Category Archives: Charles Chaput

The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity

14 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Charles Chaput, Papacy, Roman Catholicism

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The post-Vatican II era has created a serious problem for Roman Catholics.  And that problem is precisely how to reconcile the claims of the church with the facts of history – and sometimes with the facts of its own history!   It is not that this is a new problem but rather that the world and how the church relates to the world has so changed as to now lay bear the glaring contradicitons that previoiusly had been covered over by structures of authority[i] which Vatican II has made more transparent.   Perhaps the most obvioius examples are the claims made by Vatican I regarding the papacy and its foundation, continuity and extent.  As it turns out none of those claims is supportable in history and modern Roman Catholic scholars are now free to plumb the depths of these errors however much they are enshrined as “de fide” pronouncements.

But what is new in all this is not the errors but the fact that they can be discussed openly.  We know from history that John Calvin himself cajoled the Roman Church for its false claims and showed in his famous letter to King Francis I that all ordinations after the Council of Basel were fraudulent.[ii]   Calvin showed how political machinations and not “apostolic succession” had made necessary the removal of some popes and the appointment of others with little regard for ecclesiastical involvement.   And that those depositions and appointments had broken whatever alleged continuity Rome claimed theretofore from the Apostles.  And yet centuries later Vatican I was able, with full force of papal authority, to claim that all popes are “successors” of Peter that it “has always been necessary for every church…to be in agreement with the Roman church….”[iii]

And so it was with great interest that I found a collection of essays by legitimate church historians dealing with exactly these matters and it is their title that I have borrowed for this post[iv].  The first essay written by the eminent scholar, Francis Oakley[v], focuses on how the Council of Constance is a roadblock to modern Roman Catholic claims to authority.

Oakley begins with a fascinating expose of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s famous, Essay on the Development of Doctrine. In what seems a tangential departure from the period of Constance, Dr. Oakley shows how Newman misunderstood “development” in the context of Catholic history.  According to medieval scholastics (Oakley names Bonaventure, Aquinas and Scotus) Catholic doctrines were “immutable”, never changing.  So when something appeared to be different than what the church had proclaimed to be “de fide”[vi] these scholars insisted that whatever the variation it was either “implicit” in the original teaching or could be explicated therefrom.  The point is that the teaching itself was considered eternal and unalterable – it did not develop as Newman would have it.   This was the view of the Roman church from medieval times through the period Oakley refers to as the “second scholasticism” when” Spanish theologians in the 17th century”…had been at pains to make clear that, in so doing, it (the church) was not attempting to supplement revelation that was, in fact, immutable.”  Oakley uses this to lay the foundation for what will follow:

When he (Newman) wrote that work, he appears to have known nothing about the older scholastic views on doctrinal development.[vii]

 

 

The Politics of Oblivion

 The ignorance of history displayed by Newman and decried by many of his critics unfortunately continues to this day.  I have written how the Archbishop of Philadelphia mischaracterizes his church’s history here and here in our time.   And Oakley cites the work of the distinguished Catholic theologian John Noonan who has documented “the convoluted process whereby a pattern of behavior once denounced (by Rome) as contrary to nature has modulated across time into the routinely acceptable….”[viii]    All of this is to say that there has been an odd combination of historical forgetfulness in the Church of Rome.

So how does this happen?

…it may largely be due to the empire that the present continues to exert over the past in so much of Catholic institutional thinking.  And it certainly reflects the measure of genial institutional forgetfulness that seems to attend inevitably upon that state of affairs.  Under certain circumstances, moreover, casual forgetfulness has betrayed a disagreeable tendency to mutate into a proactive politics of oblivion reflective of the Orwellian conclusion that if he who controls the past controls the future, then he who controls the present would be well advised to control the past.[ix]

It is precisely that “politics of oblivion” that makes the study of Constance so fascinating.

