Yes, very interesting to contemplate what the history of the Catholic Church would have been like if 24 hour news and social media had been around 1000 years ago. I have to say that the dogma of papal infallibility is a joke- the Pope is infallible, and if he teaches heresy then he’s not the Pope? What good is that? Theologians can’t even agree about which teachings are infallible!
I had this problem exposed when I commented on 1Peter5 about how at least 4 post-VAT2 Popes seem to have hopelessly compromised the 19th century papal teaching on religious freedom. An indignant reader responded by declaring that these 4 recent Popes were heretics. So what is Papal teaching worth?
They were smart enough to realize the sheer amount of damage this teaching could and has caused. The west has suffered from nothing but constant divisions since the late 10th and early 11th century when the doctrines around the papacy started to solidify into what we see today.
True, though I can understand why they structured their churches the way they did. The east and the west seemed to take totally divergent paths as time went on. In truth I think both churches need each other. The east has preserved the faith better, but it lacks a visible point of unity. The each have something to offer the other. Just my opinion anyway, for what little that's worth.
We are all assuming here that things will go forward hence in more or less the same direction they have gone lately (which means, in our lifetimes so far). More and more media, more and more connectivity, more and more people.
This idea is almost certainly not correct. We are already running out of food. The weather is changing, and many of the changes are not friendly to human life. An over-crowded world is more vulnerable to plagues, as we have learned lately, and there are possible diseases, plenty of them, which will make Covid look tame, not to mention the ones which have not yet developed. We got lucky this time, but it would be foolish to assume that we will always be so lucky.
The advent of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse is looking more and more like a horse race: they're all coming, and which one reaches us first is uncertain, but these seem to be pretty fast horses. Papal misdeeds may very soon be the least of our worries.
Our only possible shelter is in the Triune God. That is where we should put our hope and our attention.
Yes! I was thinking the same thing. Only I would add we have gone past the peak of cheap-to-extract oil and, given the economy always depends on energy resources, we are in a de-growth environment. Which is great, in the sense that it'll be impossible to add much more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Not great if you like long supply chains and a global economy.
Have you ever read the work of Neil Postman? He wrote about the information explosion years ago when it was really only television and video games and the internet was in its infancy. He died before thing go really crazy but his thesis holds true. “Amusing Ourselves To Death “ is one of his later titles but they are all excellent and deal with how we learn and how our minds work, the move from a pre literate to a literate civilization and what that entails, how we came to memorize less but synthesize more as reading involves more global mental skills than listening or looking at pictures. (this was always one of the strengths of the TLM, reading along in the missal was likely to make a greater impression than letting the same words in the vernacular wash over you each week, I’ve never understood all the arguments against Latin for this reason. I have two children with learning disabilities, one severe, and they could stay on the right page from the time they learned to read.)
Postman goes into detail about how the modern information glut shortens attention spans, makes it impossible for people to actually understand things on a rational level, turns everything into an emotional appeal which can be accomplished with pictures in seconds rather than the 20 minutes or more it would take to read and evaluate even a simple argument.
His most memorable point is that people have never before been exposed to so much information which is irrelevant to their lives. The printing press ushered in an information and literacy explosion but people still read those things which were important to them, local news, better farming techniques, textbooks for their field of study, etc.. Now everyone is subject to a barrage of opinions masquerading as facts, most of them from unqualified quarters, on subjects which shouldn’t really matter to most of us, about things we can neither use nor have an effect on. People seem to have largely lost the ability to understand anything that requires critical thinking skills.
We are all part of an unprecedented psychological experiment which can only end badly.
Thanks for reminding people of Postman's very perceptive insights in the early days of the media onslaught. Another valuable book, from the mid 1950s, is Richard Hoggart's "The uses of literacy". As an English professor, Hoggart was mainly interested in the traditional printed word. But he made a very on-target observation about how modern communications encourage citizens to live in a perpetual present, with no time to reflect on the past or think seriously about the future. The ultimate example is the media coverage of COVID, with non-stop bombardment of a passive audience with ever changing and isolated factoids, and hardly any follow up of previously reported "facts" or forecasts.
