Lots of great info, as always. I especially appreciate the links to Matt Gaspers' articles against the sedevacantist positions being advocated by some today. In reality, sedevacantism is like suicide--in trying to "solve" the issue of a problematic visible head of the Church, it in effect "kills" the Church herself (as if that were possible) by undermining her perpetual visibility and making it practically impossible to ever elect a new pope. It is a total dead end that, unlike the SSPX, FSSP, ICKSP, and diocesan TLM communities, has born virtually no fruit other than tiny, isolated communities and angry, online comboxes.
I think traditionalists in general need to realize that a principled "recognize and resist" position actually HELPS our cause by providing a much more workable framework toward the restoration of Tradition for which we all hope. True, it may deprive us of the temporary emotional satisfaction of "declaring Francis has lost his office," but it at least allows for the regular election of new--and, eventually, hopefully better--popes (and not via some illusory "imperfect council" of online commentators). It also enables us to map out more precisely the contours of papal authority and when resistance to its abuses may be justified. To me, even leaving aside all theology, this scenario in which I can still resist the current craziness coming out of Rome while keeping alive the hope of an eventual glorious restoration seems infinitely preferable to concluding that the Catholic Church has effectively ceased to exist as a visible and universal institution.
I dont know about that. And when I say, “I don’t know” I really mean it. I am aware that God does not play by human rules, and neither does he act according to human understanding. “As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end” comes to my mind, as does the idea that perhaps we are in a situation now which only happens once. Or perhaps it is just a prefigurement of times to come, but this time a bigger one. Is the Katechon the pope? If so, it seems that perhaps we are in that time. In the papal bull, “Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio,” which I never see discussed unless I look really hard for it, Pope Paul IV ordered that nobody could become bishop or pope if they were a heretic or had ever been one, and that if they became one while in office they would lose their office. I don’t know that it has ever been lifted, but I do know that popes all the way up to Pope St Pius X used to suspend it temporarily for the conclave following them. Do they still do that? Is it still in force? I don’t know and I havent been able to find an answer. I have seen a number of things asserting that it isnt binding because it just deals with discipline. I have a hard time buying it, but something I found once convinced me, though I cannot remember its arguments well enough to articulate them. There are, however, there are two things that I fond very worthy of note. The first is that appears that per Pope Paul IV, a pope or bishop could lose their office due to heresy. The second is in the preamble which dealt with why the bull was issued, namely to stave off the day that the abomination of desolation prophesied in Daniel would come. The strong implication I take from it is that the pope used his teaching authority to state that one day the pope would be a heretic, and thus perhaps no pope at all, and then would come the abomination of desolation and presumably, the antichrist, end of the world, etc. That day has to come sometime, and perhaps it seems a bit self centered to think we are in those days now perhaps, but at the same time, we are living in *unprecedented* times to the point that the pope says stuff that seems to be apostate, and oligarchs were openly talking about implementing a requirement to have a tiny implant that had your vaccine and financial records in it to be able to, to quote Bill Gates in his 2020 TED talk, “travel or do certain types of financial transactions. Just a little mark.” And meanwhile most countries are developing or have already built, central bank digital currencies. So idk, the times are certainly strange. Have the people of North Sentinel Island been evangelized yet?
I do know that this version of the Coventry Carol is the best one I have found so far and is in better keeping with the content of it. Give it a listen on this, the Feast of the Holy Innocents:
It seems to me that the sedeprivationist thesis is the only one that could account for how the papacy continues (it does so "materially" but not "formally," until a future pope decisively rejects modernism and accepts the duties of his office, in which case that which was material becomes formal). However, this distinction was invented out of thin air, so to speak, and seems impossible to maintain. If someone holds an office, he does so actually, and therefore is, simply, what the office enables him to be, whether he uses it worthily or unworthily. I do not see "room" for a material/formal distinction in classic ecclesiology.