 

The Problem of Constance

 The instance of radical doctrinal discontinuity in question is the great gulf that yawns between the position the general councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449) affirmed concerning the ultimate locus of authority in the universal church and that staked out in 1870 by Vatican I.[x]

The seeds of Constance were planted more than a hundred years previously in the conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV, King of France.  And those seeds were watered and fertilized by the conflict between Boniface and the Colonna family in Italy.  The facts are too numerous to recount here but this conflict ended in favor of Philip and Boniface’s successors were much more amenable to the king’s wishes resulting in Clement V’s acquiescence to the King and the moving of the curia to Avignon (1309).

After a nearly seven decade hiatus at Avignon, the papacy returned to Rome haltingly in 1370 and then totally in 1378 with the election of Urban VI.  Shortly thereafter a group of French cardinals splintered from the Roman group, “disgusted by the pope’s insulting behaviour” and elected Clement VII who is known to history as the first “anti-pope”.  This is the action that set up the “Great Schism” of the church which saw competing claims to the papacy until Constance.

The intransigence of the two popes (Benedict XII and Gregory XII) coupled with a growing tension for the schism to be healed caused several of Benedict’s cardinals to defect to Gregory’s side where they called for a general council at Pisa in March 1409.  Both popes were invited to attend but refused and were summarily deposed by that Council.  The cardinals at Pisa facing a world now with no pope, elected Alexander V as their new pontiff.   And surprise of surprises, neither Benedict nor Gregory acquiesced in the Council’s decision.  Hence, the world now had three claimants to the See of St. Peter.

Alexander’s pontificate lasted less than a year until his death in May 1410.  The Pisan cardinals took less than a week to elect his successor, John XXIII, another “anti-pope”.  It was John who, under secular political pressure called the Council of Constance.

The great legacy of Constance is its decree Haec sancta, which declared that a general council of the church is the highest authority to which everyone, including the pope, is subject.  The Council thereby exercised that authority by deposing Popes John XXIII and Benedict XIII, negotiating and accepting the resignation of Gregory XII and appointing as replacement Martin V.

 

An Analysis

 Constance (along with Pisa and Basel) cause severe problems for Catholic historians.  Chief among these is the question of utlimate authority in the Church of Rome.  Is the council supreme ala Constance or is the pope as per Vatican I?  If the former is true then can it be said that Vatican I erred in its decrees?  And if Constance is not legitimate, then what to do with its annointing of Martin V as pope, a man who is the direct ancestor for every consecrated priest today?

Oakley traces the ultramontane reaction to Constance:

“…the Council of Constance, not having been convoked by a legitimate pope, cannot be regarded as a legitimate general council prior to its convocation by Gregory XII, just before his resignation on July 4, 1415.”[xi]

The difficulty here is that the council fathers did accord John XXIII the status of pope.  They did, after all, assemble in council at his decree.  And they forcibly brought him back to the council after his escape to prevent just that claim of illegitimacy from being made against them.

The discomfort that Rome feels about the history of Constance can also be seen in how they have selectively edited documents since then.

Thus, early in the (twentieth) century, even so learned a work as the Dictionnaire de thee’logie catholique took the extraordinary step of simply excising the Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel from tis list of general councils.  That list, therefore, simply jumped from the Council of Vienne in 1311–1312 to the Council of Florence in 1439–1445. A remarkably bold exercise in the politics of oblivion![xii]

Oakley continues,

In a similar but Anglophone exercise conducted around the same time, the editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia, a pretty scholarly piece of work, by simply opting to include no article on the subject, made it clear that conciliar theory was to be viewed as a dead issue, an ecclesiological fossil, something lodged deep, in the lower Carboniferous of the dogmatic theology.[xiii]

The author then goes on to note that the tradition of Rome’s historians was to label the Avignonese popes, “anti-popes” while Alexander V and John XXIII– the “Pisan” popes – were “handled in a more gingerly fashion and left in limbo.”  But Oakley notes how that mysteriously changed in 1947 when the prefect of the Vatican archives published a new list of popes wherein the “Pisan” line were now listed as anti-popes.  The reason for the change was not given but is another clear example of how the “politics of oblivion” works in Catholic history.

