Obedience in All Things but Sin?

"One cannot leap from 'ceasing to offer the Tridentine Mass is not intrinsically sinful' to 'ceasing to offer the Tridentine Mass out of obedience is always morally permissible.'"

From Rorate Cæli

By James Baresel

A priest of my diocese, who occasionally offers the Tridentine Mass on an as needed basis, has developed a habit of preaching on obedience every single time he does so—basing himself, sometimes explicitly, on Saint Alphonsus Liguori’s principle that it is never sinful to obey a superior’s command to do something which is not itself sinful. No attempt to explain just how the saint’s highly qualified statement might be relevant to the priest’s obvious implication has not, to my knowledge, ever been made.

Only the obtuse will fail to notice that Saint Alphonsus—who habitually held the stricter views on debated matters—limited himself to affirming that such obedience is “never sinful.” Not “never best.” Not “always morally required.” No more can be concluded from his principle than that obeying restrictions on the Tridentine Mass is morally permissible.

Unless the priest overlooked or was attempting to obfuscate those distinctions there can only be one “logic” to stressing Saint Alphonsus’s principles—that even if disobediently using the Tridentine missal might be justified, obedience gives the only certainty of avoiding sin. But no quarter sane, quarter educated priest would apply that standard to judging whether circumstances justify anything from “natural family planning” to war.

Because such judgments must be based on a necessarily fallible assessments of facts, traditional manuals of moral theology do not require an unattainable absolute certainty when making them. All they require is sufficiently compelling evidence that a course of action is justified.

Pitting “we can be absolutely certain obedience is permitted” against “we cannot be absolutely certain about something we can never be absolutely certain about” reduces traditional teaching on justified disobedience to a practically meaningless technicality. At best it is a form of scrupulosity, at worst moral cowardice. Using that standard of absolute certainty, a married couple with compelling reasons to use natural family planning or a government with compelling reasons to declare war would have to refrain from doing so. In reality, sufficiently severe circumstances can made the ordinarily “safe” course of action positively sinful.

Pope Paul VI and Pope Francis made clear their dislike of laity using their freedom under traditional Church teaching to choose their own method of prayer at Mass and their intention to goad people into a particular method through the new missal. Archbishop Annibale Bugnini and Cardinal Arthur Roche made clear their agreement with the foregoing and their opposition to the Church’s traditional theology.

If the texts of the new missal are (at least minimally) acceptable despite that, it is impossible to square those intentions with insisting upon “obedience as usual.” Henry Sire’s observation that if Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Robert Bellarmine were asked about the matter, they would reply “that the question had been made too easy, and that it required no theologian to see that resistance was justified” hit the nail right on the head.

A less obvious limitation of Saint Alphonsus’s principle is that he used the term “sinful” rather than “intrinsically sinful.” Being accustomed to stressing that some things are intrinsically sinful, it is easy forget how many things are not. Under ordinary circumstances, a nude woman entering a roomful of men sins by creating an unjustified near occasion of sin. It is permissible for grave reasons or if—under highly unusual circumstances—it would not create a near occasion of sin. The fact that doing so is not intrinsically sinful does not make it permissible to do so under obedience under ordinary circumstances.

Could circumstances make it sinful for a priest to cease offering the Tridentine Mass out of obedience? Given the reasons for restrictions, I find it hard to categorically exclude in principle the possibility that a situation could arise it which it could be. The important point is that one cannot leap from “ceasing to offer the Tridentine Mass is not intrinsically sinful” to “ceasing to offer the Tridentine Mass out of obedience is always morally permissible.”

The ironic absurdity is that clergymen least willing to consider the Tridentine Mass a matter for justified disobedience are not infrequently those most likely to consider attendance at Masses offered by the Society of Saint Pius X to be dangerous or—despite everything Rome has said to the contrary—sinful. If avoiding the Society of Saint Pius X is that imperative, common sense would suggest providing an alternative for attending the Tridentine Mass, even if that means being willing to offer it secret for those who can be trusted in the event that its public use is suppressed in a particular area.