And I don't think most people are aware of just how rapidly our technology is advancing at this point. If you want an interesting data point, go look at the videos from a company named 'Boston Dynamics'. They are a robotics company, been in business some twenty years. Watch the last 5 - 7 years of videos and see the progression of robotics technology. Their most recent bots make the terminator robots from the movie look dumpy by comparison. And now that they are starting to couple some of the new AI tech with these bots, it's really only a matter of time before they end up on some battlefield somewhere. And no one is even bothering to talk about whether or not we SHOULD put terminator robots on the battlefield.
And that's just one field of tech. The list is long at this point of potentially world ending technologies. And again, no one is really even bothering to talk about whether we should anymore.
The things we don’t bother to talk about would fill an encyclopedia.
Where do people think electricity comes from? Is it carbon neutral? We still burn coal here at the power plants….
How far will electric cars go on a charge and how will people go on trips? Waiting hours for a charge at rest stops?
If manmade global warming is a fact, is there actually anything we can do to affect it, and by how much compared to crippling world wide economies?
When only poor people are stuck driving gasoline powered cars and gas is no longer a commodity the same way and costs $8 a gallon, what will that do to the poor? How much of our brave new world makes life harder for the poor?
When a child given hormone treatments that destroy her or his fertility before they are 18 and they change their mind when their brain matures will they be able to sue their doctors?
I will stop, there are thousands more.
The number of things we have rushed into in this society without asking whether it’s a good or deadly idea are legion.
As a friend of mine is fond of saying, all of human history can be summarized in two questions: first, what could it hurt,and second, how were we supposed to know?
Your story and reflections of Carlos Acutis reminds me of a hymn I learned and loved to sing when I was a child, especially the 3rd verse. The hymn was written in 1929 by the talented hymnodist Lesbia Scott, for her three children:
I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green:
they were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.
They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and God’s love made them strong;
and they followed the right, for Jesus’ sake,
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast:
and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.
They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still;
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
I like a lot of the points here, especially about the influence of media and constant availability of information.
You write:
"The Pian vision of the Church is essentially one trapped in amber, a fossil of praxis and belief that moves forward physically in time, but with total unblemished integrity and continuity. It not only never fundamentally changes — it is impossible for it to do so."
You say the trads are the one who carry forward the vision of the unblemished and pure Church. But I think this is not quite right, or not quite fair. It's the trads, generally, who are willing to admit that Church history wasn't all glorious. I once published a piece at OnePeterFive for which I got in trouble with various people: https://onepeterfive.com/lessons-church-history-papal-lapses/. It even includes the famous painting of the Cadaver Synod!
It's more likely to be the so-called "conservatives" who are desperately trying to keep up the facade. They want to deny that any pope has ever even brushed against heresy. The trads are too gritty and too engaged in the actual messiness of Church history (which they had to study in order to defend their own seemingly "dissenting" stance) to hold this facile view, and I believe our faith is stronger for being more rough-and-tumble. I get the sense with some conservative apologists that if they admitted the tiniest little crack in their platonic picture of the papacy, the whole dam of unbelief would break.
But I also think - as I said last weekend in Denver - that there is good historical evidence for even morally bad popes as having had the Catholic sense not to touch dogma or morals. Alexander VI Borgia was a wicked man, but he never changed a thing about how popes celebrated Mass or what doctrine was preached. In fact, his documents are spectacularly clean.
Just a thought... I might post this over at your Substack.
I think you know I find all the arguments trying to keep in tact the idea that Rome and the papacy are free from serious error pretty anemic. The mental gymnastics grow increasingly complex. But I'm talking here more about a culture problem, where the fantasy that these things remain unchanged acts as a means of blinding people to the fact that they ARE changing them. Sedes are honest enough to admit that; they simply reach an absurd conclusion as their means of dealing with it. A papacy that's so important and so pure that it now only exists in some idealized, platonic form.
