Petrine Primacy

Father H on the horrible consequences of Francis's Papacy .

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

An interesting piece on Erick Ybarra's blog about Byzantine perspectives on the Petrine Primacy. He concludes it by wondering what S Maximus the Confessor (perhaps the most explicitly papalist Eastern Father) could have said about PF.

When the Fathers of Chalcedon shouted "Peter has spoken through Leo", I do not for one moment believe that they meant "What an exciting novel doctrine! How clever of Leo to think it up!" I think they meant something very much more like "Leo has discharged the Petrine duty of defending us against heretical innnovation".

In both the East and in the West, the Papacy has at least wished to function as an obstacle against doctrinal innovation. Blessed John Henry Newman, whose imminent canonisation was happily made official yesterday, called this function that of being a remora, a barrier. Vatican I most felicitously asserted that the Holy Spirit was notpromised to the Successors of Peter so that, by His inspiration, they could teach new doctrine. Dr Trevor Jalland, a predecessor of mine in my last Anglican job, devoted his monumental Bampton Lectures to making just this point.

The ultrapapalism of Bergoglianism is not something more than Catholicism; it is something very greatly less.

The clique around PF has, in fact, deprived us of the Papacy we are entitled to have, a Papacy bestowed by God and devoted to guarding and expounding carefully what has been handed down. Instead of this, an "aggressive, insolent faction" (Newman puts things so succinctly!) has endeavoured and is still endeavouring to foist upon us a fake Papacy which Vatican I explicitly repudiated, operating as a pseudoPapacy which is an indefatigable engine of doctrinal innovation, ambiguity, and disorder, disguised as inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

I have myself collaborated in documents attempting to specify and enumerate the heretical positions that PF has favoured. I do not repent of having done this. They were valuable contributions to the Universal Church. But I do feel that the essence of PF's doctrinal delinquency lies in his de facto repudiation of what Vatican I taught about the limitations and purpose of the papal ministry.

Doellinger, poor fellow, was (to Newman's sorrow) excommunicated for feeling unable to subscribe to the teaching of Vatican I. (Little did he realise that, in God's most merciful providence, Vatican I would be a monument against papal misbehaviour.)

PF is undoubtedly the one and only genuine pope, as Professor Ratzinger again recently made clear. Let there be no doubt about that. Sedevacantism is a disorder equal to Bergoglianism.

But geese; ganders; sauces; Doellinger; Bergoglio