As you might have anticipated the situation was further aggravated when Angelo Rancalli chose the name “John” for his episcopacy in 1958.  Interestingly Rancalli refused to endorse the 1947 position when he noted that he was claiming his name “extra legitimitatis discussiones”.  Oakley explains that Rancalli thereby signaled that he was setting himself apart from “disputes about legitimacy” regarding the prior use of his chosen name.  And in another exceptional example of the “politics of oblivion” that phrase was removed from any “official version” of the papl record and the pope’s handlers took the matter so far as to say what he really meant was “to deny the legitimacy of the Pisan line.”  Oakley draws a circle around the issue thusly:

Thus, in some cases, the Council of Pisa is either passed over in silence or rejected outright; in others, the question of its ecumenicity is portrayed as having yet to be decided.  In most cases, the Avignonese claimants are treated consistently as antipopes, but in some, the matter of their legitimacy is left in limbo.   Similarly, the Pisan pontiffs are listed as legitimate popes or dismissed as antipopes sometimes even in articles appearing in the same encyclopedia. The most striking instance of disarray is in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (first ed., 1967), where Mollat insists that “the question of the legitimacy of [John XXIII’s]… claim to the Papal See is still unanswered” but does so, ironically, in an article titled (editorially?) “John XXIII, Antipope.”[xiv]

 

Three Issues

 Professor Oakley then gives us a brief overview of the extensive literature that has developed since Vatican I.  And in the interest of brevity focuses our attention on the three issues he deems most serious.

  1. The Great Schism itself.  Current scholarship tends to side with the French cardinals who instigated the schism in 1378 by electing Clement VII.  Ultramontane sentiments had heretofore been likely to favor the prior electon of Urban VI of the Roman line but new evidence shows that Urban was not of stable mind or temperament and was inclined to “torture dissident cardinals, despite their dignity and advanced years.”  Therefore, the cardinals acted justly in preserving the structure of the church as well as themselves.

The historical evidence, certainly, does not permit one simply to insist on the exclusive legitimacy of Urban’s title to the papacy (and, therefore, the legitimacy of his successors in the Roman line). If that claim is now enshrined in the current official listing of popes, it should be recognized that it has been advanced quite explicitly on theological or canonistic rather than historical grounds.[xv]

 

  1. The papalist claim that the Council of Constance “became a legitimately assembled council only after the Roman claimant, Gregory XII, as part of the deal involved in his resignation in July 1415, was permitted by the council to convoke it also falls by the wayside.”   Professor Oakley notes two things here: first, the council’s overriding concern was unity and not succession and secondly, during the previous year the Council had received ambassadors from both Gregory XII and Benedict XIII as “papal delegates” conferring a status on them reflective of the council’s estimation of who they were representing.  The final point in regard to the papalist claim here described is that all of the Fathers at Constance had accepted the decision of the Council of Pisa which deposed both the Roman and French popes.
  2. The third issue is “conciiliar theory itself”.  The papalist claims have been that conciliarism was an accident in history that sprung up quickly and receded in a similar manner.  I find it interesting that no less an historically vibrant character as Torquemada advanced just such a theory!  (Anyone want to side with the Inquisition?)  But Dr. Oakley cites the work of Brian Tierney as having documented the bona fides of conciliarism back to the early church.  It turns out that conciliarism has “deep (and impeccably orthodox) roots in history.”

Professor Oakley’s conclusion is that after centuries of censorship and avoidance the time has come for the Roman Church to own it’s history:

…what is not in doubt is the urgent need for contemporary Catholic theologians to accept the fact that doctrinal rupture or radically discontinuous change has in the past been an unquestionable reality in the life of the church and that condeded, to undertake the bracing challenge of coming to terms with that intractable fact.[xvi]

I will end here with a quote used by Dr. Oakley near the beginning of his wonderful essay.  It succinctly captures the dilemna posed by the councils of Pisa, Constance, Basel and Vatican I.

The past isn’t what it used to be.  – Yogi Berra

 

[i] Dr. Garry Wills prefers the term “Stuctures of Deceit” which may be nearer the truth.  See Wills, Garry: Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit.  New York, Doubleday Books, 2000.