So while yes, trads admit to blemishes in the past, they do so in service of the narrative that those blemishes are the exception that proves the rule: that even as bad as it got, the papacy in all its authority, supremacy, and infallibility remained untouched.
But I really don't believe that. If Francis can do what he is doing, if he can be an open heretic and contradict scripture and tradition, so could any pope who came before him. Thus it becomes wildly implausible to believe that he is somehow unique, when men of such sordid character have occupied the papacy across the span of history.
The list of popes is very interesting. There’s periods of intrigue, but about sordid character, it tells us this <130-John XII (16 Dec., 955- 14 May, 964). He was Octavian, son of Alberic II, and was made Pope at 18 by the influence of his family. ***He is generally said to have been a man of scandalous morals-one of the few Popes of whom this can be said.*** … The emperor later claimed to 'depose' the Pope, and drove him from his throne. He regained it, but was murdered.> We don’t have to speculate about the popes of the past. It isn’t televised but it is well documented.
Francis is public with his heresies. It’s what makes it dangerous to souls. It’s equally useless to speculate about the heresies of past popes as it is to consecrate them all for doctrinal perfection. We couldn’t have a clue. They all kept the Faith as required. This is a list I’ll look through of all the popes. It’s new to me. https://ecatholic2000.com/cts/untitled-595.shtml
This is where I am too, tired of the “mental gymnastics”. I understand that it isn’t that way for everyone, that there is a coherent argument whereby the Pope can be a heretic without destroying the Church’s claim to holiness but I don’t think intellectual arguments are enough, even very good ones. Jesus didn’t come just to save the clever. The open scandal of a very pro abortion president who officiated at a gay wedding receiving communion and openly gay, predatory clergy being protected, praised, and promoted does literally destroy core moral teachings in the eyes of average people. The former strikes at the very heart of what the Blessed Sacrament is, and the required disposition to receive Jesus’s Body and Blood, the latter makes the church the most hypocritical institution on earth. We are not talking about everyday human failings here, but scandal on a spectacular level, destroying people’s willingness to even be identified as Catholics. Those who remain in many cases have their erroneous belief that sin and virtue are fluid and “evolving” concepts confirmed from the highest levels. Impossible to equate this mess with a perfect and therefore unchanging God.
<It's more likely to be the so-called "conservatives" who are desperately trying to keep up the facade.> Ahhhhh. THESE guys! The Church Militant crowd, the Opus Dei boys, etc. Steve you seem like a lone wolf. Can you clue me to these Conservatives? Who are they?
Is the pope's job to be a saint, to be a great moral example, a preacher?
For himself, yes, he should be a saint. Every Christian should strive to be a saint or else he won't get to heaven.
It's nice when the pope is a great moral example or a superb preacher, but that's not strictly speaking his job.
His job is to be a ruler, teacher, and sanctifier. He rules through governance, he teaches the doctrine that has been handed on, and he sanctifies through the sacraments and liturgical rites. These things depend not on his personal virtues but on Christ's promises. He is, in that sense, just a representative, just a conduit.
Explain to me how what I'm saying is incompatible with the understanding the Catholic Church has always had of the papacy. If you reject it, that's your business, but don't descend to abusing me for it.
If you're familiar with my work, you will know that I don't believe the pope is an absolute monarch, and that I accept the limited definition of the First Vatican Council. But I'm not going to debate for a hundred comments with someone who does not accept the papacy. That's not the reason I visit Steve's Substack page.
"You’ll come around. That is, If you have a a stitch within you which has any knowledge and comprehension of anything."
I think if Steve is looking for "epistemic humility," he won't find it among such as you. I have found that skeptics are the most flamboyant dogmaticians.
