The Critical Disagreements That Sparked The SSPX Schism...

[00:00:00]Welcome back to Pope Pray. I'm Joe Heshwar and I want to address three alleged errors of Vatican 2. Now, last week I looked at some of the legitimate critiques made against the council. For example, some of the texts were ambiguous and heretics made use of some of those ambiguities in propagating false teaching. As I pointed out then, those critiques are largely true. But you can say the same thing about many councils and it doesn't impugn the council itself. The fact that a council can be misread heretically doesn't mean the council is actually teaching heresy or error. But today I want to look squarely at three areas in which the society of St. Pius the 10th claims that a hermeneutic of continuity does not work because they say that the actual text of Vatican 2 contradict the perennial teaching of the church on the questions of religious liberty, accuminism, and collegiality. So we're going to look at all three of those. In my view, their weakest case is against collegiality and their strongest case is against religious liberty. So I'm going to take them in ascending order as it were. So the first doctrinal disagreement the SSPX has with Vatican 2 is on this concept of what's called collegiality. Now the SSPX's basic argument is that the unique authority of the pope is undermined in Vatican 2 in favor of a college of bishops. Now some of the arguments they make are kind of technical. So I want you to bear with me on this one because the subject matter is really important in determining the divinely ordained structure of the church. Now the word collegiality doesn't appear in the second Vatican council but that is the general shorthand way that everybody kind of uses to describe the teaching on the church given in lumingencium in paragraph 22. So, in an SSPX video called, "What's the problem with collegiality?" Father Steven McDonald claims >> the modernist concept of religious collegiality stemming from a faulty understanding of liberty and individual rights threatens this clear hierarchical structure.

[00:01:54]It insists that a strict democratic process should govern the church at all times.

[00:02:02]The pope is thus free to have his say, but his cardinals and bishops must always be allowed to voice their own opinions as well. In addition to claiming that collegiality teaches that a strict democratic process should govern the church at all times, father also claims that collegiality destroys the authority of the pope, the bishop, the individual and even destroys the authority of God himself.

[00:02:26]>> Collegiality is the destruction of personal authority. the authority of God, of the pope, and even of the bishops themselves.

[00:02:36]>> Compare these claims to Lummen 22, the text being criticized. It begins by saying that as vicor of Christ, the pope has full, supreme, and universal power over the church. She is always free to exercise. It then says that the college of bishops is also the subject of supreme and full power over the universal church provided we understand this body together with its head the Roman pontiff and never without this head. Now you'll notice there's nothing there about a strict democratic process and the existence of a pope and bishops being ordained by the pope is actually pretty anti-democratic. It's certainly nothing like congregationalism.

[00:03:13]The authority structure here is top down and it's top down in a collaborative way though. Now I suspect the SSPX would actually grant the the council does not itself teach congregationalism or direct democracy. It's more that there's something that may be ambiguous in the text that could lead to those negative things as a result of maybe an inadvertent consequence. But luminencium is actually unique in that it comes with a an official explanatory note. A note that explains what it does and does not mean. Now the note eliminates many of the ambiguities. It refutes many of the things the SSBX claims that it teaches.

[00:03:49]For instance, it is quite clear that it remains the discretion of the pope to in a particular case proceed in a personal or a collegial way. His authority is not him in at all by the existence of a college of bishops.

[00:04:05]Strikingly, in Archbishop Lev's own commentary in his book, I accuse the council, he writes about how he'd intervene to challenge some of the original language of luminencium that had been proposed. And he says that the result of these interventions was an important modification of the text. But he says at that time it was still not completely satisfactory. And so they asked Pope St. Paul the 6 to make a clear statement which would avoid any ambiguous interpretation of the note.

[00:04:29]And so as Lev says, it was the insertion of this explanatory note that restored the traditional teaching. So no matter how bad you think the original drafts of lumingencium were the text that was actually promulgated by the council and approved by the pope which includes this explanatory note, it faithfully presents the church's traditional teaching on the relationship of the pope to bishops. So you might be wondering why we needed anything like that in the first place then if we're just reaffirming the traditional teaching. Well, for context here, the first Vatican council had explained the theology of the papacy.