[ii] See Calvin’s “Prefatory Address to His Most Christian Majesty, the Most Might and Illustrious Monarch, Francis, King of the French, His Sovereign” which were included as introductory to the Institututes of the Christian Religion. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.ii.viii.html

[iii] First Dogmatic Constitution of the Church(Decrees of Vatican I).  Session IV, Chapter 2.  July 18, 1870.  http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Councils/ecum20.htm#Chapter 1 On the institution of the apostolic primacy in blessed Peter

[iv] Lacey, Michael J. and Francis Oakley.  The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity. New York, Oxford University Press; 2011

[v] Oakley Francis. “History and the Return of the Repressed in Catholic Modernity: The Dilemma Posed by Constance” in Lacey and Oakley op. cit., pages 29-58.

[vi] De fide or “of the faith” represents a level of commitment that Roman Catholics must make to teachings so described.  To question or modify a “de fide” doctrine is to place oneself outside of the Catholic faith.

[vii]  Oakley, op. cit., kindle location 621

[viii] Noonan, John T. A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. (Notre Dame; University of Notre Dame Press, 2005; as quoted in Lacey and Oakley op. cit.  Noonan is undoubtedly referring to the matter of “natural” family planning which is now acceptable but historically had been prohibited in the Roman communion.

[ix] Oakley, op. cit. kindle location 677.

[x] Oakley, op. cit. kindle location 689.

[xi] Oakley, op. cit. kindle location 765.

[xii] Oakley, kindle location 788.

[xiii] Oakley, kindle location 789.

[xiv] Oakley, kindle location 819

[xv] Oakley, kindle location 855

[xvi] Oakley, kindle location 1041

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To be deep in history is to not be Charles Chaput

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in America's Christian Heritage, Charles Chaput, Christianity, Founding Fathers, Roman Catholicism, U S Constitution

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Chaput

Roman Catholics have long quoted Cardinal Newman and his view of the errancy of Protestant history.  But Newman lived in a different age, an age where truth was a commodity whose usefulness was not universal.  And the pendulum of history has now swung back to where the certainty of history has been shown to be well, more Protestant.  And so it was with some great interest that I noted the estimable Archbishop of Philadelphia has written a piece in the May issue of First Things making the case for civic involvement.[i]    But he does so on an entirely Protestant foundation!  It’s almost as if Chaput either doesn’t know American history or he hopes his readers don’t. (In fact, I’ve written about Archbishop Chaput’s mistreatment of history in a previous post, The Death of Roman Catholic Tradition.)

Chaput begins, “As a nation, the United States is built on a religious anthropology.  It presumes a moral architecture shaped deeply by biblical thought and belief.”  Well that is certainly true as far as it goes.  But what he leaves unsaid is that that “anthropology” was exclusive of his denomination.  In other words to appeal to the “architecture” of the American founding is necessarily to exclude Roman Catholicism and appeal to a tradition that worked against his denomination.  (It must be admitted that the Catholics from Spain actually arrived on the North American continent before the European Protestants.  But as I show in the previous post – and what the archbishop continues in his recent offering – is his focus only on the Protestant Founders citing many of them by name.  When he refers to “the Founders” he obviously means the Protestants of New England.)

The Archbishop continues:

What we believe – or don’t’ believe – about God profoundly shapes what we believe about the nature of the human person and the purpose of human society.

So what did the Founders believe about God and the nature of the human person?   And does that bear any resemblance to what Chaput’s denomination holds?

If the average American citizen were asked, who was the founder of America, the true author of our great Republic, he might be puzzled to answer. We can imagine his amazement at hearing the answer given to this question by the famous German historian, Ranke, one of the profoundest scholars of modem times.  Says Ranke, `John Calvin was the virtual founder of America’.[ii] (emphasis added)

In fact, so profound was Calvin’s influence on the Founders that fully “80 percent of American Christians in the colonial period… were significantly influenced by John Calvin’s teachings.”[iii]  That number is simply astounding!  But it explains why 77% of the universities in America at the time of the adoption of the Constitution were “based on Calvinistic principles.”  So we may rightly assume that Founders’ idea of God, “the nature of the human person and the purpose of human society” were Calvinistic and antithetical to Roman Catholicism.