I think the Church has for the longest time been stuck in a Platonist or semi-Platonist view of the world, which views history as a mere accident because the "real world" is up there in the immovable forms with spirits uncontaminated by matter. The modern world is the birth of history as an idea, a kind of philosophical and religious vindication of history and by extension the world of history. What's so unacceptable to our contemporaries is the idea that this world is a mere testing ground for our spirits that will be thrown in to the garbage bin when God decides we've all been tested enough; that this world and its history has no intrinsic meaning of its own. People today want a real salvation of this world; a real transformation of humanity from WITHIN history, not just in some hoped for beyond. They don't just want to sit back resignedly and wait for the apocalypse to unfurl and for a warlike Christ to burn it all up and start over again, like it was all for nothing. I think Traditionalism's clinging to the old Platonic view of an ephemeral world without intrinsic meaning, one that we're just waiting to be discarded, is one of its greatest detractions. It's also incoherent as Traditionalists still wish to seize the reins of history and take back control of the world in medieval fashion, a world which they think is intrinsically worthless anyway, and only has the extrinsic purpose of testing our faith before it all gets chucked in the fire.
Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you. — Ercole Cardinal Consalvi to Napolean (who said, if he wanted, he could destroy the Catholic Church.)
Marshall McLuhan is an interesting philosopher of the media age, and I believe a Catholic.
St Therese is a great soul who lived a simple life. She’s like a close friend and very relatable.
The SSPX is the absolute repository of the Catholic faith, safeguarded in this modernist time with all its incidental madness. Every act of the Masons in the Vatican as of now will push Catholics over the edge of skepticism of the SSPX and into its well-preserved Catholicism.
When dealing with the culture or the corruption in the Church, don’t look too long into the abyss.
I dream of the day when I can log off my computer for the last time and go live a normal life. But I dream.
Yes, very interesting to contemplate what the history of the Catholic Church would have been like if 24 hour news and social media had been around 1000 years ago. I have to say that the dogma of papal infallibility is a joke- the Pope is infallible, and if he teaches heresy then he’s not the Pope? What good is that? Theologians can’t even agree about which teachings are infallible!
The Orthodox were smart to avoid this dogma.
I had this problem exposed when I commented on 1Peter5 about how at least 4 post-VAT2 Popes seem to have hopelessly compromised the 19th century papal teaching on religious freedom. An indignant reader responded by declaring that these 4 recent Popes were heretics. So what is Papal teaching worth?
They were smart enough to realize the sheer amount of damage this teaching could and has caused. The west has suffered from nothing but constant divisions since the late 10th and early 11th century when the doctrines around the papacy started to solidify into what we see today.
True, though I can understand why they structured their churches the way they did. The east and the west seemed to take totally divergent paths as time went on. In truth I think both churches need each other. The east has preserved the faith better, but it lacks a visible point of unity. The each have something to offer the other. Just my opinion anyway, for what little that's worth.
Great analysis and insight, Steve, as always!
We are all assuming here that things will go forward hence in more or less the same direction they have gone lately (which means, in our lifetimes so far). More and more media, more and more connectivity, more and more people.
This idea is almost certainly not correct. We are already running out of food. The weather is changing, and many of the changes are not friendly to human life. An over-crowded world is more vulnerable to plagues, as we have learned lately, and there are possible diseases, plenty of them, which will make Covid look tame, not to mention the ones which have not yet developed. We got lucky this time, but it would be foolish to assume that we will always be so lucky.
The advent of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse is looking more and more like a horse race: they're all coming, and which one reaches us first is uncertain, but these seem to be pretty fast horses. Papal misdeeds may very soon be the least of our worries.
Our only possible shelter is in the Triune God. That is where we should put our hope and our attention.
Yes! I was thinking the same thing. Only I would add we have gone past the peak of cheap-to-extract oil and, given the economy always depends on energy resources, we are in a de-growth environment. Which is great, in the sense that it'll be impossible to add much more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Not great if you like long supply chains and a global economy.
