On the Papacy of Pope Francis - Parts 1 & 2

Patrick Coffin has come out as a Benevacantist and the Catholic Answers crowd is attacking him. In Leila Marie Lawler's opinion, they're both wrong. 

From Happy Despite Them

By Leila Marie Lawler

You don't have to agree with Patrick Coffin -- and I do not agree with him -- to think that this video from Catholic Answers responding to his thesis is not adequate. Dismissing the cataclysmic internal upheaval we are experiencing, in a misguided attempt to calm the waters, could even cause scandal to the very people the hosts wish to reassure. 

The errors of Pope Francis are not just ones of personal immorality or defects of prudence. We are beyond "you can affirm he is pope without defending everything he says and does" and well into "there is something fundamentally wrong here."

I think Pope Francis is Pope -- and is a bad pope. I have come under fire from self-appointed establishment watchdogs like Dave Armstrong for saying this, even though I'm specifically distinguishing myself from those who think he is not pope at all.

But I warn Joe Heschmeyer and Cy Kellett not to take a flippant attitude towards those who are rightfully disturbed and dismayed. People really are losing their faith or, in the case of potential converts (the presumed target audience of Catholic Answers), turning away from the one true Church, on account of the Pope's hermeneutic of confusion regarding matters of liturgy, doctrine, and morals. Using the pseudo-assuaging tone of "it's fine, everything is fine" will not make this profound anxiety go away.

It's true that we, the laymen and suffering faithful, will not decide these matters (and Patrick Coffin says as much in his video), but we are well within our rights and duties to require the bishops to decide -- to hold them to the sticking point.

It's flippant, and therefore inappropriate, given the gravity of the matter, to say that Jesus will figure it out and "don't worry about it." Jesus may want us to call our bishops to account, just as the laymen of the 4th century did, in the Arian heresy. Read your St. John Henry Newman. Learn your history. The most scandalously depraved pope of history never attacked the foundations of the magisterial office the way Pope Francis has, as I have written in my book God Has No Grandchildren. 

And no, it was not Phil Lawler who said anything like that there is an imaginary crisis (around the 1 hour mark of the video). In fact, he is the one who has said that we are not in some merely cyclical blip of history, but at a significant crossroads, one that has to be confronted by all who are able to speak up.

Part Two:

Joe Heschmeyer and Cy Kellett make some good points in their video, although overall their tone is unacceptably dismissive and undermines, as I say here, their argument. However, they bring up two points in their response to Patrick Coffin (with whom I disagree, let me repeat) that I want to address. 

First, they say that the distinction between munus and ministerium in the resignation is a quibble, one that points to the legalism of Coffin's approach -- one that is not worth putting much weight on. I would simply reply that in itself, this is not a reason to dismiss the claim that something is meant by Pope Benedict when he himself dwells on those words. Yes, it's true that a father, a ruler, a bishop, an emeritus of any sort, retains the mantle and dignity of the office even when he is no longer carrying out its responsibilities. Of course, peaceful transition depends a lot on the dignity and commitment of the successor. 

In other words, if the father is a good father, determined to uphold the institution of the family in general and his family in particular (even acknowledging his own imperfections), the grandfather can, so to speak, rest on his laurels. Things may appear different if the person carrying out the ministerium is perceived as devouring it.

However, the obscurity of the distinction is not in itself enough to dismiss it. Keep in mind that the Arian crisis -- the direst event of our history and the one to which I would compare this moment -- turned, literally, on an iota, the least significant Greek letter. The way the Church understood the divine and human natures of Our Lord, and thus of the Church itself in representing that nature and indeed participating in it as His body, was at stake: homoousion, of one substance, as opposed to homoiousion, similar but not identical essence or substance. 

Such a small difference! It's hard to even see it in there in between the o's! Above our paygrade! Don't worry about it! Yet, St. John Henry Newman states, in his Notes on Arians of the Fourth Century: 

... in that time of immense confusion the divine dogma of our Lord's divinity was proclaimed, enforced, maintained, and (humanly speaking) preserved, far more by the "Ecclesia docta" than by the "Ecclesia docens;" that the body of the Episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism; that at one time the pope, at other times a patriarchal, metropolitan, or other great see, at {466} other times general councils, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth; while, on the other hand, it was the Christian people, who, under Providence, were the ecclesiastical strength of Athanasius, Hilary, Eusebius of Vercellæ, and other great solitary confessors, who would have failed without them ... (Note 5: 20 -- read the whole thing!) (emphasis mine)

Second, the hosts in the video caution, rightly, against resorting to a kind of gnosticism in which a certain undecipherable electoral protocol has not been followed and a vague disturbance in the spiritual stratosphere points to a situation in which what we can plainly see -- that Pope Francis is pope -- should be declared untrue -- that he is an anti-pope. 

Yet they themselves, in their final remarks, do worse. 

They agree together that we must obey and submit to this undeniably destructive papacy because of some possibility that Pope Francis is aiming at something better for us that we cannot understand, in our simple role as lay faithful. This is the Spadaro thesis, in which many words, never defined or fluid with the fluidity of the mind that can see that theologically (that is, gnostically), 2 + 2 = 5, are tossed together to convince us that monkeys may inhabit the Vatican for our own good, and it maybe raining in some spiritual sense.

Heschmeyer and Kellett spend a lot of time in this video cheerfully assuring us that it's easy to be Christian, that God never intends things to be difficult to see or understand. But then, in true gaslighting fashion, they end in also telling us that what we see plainly as offenses against God's Commandments (and frankly, just conduct unbefitting a Catholic) are part of some plan for our good. In short, they ask us to accept an attack on the very first principle of reason, the principle of non-contradiction, and to be at peace.

That would mean that to be told to reject the good is to be good. 

I don't mean to pick on them. Speaking of pay grades, I think they are above theirs. I am speaking of what is just the latest iteration of a tendency we have seen in action since the first tremors brought on by this pope, to ascribe to his actions some deep and unknowable effort to transform us as Christians. Anyone who minimizes the danger he represents must beware -- all such endeavors end the same way: in denying Christ in order to follow Christ.