People say 'I'm not in communion with Francis' errors but I am in communion with him.' That makes me seriously scratch my head. The See of Peter is a teaching office. It's sole purpose is to promulgate and confirm the correct Catholic faith. It is a teaching office and if I say I am in communion with the one who occupies that office then ipso facto I must be in communion with what he teaches. And if he teaches explicitly that the hindu gods are as sure a path to the Divine as Jesus Christ and I say I am in communion with him then I along with him have denied Jesus Christ and I will go to hell. Tell me why what I just said is wrong.
I think your very analysis provides a key to the solution. When I attend a school, I am subject to the masters (the teachers) for as long as I am enrolled there. I am their pupil. However, this does not mean there cannot be good and bad masters, who teach what is true or false. I am still a pupil and subject but that does not mean I endorse all that is taught by all of them.
Moreover, I would push back against the notion that the papacy is solely for teaching. It is an office of governance, of worship, and of instruction, and can do a better or worse job of any of those tasks. But most of all, it is a principle of unity of a hierarchical body: this function, which is both symbolic and epistemic, carries on through the institution of the papacy itself, regardless of occasional dark periods through which it passes.
I would disagree. The Office of the Papacy was created to confirm the Faith. It was given to Peter based on his divinely inspired Confession of Faith in Jesus Christ as the only Son of the Living God. When a priest prays the Roman Canon at the current moment he according to your position he is supposed to be praying that God the Father will watch over and guard the Church: una cum famulo tuo Papa nostro Francesco, et Antistite nostro N. et omnibus orthodoxis atque catholicae et apostolicae fidei cultoribus.
"One with Francis our pope, our Bishop... and all the orthodox teachers of the Catholic and Apostolic faith' It is an insufferable logical contradiction to say this. To claim that one is in communion both with those who teach the orthodox and apostolic Faith and with Francis who teaches that the hindu gods are a sure way to salvation. That just doesn't work.
The pope in this unfortunate case is a placeholder, a continuator of an office. He is keeping a seat warm for the next occupant. That's our only necessary dealing with a renegade pope. Moreover, to the extent that Francis has any beliefs that line up with the orthodox apostolic faith, to that extent he is a teacher with whom I am "one." I think you are making this issue so black and white that you are bound, by this logic, to start rejecting most of the modern popes, since one can find enormities in all of them.
Can you name one other pope who publicly and explicitly taught that Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation? I have my doubts about whether a few of them actually believed it but I cannot recall any of them ever saying anything like that. That is a giant red line that he crossed there which is why it became so black and white for me.
I think you are overestimating the papacy. The Catholic Church was born in Mary's womb - not in the Vatican. Peter denied Him and ran away at the Crucifixion. The temporary loss of the papacy will not kill the Catholic Church.
I don't deny that the Church can survive the temporary eclipse of the exercise of the papacy. But it cannot survive without the papacy itself, which is a divine institution. Nevertheless, Our Lord planned well enough that He did not rest everything exclusively on the papacy. There are multiple "pillars" on which the Faith rests; call it a system of redundancies if you will, but if one pillar buckles, there are other pillars that can hold up the structure until such time as the first pillar is repaired.
Exactly. The current situation in the Vatican and with its branch managers around the world is like the Chavista regime in Venezuela. Even though the people who run its institutions do not do so for the benefit of its people and really can't even be said anymore to be the legitimate officeholders the country still exists and the government still does exist and still can perform some basic functions, even if those who run it are entirely illegitimate.
Yes. I remember being very struck by an argument in Leo XIII, where he says that having nearly any government is better than total anarchy and the violence and confusion it unleashes. Moreover, he says that human nature is such that a vacuum of power cannot last long but a government must form. The ecclesiastical parallel is not that governments fall and form anew, but that the Church's nature is inherently structured, hierarchical, regardless of the quality of the men who temporarily inhabit it. And this structure, as much as we might complain about the abuses, makes possible many goods we take for granted; we'd be appalled at a world without a visible Church, however bad its leaders are, yet this realization is difficult because we've never in fact been deprived of the Church.
My sense is that this take is very wrong-headed. We should not think in terms of strategic positions; we should seek only fidelity to Christ and the truths that have been authentically revealed to and taught by his Church.