Have you ever read the work of Neil Postman? He wrote about the information explosion years ago when it was really only television and video games and the internet was in its infancy. He died before thing go really crazy but his thesis holds true. “Amusing Ourselves To Death “ is one of his later titles but they are all excellent and deal with how we learn and how our minds work, the move from a pre literate to a literate civilization and what that entails, how we came to memorize less but synthesize more as reading involves more global mental skills than listening or looking at pictures. (this was always one of the strengths of the TLM, reading along in the missal was likely to make a greater impression than letting the same words in the vernacular wash over you each week, I’ve never understood all the arguments against Latin for this reason. I have two children with learning disabilities, one severe, and they could stay on the right page from the time they learned to read.)
Postman goes into detail about how the modern information glut shortens attention spans, makes it impossible for people to actually understand things on a rational level, turns everything into an emotional appeal which can be accomplished with pictures in seconds rather than the 20 minutes or more it would take to read and evaluate even a simple argument.
His most memorable point is that people have never before been exposed to so much information which is irrelevant to their lives. The printing press ushered in an information and literacy explosion but people still read those things which were important to them, local news, better farming techniques, textbooks for their field of study, etc.. Now everyone is subject to a barrage of opinions masquerading as facts, most of them from unqualified quarters, on subjects which shouldn’t really matter to most of us, about things we can neither use nor have an effect on. People seem to have largely lost the ability to understand anything that requires critical thinking skills.
We are all part of an unprecedented psychological experiment which can only end badly.
Thanks for reminding people of Postman's very perceptive insights in the early days of the media onslaught. Another valuable book, from the mid 1950s, is Richard Hoggart's "The uses of literacy". As an English professor, Hoggart was mainly interested in the traditional printed word. But he made a very on-target observation about how modern communications encourage citizens to live in a perpetual present, with no time to reflect on the past or think seriously about the future. The ultimate example is the media coverage of COVID, with non-stop bombardment of a passive audience with ever changing and isolated factoids, and hardly any follow up of previously reported "facts" or forecasts.
And I don't think most people are aware of just how rapidly our technology is advancing at this point. If you want an interesting data point, go look at the videos from a company named 'Boston Dynamics'. They are a robotics company, been in business some twenty years. Watch the last 5 - 7 years of videos and see the progression of robotics technology. Their most recent bots make the terminator robots from the movie look dumpy by comparison. And now that they are starting to couple some of the new AI tech with these bots, it's really only a matter of time before they end up on some battlefield somewhere. And no one is even bothering to talk about whether or not we SHOULD put terminator robots on the battlefield.
And that's just one field of tech. The list is long at this point of potentially world ending technologies. And again, no one is really even bothering to talk about whether we should anymore.
The things we don’t bother to talk about would fill an encyclopedia.
Where do people think electricity comes from? Is it carbon neutral? We still burn coal here at the power plants….
How far will electric cars go on a charge and how will people go on trips? Waiting hours for a charge at rest stops?
If manmade global warming is a fact, is there actually anything we can do to affect it, and by how much compared to crippling world wide economies?
When only poor people are stuck driving gasoline powered cars and gas is no longer a commodity the same way and costs $8 a gallon, what will that do to the poor? How much of our brave new world makes life harder for the poor?
When a child given hormone treatments that destroy her or his fertility before they are 18 and they change their mind when their brain matures will they be able to sue their doctors?
I will stop, there are thousands more.
The number of things we have rushed into in this society without asking whether it’s a good or deadly idea are legion.
As a friend of mine is fond of saying, all of human history can be summarized in two questions: first, what could it hurt,and second, how were we supposed to know?
Your story and reflections of Carlos Acutis reminds me of a hymn I learned and loved to sing when I was a child, especially the 3rd verse. The hymn was written in 1929 by the talented hymnodist Lesbia Scott, for her three children:
I sing a song of the saints of God,
patient and brave and true,
who toiled and fought and lived and died
for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
and one was a shepherdess on the green:
they were all of them saints of God, and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.
