FORTY-NINE YEARS AND NO POPE?

Hopeless, Pope-less and Still Counting

September 22, 2007

Fr. John Peek 
(Guest columnist)

Fr. Peek's first Mass in 1996

Yesterday a parishioner passed this article to me which had been mailed to him. Fr John Peek and I were seminarians together; in fact we were classmates having entered the SSPX seminary together in 1990. Fr. Peek is the current chaplain to the Chapel of St. Roger and St. Mary a traditionalist church in a suburb of Boston, Ma.. He does an excellent job of explaining some of the same points I have been making in the last three columns that I simply had to share his well-written piece which appeared in the church bulletin September 2, 2007.

The real issue is Divine Providence and belief in it. Then there is the question how far Divine Providence will go in using defective human characters to work His eternal plan? Our Lord Jesus Christ said immediately before His ascension: "All power in heaven and earth is given unto me", and "Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world." (Matt.28;18,20) Divine Providence knows no limits then, and so defective human characters can be used by God any way he sees fit. The devil's own persecution of Our Lord and the devil's leading the chief priests into putting Him to death won the devil's own defeat and our redemption. If he who is titled the Evil One can be made an instrument of his own downfall how much more sinful men can be God's instruments willing or not. Even the damned souls in Hell will serve God against their will by serving His justice. Judas betrayed and became an instrument of redemption but in his pride wouldn't accept the price of humility on his head for the rest of his life and gave himself over to the devil. He is contrasted with Peter, who although honored by being the first pope had the opprobrium of having denied that he had even ever known his Savior.

It is those who spend inordinate time preoccupied with the devil's pomp and successes who fall into a kind of defeatism regarding God calling the shots. The King of this world is already judged. These words the Lord declared and the words mean what they say or else Christ isn't God. It is all as simple as that. Further complications and complainers need not apply.

It is not a matter of likes and dislikes. A serious faith in God faces the mature requirement that God disposes matters in ways that His subjects may intensely dislike. A faithful Catholic has to accept that by Divine permission a disastrous Council wounded the Mystical Body of Christ and that a line of popes in the wake of the Council ruled the Catholic Church and implemented the disaster. To reject it may seem suitable for certain characters as a real solution but in reality it is only a psychological device of deceitful simplicity that makes the last state worse than the first.

Let's now call them the forty-niners. It is now forty-nine years since the death of Pope Pius XII, and the main strain of arguments of the forty-niners is that since the election of the first pope who called the Second Vatican Council there has been no pope. That if John XXIII had been pope, it was only for a few short years until he convoked the invalid and heretical Second Vatican Council and then lost his claim to the papal throne for doing so.

Keep in mind that this is according to their judgment. The largest Traditionalist body, the Society of St. Pius X doesn't agree. They maintain only material heresies have occurred which no competent authority has proclaimed to be formal and confronted the Pope and the Curia with proof. They reserve it to a future pope to finally decide such matters since that would be the only competent decision maker. In other words the pope has a right to process by canon law just like any Catholic and it is not up to a democratic decision. That's Congregationalism in the Protestant Congregationalist model.

But the pat phrase is that according to Cardinal Bellarmine, a manifest heretical pope deposes himself. Therefore the conclusion is as instantaneous as it is simple. The deal is done, no further judgment needed. It is a glib closing down of the thinking process and then a long, long, long list of heresies is intoned like a kind of litany. Some more enterprising forty-niner could provide the appropriate chant. What has to be covered over quickly is the question as how could a pope be declared a heretic and declared that he has deposed himself without the processes of Canon Law. Why would he be the exception to all other members of the Church? The reply is that the Apostolic College is also heretical therefore can't perform such an investigation, trial and judgment. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it and that someone is you and me those who agree. Anyone who wants to join the lynch mob qualifies.

From then on the language of the forty-niners lynch mob becomes Congregationalist and very democratic. Behind this is the assumption that the Government of the Church Christ founded is no longer in the form and figure in which Christ founded it. It has no visible Head and no visible hierarchy and no organization in place with the power, authority and jurisdiction to elect another pope.

How many members of the College of Cardinals received their Cardinal's hat from Pope Pius XII? And if there were at least one, would he be convinced that the Papal Throne is vacant and that the purported occupant is an anti-pope? [Note: The last Cardinal from Pius XII was Paul-Émile Léger of Montreal who died in 1991. +TF]

The cassiciacum thesis tries to anticipate these questions and pays tribute to the opportuneness of such questions by offering a middle-way solution. For them the papal throne has an occupant with some limited jurisdiction to appoint an apostolic college who can elect one of their own to become another somewhat valid occupant of the papal throne. But the occupant isn't a real pope, but a kind of a quasi-anti-pope. He is materially a pope but not formally. The formality of his becoming a pope will occur when he renounces his heresies. But of course, the decision making as to what is and is not a heresy and when and in what proper form it has been renounced will never be settled among the challengers because not a single one of them, be he a layman, priest or bishop can bind a single soul to his decision and so a free-for-all guessing game continues with no end in view.

This change from a hierarchical, visible structure with real ruling powers to a Congregationalist model whereby its ministers have only voluntary compliance to their authority and are not bound to any other authority except of their choosing runs aground of such teaching as found in MORTALIUM ANIMOS.

Hence not only must the Church still exist today and continue always to exist, but it must ever be exactly the same as it was in the days of the Apostles. Otherwise we must say - which God forbid - that Christ has failed in His purpose or that He erred when He asserted of His Church that the gates of hell should never prevail against it. Pius XI.

Take an historical glance back to the Council of Florence when the schismatic Greeks momentarily returned. But the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople could not bind any other Greek bishops to return to Roman unity. Keep in mind the Greeks are better organized than today's Forty-niners.

Repugnant to Catholic sensibilities is the concept of a forty-nine year interim between valid and undoubted popes. The longest interim in Church history was four years. Another long interim was two years. Beyond that, every conceivable safeguard has been put in place to maintain a survival government between popes that can command Cardinals to enter into a conclave to elect a new pope without unnecessary delay. It is the nature of the Church to have a visible head in order to fully carry out its mission.

Vatican Council I gave an anathema on false notions of the relationship between Church and Pope.

The promise of Our Lord is to not leave us orphans. Forty-nine years is becoming a perpetual absence rather than an interim between popes. The vast majority of faithful Roman Catholics who remain so have done it without recourse to a solution that disavows valid jurisdiction and teaching authority in a visible hierarchy with a visible head. They followed a simple course of resistance to unjustifiable novelties even without private interpretation of the doctrinal content of Tradition.

Fr. John Peek

It is so refreshing to see a fellow cleric not afraid to take the blinkers off and see the light of day, see traditionalism for what it is and call a spade a spade (unless like Gwendolen Fairfax you can say that you've never seen a spade !)

+TF

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