How so, you might ask?

The chief characteristic of the Calvinistic churches was their belief in the sovereignty of God.  And because God’s will guides and directs all of His creation there was no need of a “Magisterium” to do God’s work.  (This incidentally, is the foundation of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination which the Roman Catholic Church declared anathema at the Council of Trent.)  So the early Christian churches had no hierarchy. (And Christian churches today maintain that tradition!)

The Calvinist churches in early America divided labor between pastors, elders and deacons with presbyteries over geographical areas; but none was superior to the others.  This is precisely the arrangement that was built into the American government – a President, Senate and House of Representatives with a judiciary over geographical areas.  All performed their own function but none was superior to the others.  That structure, by the way, was specifically condemned by Pope Leo XII in 1895, more than one hundred years after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution![iv]    You see to the Pope at Rome, the proper form of government was to give to Rome the “favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  In other words, the state should bow to the Pope.

(Apparently Archbishop Chaput is not even aware of his own sect’s history when he makes this further faux pas: “For Catholics, the civil order has its own sphere of responsibility and its own autonomy apart from the Church.”)

The lack of ecclesiastical hierarchy was based on the Calvinistic principle of the priesthood of all believers.  That is to say, that all of God’s children take part in the work of His kingdom equally.   The impact that this had on early America was that everyone – from a very early age – had to read and understand the Bible.  After all, how could one exercise his priestly office without knowledge?  And that had the further effect of causing Calvinists to build universities wherever they went.  God required that all of His people be educated in order to better serve him.  The Roman Catholic Church as is shown by Archbishop Chaput’s title is the antithesis of this.   Rome has always selected just a few to be “priests”.  And those priest act as an “alter Christus” which was anathema to America’s Founders.

The fact that Roman Catholicism was so far outside the purview of early American Christianity is made clear by Dr. Mark Noll’s description of the country nearly seventy years after the Founders had completed their work:

They (Protestant Christians of British descent) regarded Roman Catholicism not as an alternative Christian religion but as the world’s most perverse threat to genuine faith.  To most American Protestants, Catholicism seemed as alien to treasured political values as it was antithetical to true Christianity.[v]

How a modern Roman Catholic prelate can opine about a “religious anthropology” that would have excluded his denomination as though it hadn’t is really quite perplexing.

The Archbishop continues:

Our history as a nation is steeped in religious imagery, convictions, and language.  The idea that we can pull those religious roots out of our political life without hurting our identity as a nation is both imprudent and dangerous.

But it is equally dangerous to graft Catholic doctrine onto “those religious roots” where they never existed to begin with especially when the Catholic ideals were nowhere to be found in our “identity”.

Four paragraphs before the end apparently the Archbishop had a twinge of conscience:

It’s worth recalling that the roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant, and that these roots go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding.  Catholics have little reason to remember the Puritans fondly.

And apparently Catholics have little reason to remember any other of America’s founding groups either.

In the end, I suppose a couple of questions weigh on me:

  1. Is it legitimate for a Roman Catholic Archbishop to lay claim to ideas and principles that his denomination has rejected?  And then to use same as a basis for a call to action?
  2. Should we allow the Archbishop to so cavalierly dismiss his own church’s history while at the same time appropriating Protestant history as though it were his own?
  3. Can we as American Christians allow such God honoring doctrines as His Sovereignty and man’s depravity to be commingled with an institution that has historically stood against them?
  4. Is it prudent or even “American” to support this man when the goal of his denomination, as stated by the Pope at Rome, is to subject the state to the church?

If we are going to heed the Archbishop’s call to action we must surely get our history right first.  Or insist that he does.

 

[i] Chaput, Charles J. (2014, May 1) “We Can’t Be Silent”.  First Things.

