Papal Authority's Abuse and the Diminution of Faith

The Church's claims are too consequential to get wrong

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There's nothing simple about the mental gymnastics required to square all the papal circles these days, but there's no lack of trying. Things get more and more contorted as orthodox theologians try to stuff reality into doctrinally-compatible boundaries.

At the heart of all of this is the question of authority. Authority as wielded by a man whose office is said to be infallible, but whose actions are often anything but. A man whose office is also said to hold absolute primacy, whose jurisdiction is supreme, but who is resisted and questioned routinely by the faithful as though he’s just another cringeworthy columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.

The sedevacantists — those strange, LARPy faux-Catholics who think there’s been no valid pope since Pius XII — make stronger, more historical arguments as regards the increasingly absurd “recognize and resist” position (namely, that it's unworkable with the traditional view of papal supremacy), but the conclusion they reach — a no true Scotsman fallacy that has eliminated the papacy de facto — is silly. After all, the papacy and its authority are so central to the functioning of the Catholic Church and its teaching office that it’s simply impossible to do without it for any significant length of time. And as Vatican I declared in its dogmatic constitution on the topic:

If then, any should deny that it is by the institution of Christ the Lord and by Divine right, that Blessed Peter should have a perpetual line of successors in the Primacy over the Universal Church, or that the Roman Pontiff' is the successor of Blessed Peter in this primacy; let him be anathema.

Perpetual lines of successors don’t have 70-year gaps with imposters filling in, fooling the entire world, with all the bishops and priests backing the hoax. That’s not how any of this works.

That said, I see how the sedes arrive where they do. The Church’s claims regarding the centrality & authority of the papacy — the same claims that ironically make sede arguments unworkable — make the papacy and its power and authority simply too vital to Catholic integrity to ignore when a particular pope becomes problematic. Similarly, they make impossible the idea that the office can fall into the hands of heretics & devils successively for generations.

In an attempt to deal with the apparent contradictions, I see theologians restrict dogmas like papal infallibility to conditions so rare that they’re impossible to falsify.

When someone says to you, “Well, Pastor Aeternus limits infallibility to ex cathedra statements only” and that “this has only been done twice in history” they’re playing a game. They know that there are other papal statements considered to be infallible — like papal bulls in the context of ecumenical councils, or apostolic letters like John Paul II’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (on the reservation of the priesthood to men alone), or even the declaration of canonizations of saints. Nevertheless, when the waters get choppy, the old, “Well, the pope is only infallible when he says something we already know is true within the context of a solemn pronouncement so rarely used that it’s almost non-existent” is used to fend off critics.

Yet they will happily remind you that since infallibility is a dogma, we are still burdened with the demand to accept, on pain of mortal sin, that this is necessary to believe for salvation. That to even doubt it obstinately is a “damnable sin.”

Why is something so limited (and arguably irrelevant) so vital to salvation?