Can I Disagree with the Pope?

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]As a lifelong Catholic, where are the boundaries with with things that I don't agree with? For instance, like Pope Francis is telling bishops and pastors that they can bless gay couples, which I don't agree with, and I don't know if I'm even allowed to question it or argue it. Or also, um, Pope Leo's comments about Senator Dick Durbin and his pro-abortion stance. So, I just don't know like where am I supposed to just accept everything that they say, or am I allowed to question it, or maybe >> You're you're allowed to You're allowed to question, but I think the approach you should take is one of humility, docility, and very much like the way you would approach, uh, a parent. Or, you know, you're you're like having an attitude where you're constantly undermining isn't healthy.

[00:00:46]Like imagine like institutionally, even here at Catholic Answers, or I don't know if you work in a company or anything like this, but if you have people constantly acting in kind of an insubordinate way and calling everything into question and second-guessing everything, it can do a lot of damage institutionally, just on a a natural human level. And this is true as well at a spiritual level when we're talking about the church.

[00:01:12]Uh, Jesus, uh, foresaw Abraham Lincoln and then said that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

[00:01:18]>> He foresaw Abraham Lincoln? Is that how that works?

[00:01:21]>> are you going to tell me he didn't?

[00:01:23]Okay.

[00:01:23]>> [laughter] >> All right. Well, yeah, he certainly did.

[00:01:25]Yes. All right.

[00:01:27]I didn't technically say he quoted it. I just said he foresaw him and he also said this. And those two statements, And those while wildly misleading together, are technically both true. Yep. That's what we're going for, Joe, technical truths. You can just technically be true in the things you say. In all seriousness, though, Jesus says that a house divided against itself can't stand.

[00:01:48]And so, one of the things that I think we see, especially online, is that it's very easy for Catholics to form a kind of circular firing squad and tear one another down.

[00:01:57]But I don't think the solution to that is just to blindly say, "Oh, whatever the Pope says and does is always [snorts] the right thing." Because that obliterates the distinction between infallible and non-infallible teaching.

[00:02:11]So, as Catholics, we believe that there are different levels of authority by which the Pope acts. In the same way that federal law and the tweets of the president are not the same thing. Like an executive order is an official act in the way a tweet isn't.

[00:02:29]So, likewise, when somebody is interviewing the Pope off the cuff, that doesn't have the same kind of authority. So, in terms of, uh, the comments Pope Leo made about Dick Durbin, I don't think he was trying to say anything about his pro-choice record. I think he actually is trying not to get into it publicly at that juncture because he was he was very much caught off guard and and basically said as much in in his comments.

[00:02:55]And, you know, then he he talked about the death penalty and things.

[00:03:00]And I understand that, you know, people read that as as a false equation. I don't think you have to read it that way. So, I would say this. Number one, you don't have to just treat every off-the-cuff comment as if it's infallible church teaching.

[00:03:13]Number two, you don't even have to teach treat fallible, uh, church teachings or decisions or disciplines as if they're infallible, uh, statements of faith and morals. So, in the example of Fiducia Supplicans, where, uh, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith permitted, uh, spontaneous blessings to be given by same to same-sex couples, that you can say that's wildly imprudent and likely to lead to a lot of confusion about the church's sexual teaching and push back against it. And in fact, that is likely what the bishops in Africa did, and the church was like, "Yeah, that's fine.

[00:03:54]Like you can you can do that." They weren't, you know, denounced as being insubordinate or anything like this.

[00:04:01]They said like this is that's not going to fly. It's going to be confusing.

[00:04:04]That's that's not helpful. Because the reality is you can believe both. When two people present themselves for a blessing, you can bless them without knowing all of their particulars. That's true, and people have been doing that with people they didn't know were involved in immoral sexual relations for time immemorial.

[00:04:21]Because you don't know all the ins and outs of people receiving a blessing.

[00:04:25]That's true, but also trying to, you know, institutionalize it in any kind of official way is potentially scandalous and misleading.

[00:04:35]So, I think you can Well, I know you can you can judge an action as imprudent.

[00:04:41]You don't have to just blindly say whatever the church or a dicastery within the church does is automatically the best thing to do. That is not the duty you owe, uh, to the church as a Catholic. And the church does not ask that of you. But you should be ready to submit your intellect and will to the teaching of the church. And a good word for this is you should be docile to the church as mother and teacher.

[00:05:06]And so, if you take that approach of listening, trying to understand, not starting off from a posture of cynicism, skepticism, or rebellion, but rather saying, "What can I learn from the church?"

[00:05:20]And then trying to understand it as best you can in light of everything else you've learned from the church, uh, that's the that's the path forward. What do you think about that, Christa?

[00:05:31]Okay. No, I I agree with all that. I just, um, I just wasn't sure if I had, um, any right as a Catholic to question, um, anything the Pope says or does. Am I just supposed to accept everything, or am I supposed to use my common sense and my good judgment to say, you know, that doesn't sound right? And Yeah. Like, you know, the blessing of the gay couples, to me that that seems like it just causes scandal more than anything else.

[00:05:57]And I had a real hard time with that one. Yeah. Perfectly allowed to to do Again, the fact that there were cardinals and bishops in the church who pushed back and said, you know, even if this is technically true, it's it's very misleading, confusing, and scandalous.

[00:06:14]Um, and and that response was treated seemingly pretty favorably. I mean, it didn't seem like the Pope or the Vatican said like, "How dare you question that?"

[00:06:25]There was nothing like that. Uh, that we Yeah, we don't want to try to treat everything as if it's infallible church teaching because that's actually confusing and unhelpful.

[00:06:35]But, uh, let me just ask you this if I may, Christa. I'll just add this question to yours and you can tell me if it if it's dominant doesn't fit, but is there, Joe, in all that you've said, is there do we have to make a distinction between what we do publicly and what we might do privately? Yes. And this is something the church talks about. I'm I'm glad you you mentioned this. Um, Donum Veritatis, so I believe talks about this as well. Okay, he actually Here we go. Donum Veritatis is 27. Even if the doctrine of the faith is not in question, the theologian will not present his own opinions or divergent hypotheses as though they were non-arguable conclusions. Respect for the truth, as well as for the people of God, requires this discretion. For the same reason, the theologian will refrain from giving untimely public expression to them. So, even on areas where there's a legitimate diversity of opinion, we should be very careful about how we, uh, speak and act on these questions because one of the perennial dangers is that we want to present our opinion on a disputed issue as if it's like the Catholic opinion.

[00:07:34]And Donum Veritatis 27 is saying, "Don't do that." It goes on to talk about cases where an individual disagrees even with the fallible magisterium, and that you should avoid turning to the mass media, um, to try to exert the pressure of public opinion. So, you don't try to do like a pressure campaign and be like, "Can you believe the church did this?"

[00:07:59]And try to organize, you know, a bunch of pushback because again, that undermines people's trust in their bishops and in their Pope. That's not helpful. Like even if you win the battle, you lose the war because people just trust the church less, and and that causes a lot of damage. So, those words are written, you know, particularly for theologians, but I think they're a good model for all of us. Uh, all right.

[00:08:21]Christa, I jumped on your question. Uh, was that all right or No, I appreciate that. Thank you. Oh, all right. Uh, let's send uh, if she said no, she was mad at me, I was not going to send her a book. But since she said that was okay, uh, let's send her uh, Pope Peter, uh, Joe's book, Pope Peter, uh, about uh, the papacy, one of Joe's favorite topics. All you have to do hang hang on, Christa, give us an address there in New Jersey and we will