It reminds me of the clearly bad argument offered by Siscoe and Salza, cited by Gaspers:
"For if a Pope were able to fall from the pontificate without the Church being aware of it, we would never know for sure which Popes in the past were true Popes, and which had crossed the line into heresy and lost their office. Hence, we would have no way of knowing if the definitive decrees of the various councils had been ratified by a real Pope, or by one who had lapsed into heresy for a time and secretly fallen from the pontificate. Consequently, the object of the Faith itself (the dogmas that must be believed) would be uncertain, and the determination of which dogmas were defined by true Popes, and which were not, would be left to the private judgment of individual Catholics in the pew to decide. The scrupulous would be paralyzed by doubt, and the unstable would fall into the most outrageous conclusions."
This is silly. The scrupulous will be scrupulous, regardless of what any theologian teaches. And if there is some real question about the legitimacy of past papal teaching and papal tenures, the solution cannot be to scrupulously clutch theological pearls and insist that this cannot be. The solution is to address the issue frankly, honestly, responsibly, and have the question authoritatively resolved by the usual mechanisms whereby disputed questions are authoritatively resolved in the Church. "But that might be hard!" Yup! That's just the way she goes sometimes, brothers!
Happy wedding anniversary to you and your wife! I received a copy of Turned Around for Christmas and am looking forward to delving into it. Thank you for all that you do to defend, explain, and promote the traditions of our Faith!
Hearing "Mary's Baby" for the first time last year convinced me that a man capable of composing such emotive beauty must be worth trusting...and "following."
I also have a question related to Part 3 of the talk by Fr. Bernward Deneke, FSSP. I agree that the reverence and solemnity of the TLM is certainly more likely than the Novus Ordo to induce lapsed/lukewarm Catholics to recognize that they should not receive Holy Communion prior to going to Confession. However, is it enough to just rely on this aesthetic, or do we need more explicit catechesis at our TLMs, such as a regular announcement for visitors on the dispositions necessary to receive Communion worthily? It seems we have a major pastoral problem that did not exist prior to Vatican II, in that the link between Confession and Communion has been largely lost (at least the US). It is great that the young man cited by Fr. Deneke came to the realization of his unworthiness on his own, but I wonder if it is a bit presumptuous to assume this will normally be the case, even at the TLM, without more explicit catechesis.
Our (Oratorian) TLM parish, especially around great feasts like Christmas and Easter, explicitly prints in the mass bulletin and is communicated by the priest from the pulpit during the reading of notices after the homily.
I don't think Fr. Deneke would suggest for a moment that such a conversion will automatically occur at the TLM or that catechesis is not necessary. There is no doubt that some preaching must be given from time to time about conditions for worthy reception, and perhaps it is the case that an urban parish that sees a lot of curious outsiders visiting should post something at the door or put it in the bulletin.
On the other hand, one of the most off-putting things is to have didactic and moralistic preaching on a regular basis. I do think the TLM is at a tremendous advantage because those who are unaccustomed to it are quite turned off or kept at bay by the kneeling at the rail, the reception on the tongue, the whole solemnity of the communion time.
Good points. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that anyone in particular is being presumptuous, just that we have our work cut out for us as a Church to restore the Confession-Communion link that was second nature even to lapsed Catholics prior to decades of bad/non-existent catechesis.
Another advantage of the TLM in this regard is its length. It's not uncommon to see apparent newcomers walk out of a Sunday Sung Mass right around the hour mark, prior to Communion. While only God can judge their reasons, this could be another element that inherently helps prevent unworthy Communions.
I think Gaspers has not properly understood Lamont's position. Lamont writes: "The publicly available evidence for his knowingly and willingly denying the faith establishes that Francis is a public and notorious heretic. ... This single public and notorious heresy suffices to establish that he is no longer the pope. ... He clearly does not believe the Catholic faith, and refuses to profess it; how can he possibly function as the pope or make a claim on Catholics to believe and obey him? Such claims are sheer impudence on his part. An honest man would state that he could not believe the Catholic faith and that he was resigning the papacy in consequence. What is startling is the refusal of Catholics to acknowledge this obvious fact."
