Bishop Joseph Vincent Brennan of Fresno is nobody's idea of a liberal, and the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin did not list him with Episcopalians and Lutherans as a co-consecrator of Dr Gregory Kimura. In choir dress as an invited guest, Bishop Brennan stretched out his hand to pray God's blessing upon Dr Kimura while other hands were being laid upon him. A total nonstory. Likewise, Archbishop Flavio Pace was bowing his head and making the Sign of the Cross at the invocation of the Most Holy Trinity by Dame Sarah Mullally. He was not receiving her blessing. What she may have been doing with her own hands at that moment was her own affair. But even if you did not know, then you could guess some of the reactions to both of those occurrences. Set, of course, in a wider, if not exactly deeper, context.
Yet it was in respect of the impossibility of the ordination of women that Pope Saint John Paul II made the most recent assertion of the truth that even the Ordinary Magisterium could sometimes be infallible. In any case, when the Pope, the bishop, or, by the bishop's authority, the parish priest teaches, then that is what he is doing. Teaching. Not "expressing his opinion". And the Church's doctrine on, say, war and peace, or the economic order, is precisely that. Doctrine.
These things are usually open to cautious and qualified reconsideration by the authority that promulgated them or, where applicable, by a higher authority. But they are not suggestions. They are not advice. They are the Teaching of the Church. They are that Teaching as it is ordinarily taught and received. They are the Ordinary Magisterium. Or what do we think that the Pope is giving when he is not defining ex cathedra? Racing tips? What did we think that the minority party at Vatican I thought that all Papal teachings were, never mind their own teachings as bishops? Cocktail recipes? Note also the hallucination that small matters such as war and peace or the economic order were not "faith and morals". O ye of little faith. O ye of little morals. Your longstanding de facto schism is on the cusp of formalisation.
One of the greatest historians of the Catholic Church, Oxford University’s Dr Miles Pattenden, points out (“When Popes Get Theology Wrong”) that the greatest Catholic theologians in history have not been Popes, who often have no theological training, and have frequently rebuked Popes for speaking outside their field of expertise and making inappropriate theological pronouncements.
ReplyDeleteHe points out: “JD Vance appears to have noticed the Catholic Church’s long tradition of criticising popes who mistake legal and pastoral authority for theological expertise. In fact, some of the greatest theological minds in the Church’s history were only too quick to tell popes that they were straying beyond their competence and ought to leave such territory to others.
Most popes during the past thousand years have had legal, not theological training. The Church’s great theological minds—Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine, John Henry Newman—by contrast, were almost never popes.
Francisco de Vitoria, a sixteenth-century Dominican theologian at Salamanca, and a major exponent of Just War theory, was another key critic who, in effect, told popes to butt out. He argued, explicitly, that moral and theological questions about war require careful reasoning from first principles: ecclesiastical authority cannot simply pronounce them.
Medieval theologians had often held that the pope can get his theology wrong. Honorius I (r. 625–38) was famously denounced as a heretic at the Third Council of Constantinople (680–81). Jean Gerson, the great fifteenth-century theologian and University of Paris Chancellor, argued that the pope’s authority was real but bounded. Theological definition belonged not to one man but only to the Church as a whole.
Popes themselves have only invoked infallibility once since 1870—when Pius XII defined the Assumption of Mary in 1950—a sure sign that they understand their claim’s controversial nature.
After Vatican I, John Henry Newman still argued that Catholics have a duty to think about papal pronouncements carefully before accepting them. ‘If I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.’“
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-04-20-expert-comment-when-popes-get-theology-wrong
Exactly. The notion that Catholics can’t query the views of Popes is ahistorical nonsense. The Church’s best thinkers always queried theological missteps by the Pope, as JD Vance rightly says.
Better out than in.
Delete"The Church’s best thinkers ... JD Vance"? Thank you for a good laugh.
You are obsessed with infallibility. Its rarity does not make everything else a glorified suggestions box. Nor does it entitle you, me, Vance, or Pattenden (who is not, or at least not yet, "One of the greatest historians of the Catholic Church", and who is mostly noted for his work on Catholic medievalism and Queer Theory) to behave as if we were Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine, or John Henry Newman.
“ to behave as if we were Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine, or John Henry Newman. ”
ReplyDeleteYou don’t have to be any of those people to query papal pronouncements-that’s the whole point. As John Henry Newman said, all Catholics should consult their own conscience before accepting papal pronouncements. Even Vatican I never envisaged Popes being considered without error or unquestionably accepted on anything outside very narrowly defined doctrines. So JD Vance is quite within his rights to question a Tweet by Leo which in condemning all wars, appears to endorse universal pacifism, something at odds with the just war theory espoused by those great past theologians.
That makes my point, because Vance had clearly not understood what the Pope had said.
Delete