The following lecture was given at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Littleton, Colorado, on July 31, 2021. The video has been posted at YouTube; however, the text below features extensive endnotes that contain much important material. My goal, especially in the wake of Traditionis Custodes,
is to refute the all-too-plentiful Catholic apologists who—proof-texting magisterial documents the way their Protestant counterparts proof-text St. Paul—maintain that the pope has absolute executive, legislative, and judicial power over the liturgy. I argue, in contrast, that papal power exists within an historical, ecclesial context that conditions and limits its legitimate exercise, and therefore also grounds the right of the faithful to resist egregious violations of immemorial custom and venerable tradition. In short, this is a defense of the very foundations of the traditionalist movement in the Catholic Church.
The Pope’s Boundedness to Tradition as a Legislative Limit:
Replying to Ultramontanist Apologetics
Peter A. Kwasniewski
Catholic apologists have done a lot of great work over the decades. They have refuted many a Protestant, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, or the like oddity, and have helped Jews, Moslems, atheists, agnostics, neo-pagans, and members of all manner of false religions to find Christ and to enter His Church. For this, we are all grateful, and long may their work in this vein continue.
But the same apologists do not perform so well when they turn their sights to intraecclesial affairs, particularly when it comes to explaining the nature, purpose, and limits of papal infallibility. Even there, the apologists do well when they are justifying wonderful things like Humanae Vitae, for its teaching is in accord with natural and divine law and the tradition of the Church, and the pope’s job is to uphold all that, regardless of pressures against it. Yet when popes make spectacularly bad decisions or teach that which is ambiguous or male sonans (evil-sounding) or materially erroneous, these apologists are caught flat-footed and empty-handed. They are tempted either to ignore the problem as an embarrassing exception or to appeal bravely to an unthinking ultramontanism, as if sheer bluster will somehow paper it over.
We have seen a great deal of the latter problem ever since the release of the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes. Most commentators, it is true, fall into two more obvious categories: the progressives who gloat shamelessly over the defeat of the nasty trads, and nearly everyone else who sees Pope Francis’s move as unwarranted, malicious, inflammatory, bellicose, unworkable, and—the worst sin after Vatican II—thoroughly unpastoral. But there is a coetus of self-styled apologists who have rushed to make podcasts defending the pope’s supposed right to create, abolish, and modify liturgy nearly any way he pleases.
This lecture will not be an extensive critique of
Traditionis Custodes—that can be found in many other places at this point.
[1] Rather, I want to explain how we reached a point of such absurdity that a Roman Pontiff can dare, with the stroke of a pen, to consign to the margins and to eventual oblivion an unbroken liturgical patrimony of millennia and to claim that the new rites created by committee under Paul VI are the “only” (
unica)
lex orandi or law of prayer of the Catholic Church—and the even greater absurdity that there are Catholic apologists defending him and his purported “right” to do so.