[ii] Eidsmoe, John, “Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers” (Grand Rapids: Baker Books. Kindle book loc. 68-70

[iii] Holmes, David L.  “The Faiths of the Founding Fathers” (New York: Oxford University Press. 2006)  Kindle book loc. 225-227

[iv] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_06011895_longinqua_en.html   Specifically, Leo said: “it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced… but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  In other words the state should bow to Rome.

[v] Noll, Mark A.  “The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.”  (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.  2006.  P. 18)

The Death of Roman Catholic Tradition

11 Saturday May 2013

Posted by in Charles Chaput, Garry Wills, Religious Freedom, Roman Catholicism

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It is certainly no secret that that Catholic Church has taken it on the chin from Obamacare and the Health and Human Services Administration (HHS).  The HHS has mandated that Roman Catholic employers must provide insurance which pays for abortifacient drugs for the people they employ.  But the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to abortion, at least the modern Roman Catholic Church is.[i]  That has caused the RCC in the United States to complain that its religious liberty has been infringed.  And that infringement was the occasion for a recent address by the Most Reverend Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia to a group in Greensburg, PA.  What I found fascinating about the Archbishop’s address is that he while he admonishes his audience to remain true to their Catholic heritage he does so on a Protestant foundation.  In other words, he had to abandon Catholic teaching and Tradition on the issue of religious liberty and build his case on the work of the Protestant Founders of America.

His Excellency encouraged his audience not to “dilute our zeal as Catholics” and reminded them that they cannot “achieve good ends with impure means”.[ii]   He reminded his hearers of his work on the United States Commission on International Freedom which taught him “importance of religious liberty both abroad and in our own country.”  The Archbishop then stated that the (charitable) work of the Catholic Church must be ordered by certain principles, the first of which is this:

First, all Catholic social work should be faithful to the mission and structures of the local diocese, with special respect for the role of the bishop. It should be true to Scripture, Church teaching and the Code of Canon Law.[iii]

And that this liberty to practice one’s own religion is one of the “cornerstones of the American experience.”  The Archbishop then cites “James Madison, John Adams, Charles Carroll, John Jay, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson” as examples of men who shared his view on religious liberty.  It is interesting to me that all of these men, with the exception of Charles Carroll were Protestants.

But if we are to take the Archbishop’s admonition to remain “true” to “Church teaching” we must ask what was the Catholic Church’s teaching during the period of America’s founding down to modern times.  And that is where things become very interesting because the Roman Church has historically been against the very same “religious liberty” that the Archbishop now sees as so important to his cause.

Official “Church Teaching” on Religious Liberty: 1776-1958

Because the Archbishop ties his understanding of religious liberty to America in the eighteenth century it seems only fair that we examine what the Roman Church taught during the period.  At the time of the American Revolution of 1776 and through the period where the U.S. Constitution was drafted, ratified and implemented, the pope of Rome was Pius VI.  Here is an example of Pius VI’s idea of “religious liberty” in the Papal States over which he presided:

…at the time of Pius VI came to St. Peter’s throne in 1775 and issued his order reinstating all the old restrictions, Jews lived in eight ghettoes, locked in each night behind high walls and heavy gates. Everyone was able to tell who was a Jew, because, in another sixteenth-century papal provision reiterated in the 1775 edict, Jews were required to wear a special badge on their clothes…Jews were not allowed to keep shops or warehouses outside the ghetto and their social isolation was to be strictly enforced.[iv]

If you were a Jew living in Rome at the time of the American Revolution, “religious liberty” meant being imprisoned, giving up your possessions and being harassed by the Catholic Church.