[00:05:02]But before it had a chance to unpack the theology of the episcopacy or its relationship to the papacy, the first Vatican council was interrupted by the Francoressussian war. So its work was left incomplete. So in some ways, Vatican 2 is picking up where Vatican 1 left off. It is unpacking this theology of bishops of the episcopacy. So for example, do bishops derive their authority from Christ directly or from the pope? What is the relationship of the bishops around the world and what is the scope of their authority individually and collectively? The key line in Lumencium 22 is this. Just as in the gospels, the Lord so disposing, St. Peter and the other apostles constitute one apostolic college. So in a similar way, the Roman pontiff, the successor of Peter and the bishops, the successors of the apostles are joined together. Now, of course, the pope and bishops today don't share the apostles extraordinary powers, but that's still a helpful analogy to understand the structure of the church. So, let's think about the biblical model. The first thing we notice when we're looking at the biblical model of the church is that Jesus doesn't just call St. Peter and then has Peter choose 11 deputies or vicors. No, Jesus calls all 12 of the apostles. And he's very explicit about this fact, saying, "Did I not choose you the 12?" But notice that second point.

[00:06:15]He doesn't just call 12 different people to follow him individually. He calls them and then forms them into a body or a college that he calls the 12 and which we sometimes refer to today as the college of the apostles.

[00:06:28]Now the term college there is drawn from Roman law. And as the Catholic encyclopedia explains, it just means they're working together under one head and for one purpose. So when you hear college here, don't think university, think like colleagues. But this college of apostles of course is not above Peter in such a way that they could overrule him or work around him or order him around. In fact, it's not even entirely distinct from Peter since Peter is both a member of the 12 and their earthly head. And so in the book of Acts, Peter sometimes acts in his personal capacity as head of the church, for example, in opening the doors of salvation to the Gentiles in Acts 10. Other times, he acts in what we might call a collegial way. He's acting in concert with the other apostles. Now that happens in a kind of extraordinary way at the council of Jerusalem in acts 15. But even apart from the existence of a council like the council of Jerusalem. We see the college of apostles existing as a college as a standing body. For example, in acts chapter 6 the 12 summoned the body of the disciples and gave them instructions on the calling of the first deacons. But whether it's Peter acting in his individual capacity or the 12 acting collegially, we're witnessing in each case the highest level of authority in the church. Does that mean then that there are two heads of the church? Peter and the 12. No, because Peter is head of the 12. The other apostles are distinct from Peter, but their authority is inseparable from his own authority.

[00:07:52]Okay? So that's the biblical kind of model of Peter and the apostles. If you apply that biblical model to the church today, the result is that the pope is able to act in his own capacity. He does not have to await the approval of his brother bishops any more than St. Peter needed to send out a group memo before eating with Cornelius. But the bishops are nevertheless to remember that they are all successors of the apostles and they're all called to be in college together. Now, for some people, the idea of the bishops making up a global college of bishops sounds like something Vatican 2 is just inventing. But that's not the case. We find Leo the 13th talking that way about the Pope's authority over the Episcopal College back in 1896.

[00:08:33]And as the 1908 Catholic encyclopedia mentions, the College of the Apostles lived forth in the Episcopet, which gradually took its place and filled its functions. So none of these are novelties of Vatican 2. Even when the exact wording of college of bishops isn't used, that theology we still find it going back into the early church. St. Cyprian of Carthage writes that this unity we ought firmly to hold and assert, especially those of us that are bishops who preside in the church, that we may also prove the episcopet itself to be one and undivided.

