Martin Luther burns a papal bull, and perhaps future traditional Catholics burning the edicts of the Amazon Synod?
By Davis Carlton
The traditional Catholic world is abuzz over the Amazon Synod currently underway in Rome. The synod is a gathering of bishops selected by Pope Francis ostensibly to discuss issues related to the evangelization of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region in South America. The reason for the uproar is the synod’s “working document” titled Instrumentum Laboris. The document was principally authored by former priest turned Marxist firebrand Leonardo Boff. The document is suffused with pantheist language that has routinely become incorporated into liberation theology. Accusations of apostasy in the mainline Roman Catholic Church are nothing new for radical traditionalist Catholics (commonly abbreviated as RadTrads or just Trads), but the anti-Christian (“Mother Earth”) language is so apparent in this synod document that even Catholic bishops such as Athanasius Schneider and Cardinals Raymond Burke and Walter Brandemuller have called the synod for what it truly is; apostasy. I doubt that this apostasy will come as a terrible shock to our readers. The apostasy of Rome is simply trailing mainline Protestantism at this point.
Traditional Catholic commentary is readily available on pages like Rorate Caeli, Taylor Marshall, Life Site News, The John-Henry Westen Show, Patrick Coffin Media, The Remnant, and Church Militant. Feel free to peruse these sources at your leisure. My primary focus isn’t on the ongoing apostasy within the Roman Catholic Church. My concern is to address a common thread on virtually all Trad critiques of the Amazon apostasy. Most Trads readily identify the culprit as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II as it’s commonly called. Michael Matt of The Remnant even proposed the Twitter #ToHellWithVaticanII.
There is a faction of Catholics such as George Weigel and Bishop Robert Barron who are more moderate and who admire the legacy of John Paul II who attempt to harmonize the teachings of Vatican II with some semblance of traditional Christian doctrine and practice. This is commonly referred to in Catholic circles as the “hermeneutic of continuity.” Traditional Roman Catholics are right to be skeptical of this approach and often ridicule the mental and rhetorical gymnastics required to force a traditional interpretation on several Vatican II teachings. The “hermeneutic of continuity” is often rejected in light of ubiquitous examples of liturgical abuses and heterodox teaching as a manifestation of the “spirit of Vatican II.”1
It doesn’t take much guesswork to see why. Vatican II teaches that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the same God; that Jews are still God’s chosen people; that all religions should be tolerated by society at large; and that non-Christians can be saved without faith in Christ, so long as they respond to God as they perceive him in their conscience. This certainly represents a consensus among many professed Christians by the mid-twentieth century, but it bears absolutely no resemblance to the teachings of Scripture or anything that could reasonably be called Christian tradition.
Where I think that traditional Catholics are wrong is that they fail to see that the Catholic Church went off the rails earlier than they realize. The endless debates between traditionalists, moderates, and liberals over what actually constitutes Church teaching can be traced back to the increasingly arbitrary position of authority that the Latin Church asserted following the Great Schism of 1054. For some time after this the most respected position in the Latin West was that an ecumenical council was superior in authority to the Pope, but this position gradually gave way to papal supremacy. Both councils and popes contributed theological and disciplinary innovations that have passed into the conscious “tradition” so eagerly defended by today’s Trads.
A good example of this is the practice of clerical celibacy. Married clergy were normal throughout Church history in both the West and East. Clerical celibacy has long since passed into the conscience of Catholic Trads as the tradition of the Church that must be defended against those who want reform. (Ironically, restoration of clerical marriage would actually be a return to the genuinely traditional practice of the Church.) Celibacy became an increasingly lofty ideal throughout Christendom but especially in the Latin West and was ultimately imposed on all clergy by the Second Lateran Council in 1139 in which clergy were forbidden to marry and even existing marriages of clergy were ordered to be invalid.2
Catholic apologists implicitly understand that appeals to an arbitrary authority are weak arguments, so they must try to retroactively assert that clerical celibacy was the tradition of the Church all along. (Or at least clerical continence, which would require married men not to copulate with their wives. Clerical continence was at times encouraged and/or required, but the prevalence of historical references to clergy with families clearly demonstrates that this was not enforced or widely practiced by the faithful. At any rate I believe that this clearly goes well beyond the prerogatives of any human authority. God ordained marriage which is “honorable in all, and the bed undefiled” (Heb. 13:4).) An excellent example of this cognitive dissonance can be seen in this article from Unam Sanctam Catholicam called St. Bridget: Popes and Priestly Marriage.
Bridget was a fourteenth century Catholic nun and mystic who claimed to receive several private revelations, mostly from Mary. In this vision Mary supposedly communicates the impropriety of priests having sexual relations while also consecrating the Eucharist.3 The article takes for granted that Bridget’s private revelation legitimately bolsters the case against clerical marriage, but includes this editorial footnote at the end:
We must offer a few historical notes: St. Bridget’s revelations seem to imply belief that in the ancient Church, priestly marriage was common and accepted, but then later was revoked under the inspiration of a particular pontiff, presumably Pope St. Gregory VII, under whom the Gregorian Reform struck out against clerical concubinage. At any rate, this view is incorrect. Even in the ancient Church, clerical celibacy was expected. There certainly were married priests, but they were expected to remain chaste. The move towards a universally unmarried priesthood was not due to the legislative decree of a single pope, Gregory VII or otherwise; it was an issue spoken of and legislated on by several pontiffs from the 5th century into the Middle Ages.