All this seems correct. Gaspers want to object that the prelates of the Church still need to act to remove Francis. But obviously Lamont agrees! Hence his conclusion:
"almost all bishops and cardinals have ignored his departure from the faith, and acted as if they belong to a cult where blind obedience and mindless adoration of an evil leader is praiseworthy and compulsory. This is a betrayal of their duty to God, and it has to end. All believing bishops and cardinals should publicly state that Francis has clearly ceased to accept the Catholic faith. For pastoral reasons they might begin by asking him to retire from the papacy because of his unbelief, rather than bluntly and immediately stating that he is no longer the pope. But it is not permissible to continue treating him as the legitimate ruler of the Church."
What Gaspers fails to realize, I would suggest, is that the necessity of the believing bishops and cardinals to act is only a *consequence* of the realized fact that indeed Francis has cut himself off from communion with Christ, and therefore cannot possibly be, or function as, pope. Conversely, if he were still pope, then there would be no necessity, *or even possibility*, of legitimately deposing him. (The case is analogous to an 'annulment,' which is of course in fact a finding and declaration of the *fact* of nullity, not a *making null* of a valid marriage. And we would of course not say that an evidently invalidly married couple ought to be regarded and treated as validly married until such a time as there was an official declaration of nullity by the responsible chancery official or whatever.)
Lots of great info, as always. I especially appreciate the links to Matt Gaspers' articles against the sedevacantist positions being advocated by some today. In reality, sedevacantism is like suicide--in trying to "solve" the issue of a problematic visible head of the Church, it in effect "kills" the Church herself (as if that were possible) by undermining her perpetual visibility and making it practically impossible to ever elect a new pope. It is a total dead end that, unlike the SSPX, FSSP, ICKSP, and diocesan TLM communities, has born virtually no fruit other than tiny, isolated communities and angry, online comboxes.
I think traditionalists in general need to realize that a principled "recognize and resist" position actually HELPS our cause by providing a much more workable framework toward the restoration of Tradition for which we all hope. True, it may deprive us of the temporary emotional satisfaction of "declaring Francis has lost his office," but it at least allows for the regular election of new--and, eventually, hopefully better--popes (and not via some illusory "imperfect council" of online commentators). It also enables us to map out more precisely the contours of papal authority and when resistance to its abuses may be justified. To me, even leaving aside all theology, this scenario in which I can still resist the current craziness coming out of Rome while keeping alive the hope of an eventual glorious restoration seems infinitely preferable to concluding that the Catholic Church has effectively ceased to exist as a visible and universal institution.
I dont know about that. And when I say, “I don’t know” I really mean it. I am aware that God does not play by human rules, and neither does he act according to human understanding. “As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end” comes to my mind, as does the idea that perhaps we are in a situation now which only happens once. Or perhaps it is just a prefigurement of times to come, but this time a bigger one. Is the Katechon the pope? If so, it seems that perhaps we are in that time. In the papal bull, “Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio,” which I never see discussed unless I look really hard for it, Pope Paul IV ordered that nobody could become bishop or pope if they were a heretic or had ever been one, and that if they became one while in office they would lose their office. I don’t know that it has ever been lifted, but I do know that popes all the way up to Pope St Pius X used to suspend it temporarily for the conclave following them. Do they still do that? Is it still in force? I don’t know and I havent been able to find an answer. I have seen a number of things asserting that it isnt binding because it just deals with discipline. I have a hard time buying it, but something I found once convinced me, though I cannot remember its arguments well enough to articulate them. There are, however, there are two things that I fond very worthy of note. The first is that appears that per Pope Paul IV, a pope or bishop could lose their office due to heresy. The second is in the preamble which dealt with why the bull was issued, namely to stave off the day that the abomination of desolation prophesied in Daniel would come. The strong implication I take from it is that the pope used his teaching authority to state that one day the pope would be a heretic, and thus perhaps no pope at all, and then would come the abomination of desolation and presumably, the antichrist, end of the world, etc. That day has to come sometime, and perhaps it seems a bit self centered to think we are in those days now perhaps, but at the same time, we are living in *unprecedented* times to the point that the pope says stuff that seems to be apostate, and oligarchs were openly talking about implementing a requirement to have a tiny implant that had your vaccine and financial records in it to be able to, to quote Bill Gates in his 2020 TED talk, “travel or do certain types of financial transactions. Just a little mark.” And meanwhile most countries are developing or have already built, central bank digital currencies. So idk, the times are certainly strange. Have the people of North Sentinel Island been evangelized yet?