[00:09:05]And there are countless examples of the bishops, usually the bishops of a particular country, taking concrete steps to live this out, to show their unity with one another and with the pope. Now, as Catholics, we believe the Episcopy is of divine origin since the bishops are the successors of the apostles. If Bishop X is bad, that's not an argument that the Episcopy is bad. So similarly pointing to the bad things sometimes done in the name of collegiality in the modern age does not disprove collegiality itself because the truth is that there is a longstanding Catholic tradition of what we might call collegiality and even cenidality. For instance St. Bonafice the so-called apostle to the Germans writes the following in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. We decreed and acknowledged in our senate that we wish to preserve to the end of our lives the Catholic faith and unity and submission to the Roman church that we bowed to St. Peter and to his vicer that we should call a senate together every year that the metropolitans would seek their Paul's that's paleia from the holy sea that we desired to follow in everything the precepts of St. Peter so as to be numbered among the sheep entrusted to him so St. Bonafice cenodal way was to hold annual senates of the bishops of Germany to show their unity, their brotherhood and also their union with the holy sea. That's what true collegiality looks like. The bishops act but they're acting in union with one another and united with and under the leadership of the pope. So if cidality has become kind of a bad word today, it's worth recognizing that this is owing to the bad theology and bad intentions of many of those involved in it rather than any kind of problems with cinnids or colleges of bishops themselves. In fact, many of the objections to collegiality and cenidality reveal something that I think is often the critic's own understanding of the church. And I mean to critique something broader than just the SSPX here because many Catholics including I fear many bishops have internalized this idea that the role of the bishop is to be a kind of middleman or just a vicor of the pope. When Bishop Strickland tweeted that bishops are not the Vatican's regional managers. They're successors to the apostles in their own right. The response from many online Catholics was outrage accusing him of disloyalty to the pope or denying Catholic doctrine. But while the words he was quoting there were theologically imprecise, Vatican 2 quite plainly does say bishops are not to be regarded as vicors of the pope. Remember Christ called all the apostles. He didn't just call Peter. And even though Vatican 2 says that, it's not the first to say that. Pope Leo the 13th said the exact same thing back in 1896. Okay. So I want to turn now to a very subtle argument about collegiality. This is an argument about the distinction between jurisdiction and order. As I say, it is a subtle distinction, but basically a priest becomes a bishop by virtue of his consecration. That's orders, holy orders. But to be a bishop of a particular place, that requires jurisdiction. The pope can regulate where he's bishop of. He can move him to a different dascese. He can even depose him entirely. But he can't change the indelible fact that the man is now a bishop. The pope can make the bishop of Tyler no longer the bishop of Tyler, but he can't make him no longer a bishop.

[00:12:21]But the SSPX claims that lumencium denies this distinction.

[00:12:25]>> Finally, I'll just mention very briefly collegiality. Um Vatican 2 in Lumencium asserts that um bishops receive jurisdiction immediately from God at their Episcopal consecration. But that goes directly contrary to what pas I 12th had taught.

[00:12:42]>> Now this is a common misreading of Vatican 2, but I think it's still a misreading. The text never asserts that bishops receive jurisdiction immediately from God at their Episcopal consecration. It seems to say the exact opposite. In fact, what Lummenian says is that a bishop receives what are called muna, not jurisdiction, when he is consecrated. Through episcopal consecration itself, bishops receive with the function munus of sanctifying also the functions muna of teaching and governing. As Christ is priest, prophet and king, so every bishop is called to act as priest by sanctifying, prophet by teaching and king by governing. But this theology, as Lumigencian's explanatory note points out, is absolutely clear from tradition, lurggical tradition included. For example, in the traditional right of consecration of bishops, the priest about to be consecrated as a bishop is told it is the duty of a bishop to judge, to interpret the scriptures, to consecrate, to ordain, to make oblation, to baptize, and to confirm.

[00:13:43]That seven-fold calling is the calling of the Episcopal office itself. And that office is what is received in the sacrament of holy orders, quite apart from the question of jurisdiction. But here's the crucial distinction. Many of the SSBX critiques omit the explanatory note was very clear that they intentionally used the term muna rather than a stronger term like potastes for powers because for the power being described as being received in holy orders there to be fully ready to act something else is needed canonical or jeritical determination through the hierarchical authority. So typically in the west that's going to be the pope. So Bishop Johnston is the bishop of Kansas City because one he shares in the triple mooner of priest, prophet and king through consecration but two he was named bishop by the holy father. The first of those is orders and the second is jurisdiction and that appears to harmonize with the teaching of pest the 12th perfectly. There is no contradiction there unless you read a contradiction into the text. But the final SSPX argument that I want to address on collegiality is that of Dom Tranquilo who accuses the council of actually teaching heresy. Now, usually the society shies away from such an accusation because once you begin to accuse the pope and all the world's bishops of being manifest heretics, it raises the spectre of state of accountant. But his argument is that Vatican 2 contradicts the infallible dogma of Vatican 1. And that's another problem, another error or heresy even because it is defined that God our Lord gives only to Simon Peter the power of governing the church the supreme power.

[00:15:21]Vatican the first doesn't say gives to Peter which would be okay to Peter and to some somebody else. We we define that afterwards. Vatican the first says only to Peter and the su successors obviously.

