Father brings to light a paper by Fr Aidan Nichols, OP, that expresses opinions his Superiors (and Rome?) would like to suppress.
From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment
On August 18, 2017, Dan Hitchens published news in the Catholic Herald about a paper read by the Dominican, Oxford and Cambridge, theologian, Fr Aidan Nichols.
Fr Aidan publishes a lot; his connection with us goes back to the years long before the Ordinariate when he devoted enormous amounts of time and care to helping us as we worked towards what finally came to fruition in the Ordinariate. He is a major theological heavyweight.
Back in 2017, we were all coming to terms with Amoris laetitia, PF's first major encouragement of heresy and incitement to sexual immorality. Aidan's paper entered into those topics ("an extremely grave situation").
Today, however, I'm planning to give a new airing to his more general remarks. Sadly, the full text of the paper is not available; after the Hitchens report, Aidan appears to have been forbidden to share it further.
In Easter Week, 2019, he broke silence to the extent of signing the Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church; in 2020, he was sent to teach in the seminary in Jamaica (seven seminarians!).
Fr Nichols said that neither the Western nor Eastern Codes of Canon Law contain a procedure "for enquiry into the case of a pope believed to have taught doctrinal error, much less is there provision for a trial." He remarked that the tradition of canon law is that "the first see is judged by no-one". But the First Vatican Council had restricted the doctrine of papal infallibility, so that "it is not the position of the Roman Catholic Church that a pope is incapable of leading people astray by false teaching as a public doctor. He may be the supreme appeal judge of Christendom ... but that does not make him immune to perpetrating doctrinal howlers. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly given the piety that has surrounded the figures of the popes since the pontificate of Pius IX, this fact appears to be unknown to to many who ought to know better." Given the limits on papal infallibility, Aidan remarked, canon law might be able to accommodate a formal procedure for inquiring into whether a pope had taught error ... "a procedure for calling to order a pope who teaches error."
He said that the judicial process would "dissuade popes from any tendency to doctrinal waywardness or simple negligence", and would answer some "ecumenical anxieties" of Anglicans, Orthodox, and others who fear that the pope has carte blanche to impose any teaching. "Indeed, it may be that the present crisis of the Roman Magisterium is providentially intended to call attention to the limits of primacy in this regard."
He thought that this procedure might be less "conflictual" if it took place during a future pontificate, rather as Pope Honorius was only condemned after he had ceased to occupy the chair of Peter.
I applaud the effort. The thorny issue here is that if something besides the Papacy has to function as the Papacy to fix the Papacy, the locus of supreme authority becomes addressed to two or more, and that seems to collide against the principle of unity that manifests the visible unity of the Church.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not a heretical pope but all the cardinals and bishops who go along with him. St. Vincent of Lerins said that when the whole church goes bad we have to cling to the church of antiquity.
ReplyDelete