranteed
not to be any kind of error that could be a danger to your soul.
And we know that because otherwise God could not demand submission to all papal teaching
as a matter of eternal salvation.
It would be a contradiction.
So, no, the Pope could never teach heresy even in his non-infallible.
Magisterium, or any kind of error that would drive people to spiritual ruin.
And secondly, any possible error in a non-infallible papal document would not be the kind of error
that people like you and I would even be able to notice.
Because if it were, the Pope and his theologians would have noticed it long before it ever
got published.
So, although the Pope's non-infallible magisterium is not guaranteed to be always free, it is
always guaranteed to be safe to follow.
That, in a nutshell, is the Catholic teaching on the faithful's obligation to accept papal
teaching, even when it is not infallible.
And that's what you find in the Church's dogmatic theology books after Vatican I and
before Vatican II.
So, that's how things work in the Catholic Church.
But after six decades of the Vatican II sect, even well-meaning people who consider themselves
traditionalists have been so poisoned by the errors of the Novus Ordo religion and the
recognizing resistors, like the Society of St. Pius X, that they have no more faith in
the papacy.
They no longer really believe that the papacy is a divine institution that has all these
protections from God.
And how could they believe that, considering what apostates they accept as true popes?
See?
It does make a difference whom you accept as a true pope and whom you don't.
One final quote from Schmitz, quote,
Perhaps our current controversies are a kind of jittery withdrawal from the Church's
ultramontane highs.
Since the latter part of the 19th century, the Church has been blessed with an unusually
holy and brilliant series of popes.
In this period, the Church may have come to expect too much of the successors of St. Peter.
Expectations are now so high that not even Peter could meet them, unquote.
Oh, really?
Yeah, or maybe Schmitz is simply clueless.
You know, God Almighty has known very well from all eternity about the frailty of fallen
man, and he fortified the papacy against that so that regardless of man's weakness, the
pope would still be the rock against which the gates of hell cannot proceed.
On February 20th, 1949, Pope Pius XII said, in an address to the people of Rome, quote,
The pope has the divine promises.
Even in his human weaknesses, he is invincible and unshakable.
He is the messenger of truth and justice, the principle of the unity of the Church.
His voice denounces errors, idolatries, superstitions.
He condemns iniquities.
He makes charity and virtue loved, unquote.
And the name of that address by Pope Pius XII is Ancora Una Volta.
See, the Catholic Church truly is the Ark of Salvation.
That's not just some phrase, some slogan.
It is a reality.
You can safely throw yourself into the arms of Holy Mother Church.
And be nourished by her teaching without any fear of being led astray.
But of course, you cannot do that with the Vatican II Church, can you?
And so because people don't want to reject the Novus Ordo papal claimants as charlatans,
they would rather tinker with the Catholic doctrines and dogmas on the papacy.
What absurdity.
What dangerous folly to sacrifice Catholicism so you can have Bergoglio.
You know, a lot of bad ideas and flawed reasoning could be prevented
if people who blog about Catholic theology actually thought about
what they're saying before they publish it to the whole world.
Case in point, the blog Catholic Monitor, with a post of November 15th entitled
American Spectator Editor Neumeier and Scholar T. Marshall
call for Catholic cardinals to judge if Francis is manifest heretic
who has self-vacated the papacy.
Here's what the blogger Fred Martinez writes in that post.
Quote,
The contributing editor of the American Spectator, George Neumeier,
who is a best-selling author and former editor of the Catholic World Report,
and Thomas scholar Dr. Taylor Marshall called on the non-heretical Catholic cardinals
to convene in order to judge if Francis is a manifest heretic,
which could mean he self-vacated the chair of St. Francis.
Now, I don't know if that is an accurate summary of what Marshall and Neumeier
actually said in that video, but let's just take the claim at face value.
So, the non-heretical cardinals should get together and determine
if Francis is a manifest heretic, and if he is, well, then he is no longer pope,
and they declare that.
Now, I know this sounds great, right?
We mere laymen cannot judge this, so it's going to need to be the cardinals.
They can determine that.
And yet, this is all wrong.
Not to be quoting Greta Thunberg here.
How dare you?
They probably got this from John Salza, because I think that's his position.
So, what's wrong with this?
Well, first, it makes no sense to say that they need someone to determine
if Francis is a manifest heretic.
If he's a manifest heretic, then this doesn't need to be determined by any authority,
because that's what manifests.
It means it's open, it's evident, it's undeniable, it's obvious.
Now, I have yet to come across a Catholic theology book in which
some authority was needed to determine that something is manifest.
It just makes no sense.
If it's manifest, it doesn't need to be determined.
Another thing that doesn't make sense is the implicit idea that Francis doesn't become
a manifest heretic until some select cardinals agree he is one.
Well, if he is one, then he's a manifest heretic.
If he is one, then he is one before their judgment, which then merely recognizes what
is already the case.
But if he isn't one before their judgment, then there's nothing for them to judge.
They can't judge something to be the case that isn't.
It would be a false judgment.
The next thing that doesn't make any sense is the idea that their judgment would be binding
on the whole church.
I mean, these people, you know, Taylor Marshall and all the other recognizing resistors, these
people resist one thing.
They can suppose that papal judgment after another, including even a purported ecumenical
council.
So why should all of a sudden the judgment of a select group of cardinals be authoritative?
Why should it be binding?
Why?
Because they agree with the judgment?
Well, then they're really just going by their own judgment and not by that of what they
call the proper authority.
Lastly, and this is really hilarious.
What doesn't make sense?
This is the demand that this judgment against Francis be rendered by non-heretical cardinals.
Now, pardon me for asking, but how are they going to determine which cardinal is a heretic
so that those that aren't heretics can then determine if Francis is one?
Are they going to use their own non-authoritative and private judgment for that?
Or will they argue that it's manifest?
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