[00:15:36]So this is absolutely something wrong.

[00:15:39]Now Vatican 1 says that it was to Peter alone that Jesus after his resurrection confided the jurisdiction of supreme pastor and ruler of his whole fold saying feed my lambs feed my sheep and so the argument is that Vatican 2 contradicts this by saying that there's another supreme power the college of bishops but again the explanatory note is explicit that lumins is not talking about a distinction between the pope and the bishops taken collectively talking about a distinction between the pope taken by himself and the pope together with the bishops. And Vatican 1 ironically illustrates this point perfectly. The dogma of papal infallibility isn't defined by a pope operating alone by an ecumenical council. And yet, it's still received at the highest level of authority as a dogmatic definition. So, if you want to see why Vatican 1 isn't contradicting Vatican 2 or contradicting itself by having a council, I would suggest you look at the work of Cardinal Joure. He was a theologian Lev himself, praised as a deep thinker and a great theologian.

[00:16:38]and he explicitly taught what SSPX priests are now claiming is heresy. In his 1941 book, The Church of the Word Incarnate, Jouri explicitly teaches that the power to rule the universal church resides in one, the pope, and two, the Episcopal College united with the Pope, and that it can be exercised either way.

[00:16:56]But he stressed that these are not two entirely distinct powers, but one sole supreme power exercised in two different ways. So it's the same authority whether it's the pope acting alone or with the college of bishops. And Cardinal Bilot actually goes further writing that there's nothing more explicit in the Catholic faith from the beginning than the dogma of the supreme authority of the whole episcopate whether united in an ecumenical council or dispersed throughout the world. Now that's an important distinction because the SSPX will actually grant that yes an ecumenical council shares in this supreme authority but it denies that to the college of bishops dispersed throughout the world and united as a college of bishops and billet isn't some modernist looking to change the church quite the opposite he was literally the man who drafted Pishendi Dominik Gregus which was St. famous anti-modernist encyclical and yet SSPX priests are publicly accusing the church of heresy for teaching what billet called the most explicit dogma in the Catholic faith known from the beginning. So on the question of collegiality I think the SPX argument simply misunderstands both the teaching of lumenencium and also the traditional ecclesiology of the church on this question. But I want to turn to the second issue where I think they have a somewhat stronger case. This is the idea of accuminism. Now, on the one hand, I sympathize with the frustration many Catholics feel in response to vague feel-good statements from church leaders about non-atholic, even non-Christian groups. And I think we should be very careful in distinguishing the actual teaching of Vatican 2 on accuminism from these sometimes scandalous things that we might see done in the name of a humanism. Think about it this way. You can find plenty of bad Catholic Protestant debates, but that by itself doesn't mean debate is bad or that this is somehow contrary to what it is to be Catholic. It might just be a sign that the Catholic side needs better debaters.

[00:18:53]Well, similarly with accuminism, I agree with the evangelical Timothy George who remarked that for too long accuminism has been left to left-leaning Catholics and mainline Protestants. So, it might not be a problem with accuminism itself.

[00:19:05]We might just need better accuminists.

[00:19:08]So okay what are the arguments against Vatican 2's teaching on accuminism itself? Now unfortunately many of the arguments against many of the critiques both within the SSPX and from others they're often confused about what accuminism even is as in they'll they'll simply misdefine it. For example the society put out a video called what is the problem with modern accuminism in which Father McDonald offers this definition of accuminism. The recent popes have participated and even organized [music] many ecumenical events. Yet accuminism raises both doctrinal and pastoral problems. Ecummenism denotes the search for worldwide religious unity.

[00:19:50]>> And the SSPX article, what is accuminism? Claims that the Vatican 2 document on accuminism that's Unitatius read in Graatio is based upon the belief that all religions are more or less praiseworthy. And you can find the SSPX making these kind of claims in a lot of their materials. The idea that modern accuminism is about trying to get Buddhists to be good Buddhists and Protestants to be good Protestants and that it's not concerned with conversion.

[00:20:13]All of this now none of this is remotely true. Unatis red and gracio the document being critiqued is explicitly about the restoration of unity among all Christians. Those are literally the opening words of the document. That is a reintegration being talked about. It's a restoration of full communion and it's based on the idea that Christ the Lord founded one church and one church only.