They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
and God’s love made them strong;
and they followed the right, for Jesus’ sake,
the whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
and one was slain by a fierce wild beast:
and there’s not any reason, no, not the least,
why I shouldn’t be one too.
They lived not only in ages past;
there are hundreds of thousands still;
the world is bright with the joyous saints
who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;
for the saints of God are just folk like me,
and I mean to be one too.
Lovely!
I read every day’s Saint in Butler’s Lives. It’s a great daily practice.
I like a lot of the points here, especially about the influence of media and constant availability of information.
You write:
"The Pian vision of the Church is essentially one trapped in amber, a fossil of praxis and belief that moves forward physically in time, but with total unblemished integrity and continuity. It not only never fundamentally changes — it is impossible for it to do so."
You say the trads are the one who carry forward the vision of the unblemished and pure Church. But I think this is not quite right, or not quite fair. It's the trads, generally, who are willing to admit that Church history wasn't all glorious. I once published a piece at OnePeterFive for which I got in trouble with various people: https://onepeterfive.com/lessons-church-history-papal-lapses/. It even includes the famous painting of the Cadaver Synod!
It's more likely to be the so-called "conservatives" who are desperately trying to keep up the facade. They want to deny that any pope has ever even brushed against heresy. The trads are too gritty and too engaged in the actual messiness of Church history (which they had to study in order to defend their own seemingly "dissenting" stance) to hold this facile view, and I believe our faith is stronger for being more rough-and-tumble. I get the sense with some conservative apologists that if they admitted the tiniest little crack in their platonic picture of the papacy, the whole dam of unbelief would break.
But I also think - as I said last weekend in Denver - that there is good historical evidence for even morally bad popes as having had the Catholic sense not to touch dogma or morals. Alexander VI Borgia was a wicked man, but he never changed a thing about how popes celebrated Mass or what doctrine was preached. In fact, his documents are spectacularly clean.
Just a thought... I might post this over at your Substack.
Warm regards,
Peter
I think you know I find all the arguments trying to keep in tact the idea that Rome and the papacy are free from serious error pretty anemic. The mental gymnastics grow increasingly complex. But I'm talking here more about a culture problem, where the fantasy that these things remain unchanged acts as a means of blinding people to the fact that they ARE changing them. Sedes are honest enough to admit that; they simply reach an absurd conclusion as their means of dealing with it. A papacy that's so important and so pure that it now only exists in some idealized, platonic form.
So while yes, trads admit to blemishes in the past, they do so in service of the narrative that those blemishes are the exception that proves the rule: that even as bad as it got, the papacy in all its authority, supremacy, and infallibility remained untouched.
But I really don't believe that. If Francis can do what he is doing, if he can be an open heretic and contradict scripture and tradition, so could any pope who came before him. Thus it becomes wildly implausible to believe that he is somehow unique, when men of such sordid character have occupied the papacy across the span of history.
The list of popes is very interesting. There’s periods of intrigue, but about sordid character, it tells us this <130-John XII (16 Dec., 955- 14 May, 964). He was Octavian, son of Alberic II, and was made Pope at 18 by the influence of his family. ***He is generally said to have been a man of scandalous morals-one of the few Popes of whom this can be said.*** … The emperor later claimed to 'depose' the Pope, and drove him from his throne. He regained it, but was murdered.> We don’t have to speculate about the popes of the past. It isn’t televised but it is well documented.
Francis is public with his heresies. It’s what makes it dangerous to souls. It’s equally useless to speculate about the heresies of past popes as it is to consecrate them all for doctrinal perfection. We couldn’t have a clue. They all kept the Faith as required. This is a list I’ll look through of all the popes. It’s new to me. https://ecatholic2000.com/cts/untitled-595.shtml
This is where I am too, tired of the “mental gymnastics”. I understand that it isn’t that way for everyone, that there is a coherent argument whereby the Pope can be a heretic without destroying the Church’s claim to holiness but I don’t think intellectual arguments are enough, even very good ones. Jesus didn’t come just to save the clever. The open scandal of a very pro abortion president who officiated at a gay wedding receiving communion and openly gay, predatory clergy being protected, praised, and promoted does literally destroy core moral teachings in the eyes of average people. The former strikes at the very heart of what the Blessed Sacrament is, and the required disposition to receive Jesus’s Body and Blood, the latter makes the church the most hypocritical institution on earth. We are not talking about everyday human failings here, but scandal on a spectacular level, destroying people’s willingness to even be identified as Catholics. Those who remain in many cases have their erroneous belief that sin and virtue are fluid and “evolving” concepts confirmed from the highest levels. Impossible to equate this mess with a perfect and therefore unchanging God.