This is mental gymnastics at its finest! Trads cite a purported vision of St. Bridget as an authority against clerical marriage, while at the same time alleging that Bridget either misunderstood the vision she received or that the apparition of Mary herself was wrong about the history of the requirement of celibacy. This same style of mental gymnastics is what is commonly employed by Catholic apologists today to justify a myriad of different beliefs in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This brings us to the Amazon Synod. Many Catholics will have great difficulty parsing out the numerous errors when they are promulgated by synods and pontifical letters. Many of the more radical stances of the synod’s working document will likely be left out of a final statement issued by the synod’s participants, but it is also likely that many concessions to modernity will also be made. (Some of the Catholic sources that I referenced above speculate that “women’s ministry” will be broadened and that eventually women will be able to take on many of the duties of deacons such as teaching, baptizing, and preaching at Mass.) In the future, these practices will likely pass into the collective experience of Catholics, and all but the most radical traditionalists will even be able to recall a time when this was not so.
Traditional Catholics are correct about the obvious problems of Vatican II, there is a greater elephant in the room that often goes unaddressed, and that is the nature of authority of the Roman Catholic magisterium. It’s easy to view Vatican II and even easier to view the Amazon Synod as a rupture with Catholic tradition. What traditional Catholics fail to understand is that this is simply an unfortunate bi-product of the arbitrary authority of the Catholic magisterium. The mainstream response to traditionalists by mainstream Catholics is essentially to ignore them. The same thing will happen with the recent papal encyclical Amoris Letitia in which it is proposed that divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive communion. This is an obvious reversal of previous policy and teaching. Four Cardinals issued a “dubia,” or official doubts about what the Pope was teaching. Pope Francis has ignored them, and it is certain that their objections will go unaddressed with scores of future Catholics simply unaware of what previous generations of Catholics were taught about divorce and remarriage.
By and large this is an effective tactic. I recall listening to a Catholic Answers episode about Trad dissidents in which a sedevacantist priest named Fr. Cekada cited canonized Saint Robert Bellarmine regarding how heretical popes should be resisted and even deposed by the faithful. The guest was Catholic apologist Tim Staples, and he managed to dismiss Bellarmine’s opinion with the casual wave of a hand saying, “that’s not the teaching of the Church.”
This brings us to the underlying problem that prompted me to write this article. I said earlier that many of our readers won’t be the least bit surprised or even terribly interested in the ongoing apostasy within Roman Catholicism. The point is that the arbitrary authority represented by a doctrine like absolute papal supremacy will inevitably lead down paths like the Amazon Synod. If the Pope and the bishops in communion with him have the authority that Catholics claim that they do, then there isn’t much that can be done to resist these liberalizing trends towards apostasy. All authority must be understood as subordinate to what God has revealed to be true. We ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29), and that is true whether we are talking about a clergyman, king, or even a family patriarch.
Historically Western Civilization thrived because Europeans managed to achieve a kind of Golden Mean between the arbitrary authority that was common under oriental despotism and the lawlessness of individualistic African tribes. Those who love Western Civilization must reject both the errors of hyper-individualism and arbitrary authority. My studies have helped me to grow all the more in my appreciation for the doctrine of the primacy of Scripture as the proper epistemological groundings for our beliefs as well as theonomy for the proper grounding of our ethics. Arbitrary authority such as papal supremacy won’t always conclude with the particulars of the Amazon Synod, but they will always lead to despotism and tyranny. I honestly feel bad for traditional Roman Catholics. I know some personally and they are fellow travelers on so many issues of great importance, but as long they remained tethered to the theoretical authority of the Roman Pontiff the fight against the apostasy of the Amazon Synod will remain a losing one.
1 The central thesis that I am promoting here is that the First Vatican Council or Vatican I conducted in the 1870s and which promulgated the teaching of papal infallibility establishes the Pope as the arbitrary authority over all truth and has consequently brought about the problems associated with Vatican II since this council has papal approval and therefore cannot be questioned on the basis of what Catholics believe about the Church’s authority. Hence “the Spirit of Vatican I,” but I am also aware that the problem of authority goes back earlier in Church history.
2 I don’t intend to go into depth on the history of clerical marriage and enforced celibacy, but here are some good resources from Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic perspectives. Here is an interesting discussion on Jennifer Thibodeaux’s book, The Manly Priest which deals with the history of the imposition of clerical celibacy. There are clearly advocates in Church history for an ideal or even a requirement of clerical celibacy, but it is obvious that married clergy were the norm in both East and West throughout the first millennium.
3 As an aside, I find it astonishing how conveniently these revelations of Mary often serve to confirm the preconceived notions of medieval monastics. I wonder why that is?