[00:20:37]In other words, accuminism is only possible with groups that believe in the trinity and confess Jesus as Lord and Savior. The term ecumenical comes from the Greek word for house or household.

[00:20:49]Same root as ecumenical council, of course. So, we're dealing with the household of God, those connected to the church in some way through baptism. As Pope Francis pointed out a few years back, accuminism is essentially baptismal because it is in baptism that we find the basis of the communion between Christians and our yearning for full visible unity. Now, it's true that the church also engages in interreligious dialogue, but that's a completely different thing. As the diccastri for promoting Christian unity points out, these contacts we sometimes have with non-Christian groups, they differ radically from the contacts we have in ecumenical dialogue with other Christian groups. Because it's only with other Christians that we're striving for the restoration of the unity Christ willed among all his disciples. And only that intrachristian dialogue can be properly called ecumenical. So if your idea of accuminism is like that scene in the last battle at the end of Chronicles of Narnia in which Shift and Ginger are preaching that Alan and the demon Tash are really the same god, fear not. That is not what a humanism actually is and it's not what Vatican 2 taught. Instead, as St. John Paul II would later explain in Utunam, the goal of accuminism is full communion among Christ's disciples.

[00:22:01]Now full communion understood this way is marked by a shared eukarist in union with the bishop of Rome, the pope. So the root of accuminism is our common baptism and the goal of accuminism is full eucharistic and ecclesial communion in union with and under the pope. So with that in mind, let's look at two related questions. One, why does Vatican 2 describe Orthodox and Protestants as separated brethren? And two, why does it talk about degrees of communion? There's a lot of misconception on this point.

[00:22:32]for example, and this idea that when we talk about the Orthodox and Protestants as separated brethren, that this is some kind of Vatican 2 novelty. It's a repudiation how we spoke about them in the past. Now, you can see this presented positively, for example, by some Protestants.

[00:22:46]>> Vatican 2.

[00:22:48]In that council, they said for the first time ever, they called Protestants quote separated brethren. That is a firestorm of controversy in the Catholic Church because up until that point there have been official council declarations that people who say and believe the things I believe and say that we are excommunicated that we are anathema.

[00:23:09]>> And you'll see the same argument often being made but as a negative by some traditional Catholics. The term often appears in scare quotes in SPX writings including those of Lev himself or we'll find the use of the phrase so-called separated brethren. But whether you're a Protestant who thinks this was a good novelty or a traditionalist who thinks it's a bad novelty, the truth is that it wasn't a novelty at all. Terms like separated brethren to describe heretics and schismatics are older than Vatican 2. They're even older than Protestantism. And they're based upon the theology of baptism. So let me explain. The 1917 code of canon law is very explicit. By baptism a man is constituted a person in the church of Christ. When Pope Pis the 12th appeared to contradict that point in mystic corporus Christi he quickly clarified in mediatra day that by the waters of baptism as by common right Christians are made members of the mystical body of Christ the priest. They're made members even in the priesthood of Christ. That's Christian doctrine. It's rooted in the words of St. Paul that by one spirit we were all baptized into one body. Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit. So, the Catholic Church recognizes the validity of Orthodox and Protestant baptism so long as they're done in the proper way and with the proper intention. The Council of Florence is even explicit that pagans and heretics validly baptize. And so, there's this sense in which we regard even baptized heretics and schismatics as our brothers. This was a point that the church fathers stressed. St. St. Optius of Malevus rebuked the Donatus schismatics by saying, "You will not have peace with us, that is with your brothers. For you cannot escape being our brothers. You whom together with us one mother church is born from the same bowels of her mysteries and whom God the father has received in the same manner as sons of adoption."

[00:25:06]And so we find Pope Leo I1 13th speaking of the Orthodox back in the late 1800s as our dissident brethren and expressing his hope that they may seek out more readily the embrace of their mother the church. Already then the Orthodox are understood in some sense as being brothers and true sons of holy mother church. In the next year he speaks the same way about the Anglicans. He ends an encyclical with a prayer. Oh sorrowful mother, intercede for our separated brethren. With us in the one true fold, they may be united to the supreme shepherd, the vicor of thy son. In 1928, Pope Pius the 11th wrote an encyclical called mortalium onos, which I'm going to look at more closely because in it, he condemns some bad forms of accuminism. We have a sort of unity at the expense of truth. But even in that document, he talks about how the separated children should return to the apostolic sea. And he speaks of our children both as those who belong to the Catholic community but also those who are separated from us. So it is perfectly traditional and doctrinally orthodox to recognize that Orthodox and Protestants are united to the church in one way through the sacrament of baptism and much more than that in the case of the Orthodox. But that this union is not yet complete. So is it messy to talk about full communion and elements of communion? Sure. But that's just a reflection of the messiness of the situation. And frankly, the SSPX should be able to relate their own relationship to the Catholic Church is similarly kind of famously messy.