<It's more likely to be the so-called "conservatives" who are desperately trying to keep up the facade.> Ahhhhh. THESE guys! The Church Militant crowd, the Opus Dei boys, etc. Steve you seem like a lone wolf. Can you clue me to these Conservatives? Who are they?
Is the pope's job to be a saint, to be a great moral example, a preacher?
For himself, yes, he should be a saint. Every Christian should strive to be a saint or else he won't get to heaven.
It's nice when the pope is a great moral example or a superb preacher, but that's not strictly speaking his job.
His job is to be a ruler, teacher, and sanctifier. He rules through governance, he teaches the doctrine that has been handed on, and he sanctifies through the sacraments and liturgical rites. These things depend not on his personal virtues but on Christ's promises. He is, in that sense, just a representative, just a conduit.
Explain to me how what I'm saying is incompatible with the understanding the Catholic Church has always had of the papacy. If you reject it, that's your business, but don't descend to abusing me for it.
If you're familiar with my work, you will know that I don't believe the pope is an absolute monarch, and that I accept the limited definition of the First Vatican Council. But I'm not going to debate for a hundred comments with someone who does not accept the papacy. That's not the reason I visit Steve's Substack page.
Here's my view in a nutshell:
https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-popes-boundenness-to-tradition-as.html
"You’ll come around. That is, If you have a a stitch within you which has any knowledge and comprehension of anything."
I think if Steve is looking for "epistemic humility," he won't find it among such as you. I have found that skeptics are the most flamboyant dogmaticians.
Language man, don’t be obscene.
I think the Church has for the longest time been stuck in a Platonist or semi-Platonist view of the world, which views history as a mere accident because the "real world" is up there in the immovable forms with spirits uncontaminated by matter. The modern world is the birth of history as an idea, a kind of philosophical and religious vindication of history and by extension the world of history. What's so unacceptable to our contemporaries is the idea that this world is a mere testing ground for our spirits that will be thrown in to the garbage bin when God decides we've all been tested enough; that this world and its history has no intrinsic meaning of its own. People today want a real salvation of this world; a real transformation of humanity from WITHIN history, not just in some hoped for beyond. They don't just want to sit back resignedly and wait for the apocalypse to unfurl and for a warlike Christ to burn it all up and start over again, like it was all for nothing. I think Traditionalism's clinging to the old Platonic view of an ephemeral world without intrinsic meaning, one that we're just waiting to be discarded, is one of its greatest detractions. It's also incoherent as Traditionalists still wish to seize the reins of history and take back control of the world in medieval fashion, a world which they think is intrinsically worthless anyway, and only has the extrinsic purpose of testing our faith before it all gets chucked in the fire.
https://youtu.be/BWNKp3jYyRo
Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you. — Ercole Cardinal Consalvi to Napolean (who said, if he wanted, he could destroy the Catholic Church.)
Marshall McLuhan is an interesting philosopher of the media age, and I believe a Catholic.
St Therese is a great soul who lived a simple life. She’s like a close friend and very relatable.
The SSPX is the absolute repository of the Catholic faith, safeguarded in this modernist time with all its incidental madness. Every act of the Masons in the Vatican as of now will push Catholics over the edge of skepticism of the SSPX and into its well-preserved Catholicism.
When dealing with the culture or the corruption in the Church, don’t look too long into the abyss.