The pontificate of the next pope, Pius VII was marked by the struggle with Napoleon.  It is interesting that Napoleon freed the Jews imprisoned by the Catholic Church after he invaded Rome at the beginning of the 19th century.  Unfortunately the Jews were re-imprisoned by the next pope, Leo XII in 1826.  One notable Catholic historian describes Leo this way:

Leo XII’s pontificate was an extremely conservative one:  he condemned religious toleration, reinforced the Index of Forbidden Books and the Holy Office (formerly the Inquisition), reestablished the feudal aristocracy in the Papal States, and confined the Jews once again to ghettos.[v]

Leo was followed by Pius VIII who lasted only twenty months who was in turn followed by Gregory XVI.  And Gregory was no fan of “religious liberty”.  Fr. McBrien once again:

Gregory XVI was as rigid in dealing with theological issues as he was in dealing with political ones.   In his encyclical “Mirari vos” (August 15, 1832)…he denounced the concepts of freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and separation of Church and state, particularly the liberal views associate with the French priest Félicité Robert de Lamennais…(Lamennais favored religious liberty and the separation of Church and state….[vi]

The last pope of the 19th century was Pius IX.  Pius was famous for, among other things, his Syllabus of Errors.  That document listed a variety of doctrines or viewpoints that, if applied to the Roman Catholic Church would be considered errors.  And religious liberty would be included in that list of errors.  Here is the way Pius IX phrased it:

That in the present day, it is no longer necessary that the Catholic Church be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other modes of worship: whence it has been wisely provided by the law, in some countries nominally Catholic, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the free exercise of their own worship…That the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.[vii]

The next pope was Leo XIII.  And the irony of Leo’s papacy in light of Archbishop Chaput’s presentation is that Leo disliked the American system so vehemently that he created the heresy of “Americanism”!  In his encyclical “Longiqua Oceani” the pope put the matter this way:

…it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.[viii]

You see, according to the Pope, the type of system the Archbishop thinks is fundamental to defend the religious liberty of Catholics is actually heretical.  If the Archbishop were true to his own dictate to remain true to “Church teaching” he would give up this talk of liberty.

And the next pontiff – the “pastoral” Pius X – was no different.  It seems that this pope was so set against “religious liberty” that he refused to see the American President Teddy Roosevelt simply because the President was scheduled to speak at a Methodist Church in Rome.  I have a hard time finding the “liberty” in that story, don’t you?

Benedict XV’s pontificate seems to have been preoccupied with internecine quarrels as well as with the events of the First World War.   But his successor, Pius XI renewed Rome’s march against religious liberty with the encyclical “Martalium animos” which “forbade any Catholic involvement in ecumenical conferences.”[ix]

The last pope that I will mention brings us past the mid-point of the twentieth century; Pius XII.  And I have to note him with a truly great sense of irony.  You see, Pius XII instigated a “persecution” of leading Catholic scholars of the day including Henri de Lubac, who Archbishop Chaput quotes from to begin his speech!  And while it is true that John Paul II later raised de Lubac to the episcopate, the fact remains that he was first an example of the sort of religious intolerance which is the true legacy of Rome.

Conclusion:

The Tradition of the Roman Catholic Church is to deny religious liberty.  That case has been made by a review of centuries of official Catholic documents promulgated by every pope from America’s founding until the mid-twentieth century. It is beyond question that Rome’s official position is one in opposition to “liberty”.  And that the American system of which Archbishop Chaput thinks is so instructive has actually been declared a heresy by Rome.

In order for this not to be true, it will be necessary for Roman Catholics to show where, when and by whom these many papal pronouncements have been rescinded, reformed or replaced.  A feat that cannot be accomplished given the nature of papal writings.

Therefore we must conclude that either the Tradition of Rome is dead or that the venerable Archbishop of Philadelphia is a heretic.  As harsh as that may sound, what other choice is there?

Soli Deo Gloria.

[i] It is an interesting fact of history that the Roman Catholic Church has not been opposed to abortion until recent times.  You can read more about that here .

[ii] It seems to this writer that God Himself has achieved good ends almost entirely through “impure means” if the Scriptures are any testimony.  The only exception I can recall are the ends that God achieved through Christ who is, of course, pure.

[iv] Kertzer, David I.  The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.  Pgs. 28-29.

[v] McBrien, Richard P.  Lives of the Popes.  San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.  Page 333.

[vi] Ibid. p. 338

[ix] McBrien, p. 360.