[00:26:36]But the underlying doctrine of the church is the same. On the one hand, Vatican [clears throat] 2 explicitly reaffirms an oriental ecclesiorum that the cath holy catholic church which is the mystical body of Christ is made up of the faithful who are organically united in the holy spirit by the same faith, the same sacraments and the same government. On the other hand, in Lummenium, which was released the same day, the council also recognizes that many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of this visible structure of the church, but that those elements aren't meant to just be like, okay, you're good enough. Instead, those elements outside the church or outside the visible bounds of the church impelled toward Catholic unity. So, there's a shift in emphasis there, but there's not a change in the doctrine of the church. It's the same doctrine before and after. Instead, what we do have, we do have some shifts. But as Father Brian Harrison puts it, we're dealing here not with doctrinal changes.

[00:27:34]We're dealing with changes to the church's policy, discipline, and pastoral strategy. In Father's words, between Pius the 11th and Vatican 2, there's an undeniable and very marked change of direction. Indeed, practically a U-turn. Pius the 11th flatly forbade any Catholic participation in interchurch or interreligious meetings and activities motivated by the desire for restoring Christian unity. Vatican 2 on the other hand authorizes and positively encourages Catholic participation in such activities within certain limits. Now all of that is true but I would say here the U-turn isn't maybe quite as abrupt as you might be imagining. Now remember the ecumenical movement is still very young. It started most people date it to the 1910 world missionary conference. So it's only the early 20th century that even the Protestant and Orthodox world gets serious about accuminism. And the church's initial reaction to the ecumenical movement was one of caution even one of suspicion. Pius the 11th as I said quickly recognized that there's a kind of shallow accuminism that easily leads to indifferentism and to relativizing of doctrine. and the pope condemned specific liberal Protestant doctrines that many accuminists held to.

[00:28:46]But as the ecumenical movement itself grew and matured, the church's response to it softened, and this had already begun prior to Vatican 2. In 1949, for example, the Holy Office described the ecumenical movement's longing for unity as the consequence of the common prayers of the faithful through the grace of the Holy Spirit. And it relaxed some of the prohibitions on ecumenical collaborations between Catholics and non-atholics. It was even permitted, for example, to pray the Lord's Prayer or some prayer approved by the Catholic Church at the beginning or ending of these meetings. Normally that was a line we didn't cross but here they recognized this can be done safely without fear of indifferentism. Ultimately of ecumenical efforts the holy office said all especially priests and religious should be exhorted and warmly encouraged to be zealous by their prayers and sacrifices to ripen and promote this work. So again the U-turn wasn't quite as abrupt as you might imagine. But there is certainly a shift in large ways and in small ways.

[00:29:44]We see the magisterium already even prior to Vatican 2 starting to take a warmer stance towards the ecumenical movement and certainly Vatican 2 continues that trajectory. Now we still need to avoid errors like relativizing dogma or falling into the trap of indifferentism but the church has I think properly recognized that there is an appropriate role for ecumenical dialogue in promoting the unity of the church. Now, one of my favorite quotations from Bla1 Pascal is that when we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that heirs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for in that side it is usually true and admit that truth to him, but revealed to him the side on which it is false. So if you want to correct Protestants and Orthodox, well, we do well to first recognize what perspective they're looking at things, to affirm what it is that they're getting right, and then to show the side on which their beliefs are false or incomplete. Now, is that always well done? Of course not. But the doctrine and the theory are sound even when the execution falters.

[00:30:47]Okay. So, now I want to turn to the third and final of the SSPX's doctrinal disagreements. And this is the one that I think they make the strongest case for. It's the doctrine of religious freedom. Because at a surface level, there certainly appears to be a contradiction between what Pope said throughout the 19th and the early 20th century and what the second Vatican council and every subsequent pope has had to say. For example, Pope Gregory the 16th wrote an entire encyclical against liberalism and religious indifferentism, Marari Vos, in which he denounces as absurd the idea that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. Gregory warned that this idea spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs since when all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature which is already inclined to evil propels them to ruin.

[00:31:36]And Pope Pius the 9th similarly warned in his 1864 encyclical Quantura against those who dared to teach that the best form of society is one in which the state made no distinction between true religion and false religions or who contradicted scripture, the magisterium and the church fathers by teaching that the ideal civil society is one in which no duty is recognized as attached to the civil power of restraining by enacted penalties offenders against the Catholic religion except so far as public peace may require.

[00:32:05]Now alongside Quantura, Pas also released his famous syllabus of errors.

[00:32:11]And in the syllabus of errors, one of the errors condemned is the idea that every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which guided by the light of reason he shall consider true.

[00:32:22]Now I want you to compare that language with the language of the Vatican 2 document dignitus which teaches that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power in such ways that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs whether privately or publicly whether alone or in association with others within due limits. Now first glance that looks like just a blatant contradiction that appears to be the very kind of teaching that Gregory the 16th and Pis 9th condemned. And if we interpret phrases like religious freedom to mean the way we use them in a secular context, then I think there really does seem to be a contradiction. But is that what the fathers of Vatican 2 actually meant? Because remember, the mere fact that two things sound contradictory doesn't mean that they are contradictory. Because the very fact that two things might sound the same doesn't mean they are the same. As I pointed out last week, 3 century bishops condemned Paul of Samosada's doctrine of Christ being homoius with the father.

[00:33:24]And then the bishops in the 4th century teach that Christ is homosio with the father. That looks like a blatant contradiction, but it's not a real contradiction because Paul had meant something different by the term than the nyine bishops did later. So even though critics accuse him of contradiction and of the later council of contradicting the earlier teaching, the reality is that they're just using the same word to describe two things, a true thing and a false thing. So similarly, how do we distinguish the true version of religious liberty taught by Vatican 2 from the illegitimate version of religious liberty or freedom of conscience condemned by 19th century popes? Well, as professor Michael Dunigan points out, the so-called right that the 19th century popes had condemned was this false vision of religious liberty really proposed by enlightenment thinkers. And it was this idea of religious liberty as a positive right to error and a right that had no real limitations beyond perhaps public peace. And it was rooted in true indifferentism. The idea that one religion was as true and as good as another or at least that the truth of religion was too difficult to ascertain.

[00:34:32]To really understand what the popes are are kind of rejecting in the 19th century, you need to look at the French declaration of the rights of man and the citizen which came out in 1789, the same year as the revolution itself.

[00:34:47]And the key point there was that when they talked about rights and like the right to conscience or right to worship, their idea of those rights was as a positive authorization that you had you had a a positive right to worship or believe or pretty much say anything that anything that you wish to say or believe, etc. Gregory the 16th is actually explicit that the form of religious liberty that he's condemning is one which arises from that shameful font of indifferentism.

[00:35:23]And so the popes rightly reject this false right to religious freedom. And to their credit, the SSPX, I think, will acknowledge that what Vatican 2 affirms is not this indifferent version of religious freedom that Gregory and Pas condemned because what Vatican 2 affirms is something more nuanced. It's quite different. First, it's actually not a positive right at all. Instead, it is an immunity from coercion. And second, it's an immunity that is limited not only by public peace, but also by the good of society.

[00:35:55]>> The right to religious liberty is a right to immunity. It's a right not to be interfered with for the most part.

[00:36:01]Again, within due limits, >> we see these two distinctions in dignitus human itself. The declaration rejects indifferentism. It reaffirms the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one church of Christ. Instead, what it calls religious freedom is specifically immunity from coercion in civil society.

[00:36:23]Now, the distinction here between positive rights and immunities or sometimes called negative rights is a critical one. In American law, for example, you have a legal immunity from unreasonable searches and seizures.

[00:36:34]That's a very different thing from saying that you have a positive right to carry drugs or illegal weapons or something. Even if some people will misuse their legal immunity in just that way, they don't actually have a positive right to it. There's an important distinction there. I hope it's clear.

[00:36:49]Similarly, the catechism is very clear that the church and parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer baptism shortly after birth. You have no positive right to refuse to baptize your baby. you're doing an an injustice to your child, but you do have a negative right. We can't force you to get your baby baptized. You have an immunity from coercion in this area. St. Thomas Aquinas actually taught this explicitly that it'd be immoral for the state to baptize, for example, Jewish children against the will of their parents, arguing that to do so would be a danger to the faith and against natural justice. And he points out that even when the church had powerful princes on her side, it was never Christian practice to forcibly baptize.

[00:37:34]Well, use that as kind of a model for understanding this idea of religious liberty. Paragraph 21108 of the catechism is clear. The right to religious liberty is neither a moral license to adhere to error nor a supposed right to error. Error has no rights. Religious liberty instead is a negative right. It is an immunity within just limits from external constraints in religious matters by political authorities. And those just limits as I said are more limited than in the false enlightenment version of religious liberty. Dignitas repeatedly stresses that this is a right within due limits.

[00:38:11]But the boundary there is not simply public order as the enlightenment thinkers thought in public order in a kind of secular sense. the higher standard of the objective moral order, recognizing the state has a legitimate role as a proper guardian of public morality. And as the catechism points out, those due limits have to be determined in a particular social situation by the virtue of political prudence with a view toward the common good. So this right, the Vatican 2 right, is formulated specifically as a limitation upon the coercive power of the state. Now here there's been a lively debate between thinkers like Thomas Pink on one side, Michael Dunigan on the other. Pink argues that when earlier popes called for the state to crack down on heresy and false religion, the state was acting on the church's behalf. Whereas Vatican 2 recognizes that the state does not have this coercive authority in its own right.

[00:39:02]>> The 19th century popes must have envisaged the state as acting on an authority other than its own. There must be another authority, the church, that can coers religiously. And the 19th century popes must have been calling on the state to coersse religiously, not on its own authority, but as an agent of and in the service of the church.

[00:39:28]While by contrast in 1965, Dignitartis Yumane must be addressing the state in a new context as acting no longer as an agent of the church, but on its own native authority, an authority that does not extend to the direction of religion.

[00:39:47]>> Now, that's an intriguing hypothesis, although one that I have to say other scholars have pushed back against forcefully. But whether pink is right or not, it is certainly true that dignitus is explicitly limited to an immunity against the coercive authority of the state or of society, the political authorities and that the church retains its own proper coercive authority. Pope Benedict I 16th reminded us of this in 2010 when he said that the church too must use the shepherd's rod. The rod with which he protects the faith against those who falsify it against currents which lead the flock astray. The use of the rod can actually be a service of love.

[00:40:26]So I think it's actually fair to say there are several plausible ways of harmonizing dignitus human with 19th century papal teaching even though they might look contradictory at the outset.

[00:40:36]I like the way that John do. Rosa of the classical theism podcast puts it >> but I also don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing to have more than one solution just like certain Bible difficulties we might be able to you know get to a set of options that okay maybe this is the solution maybe that maybe we have two or three different options on the table maybe we're not sure 100% um which one is correct if you've ever dealt with alleged Bible difficulties I think you'll know what John means sometimes there's a clear answer as to how to make sense of two seemingly contradictory passages other times there's several possible solutions. Even if you're not sure which one is correct 100%. It can be enough to show well there are several plausible harmonizations so it doesn't seem like an obvious contradiction.

[00:41:20]Well, similarly here, while there are plenty of examples of people promoting the false version of religious freedom in the name of the council, when you look at the actual right to religious liberty described in dignitaratus and in the catechism, it's significantly different than the false doctrines that are condemned in things like the syllabus of errors. Now, I'm admittedly I'm only scratching the surface of this topic or really any of the three that we've talked about here. If you want to go much deeper on the alleged contradiction here, I recommend Thomas Pink's debate with Father Martin Ronheimer as well as John De Ro's two interviews with Michael Dunigan. I'm going to link to all three of those in the description below. And I know that Larry Chap is in the middle of working on his own essay form looking at harmonization there. So, I'll link to those as well. Finally, special thanks to Father Ian Palco of the SSPX. He reviewed the sections on religious liberty and collegiality. Speaking of which, if you want to better understand the theological case for the papacy and why it is we believe that there is one pope who has primacy within the church, encourage you to check out this video right here for Sheamus Popey. I'm Joe Heshmire. God bless you.