I do know that this version of the Coventry Carol is the best one I have found so far and is in better keeping with the content of it. Give it a listen on this, the Feast of the Holy Innocents:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hQGh-x95Il4
I agree.
It seems to me that the sedeprivationist thesis is the only one that could account for how the papacy continues (it does so "materially" but not "formally," until a future pope decisively rejects modernism and accepts the duties of his office, in which case that which was material becomes formal). However, this distinction was invented out of thin air, so to speak, and seems impossible to maintain. If someone holds an office, he does so actually, and therefore is, simply, what the office enables him to be, whether he uses it worthily or unworthily. I do not see "room" for a material/formal distinction in classic ecclesiology.
People say 'I'm not in communion with Francis' errors but I am in communion with him.' That makes me seriously scratch my head. The See of Peter is a teaching office. It's sole purpose is to promulgate and confirm the correct Catholic faith. It is a teaching office and if I say I am in communion with the one who occupies that office then ipso facto I must be in communion with what he teaches. And if he teaches explicitly that the hindu gods are as sure a path to the Divine as Jesus Christ and I say I am in communion with him then I along with him have denied Jesus Christ and I will go to hell. Tell me why what I just said is wrong.
I think your very analysis provides a key to the solution. When I attend a school, I am subject to the masters (the teachers) for as long as I am enrolled there. I am their pupil. However, this does not mean there cannot be good and bad masters, who teach what is true or false. I am still a pupil and subject but that does not mean I endorse all that is taught by all of them.
Moreover, I would push back against the notion that the papacy is solely for teaching. It is an office of governance, of worship, and of instruction, and can do a better or worse job of any of those tasks. But most of all, it is a principle of unity of a hierarchical body: this function, which is both symbolic and epistemic, carries on through the institution of the papacy itself, regardless of occasional dark periods through which it passes.
I would disagree. The Office of the Papacy was created to confirm the Faith. It was given to Peter based on his divinely inspired Confession of Faith in Jesus Christ as the only Son of the Living God. When a priest prays the Roman Canon at the current moment he according to your position he is supposed to be praying that God the Father will watch over and guard the Church: una cum famulo tuo Papa nostro Francesco, et Antistite nostro N. et omnibus orthodoxis atque catholicae et apostolicae fidei cultoribus.
"One with Francis our pope, our Bishop... and all the orthodox teachers of the Catholic and Apostolic faith' It is an insufferable logical contradiction to say this. To claim that one is in communion both with those who teach the orthodox and apostolic Faith and with Francis who teaches that the hindu gods are a sure way to salvation. That just doesn't work.
The pope in this unfortunate case is a placeholder, a continuator of an office. He is keeping a seat warm for the next occupant. That's our only necessary dealing with a renegade pope. Moreover, to the extent that Francis has any beliefs that line up with the orthodox apostolic faith, to that extent he is a teacher with whom I am "one." I think you are making this issue so black and white that you are bound, by this logic, to start rejecting most of the modern popes, since one can find enormities in all of them.
Can you name one other pope who publicly and explicitly taught that Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation? I have my doubts about whether a few of them actually believed it but I cannot recall any of them ever saying anything like that. That is a giant red line that he crossed there which is why it became so black and white for me.
I think you are overestimating the papacy. The Catholic Church was born in Mary's womb - not in the Vatican. Peter denied Him and ran away at the Crucifixion. The temporary loss of the papacy will not kill the Catholic Church.
I don't deny that the Church can survive the temporary eclipse of the exercise of the papacy. But it cannot survive without the papacy itself, which is a divine institution. Nevertheless, Our Lord planned well enough that He did not rest everything exclusively on the papacy. There are multiple "pillars" on which the Faith rests; call it a system of redundancies if you will, but if one pillar buckles, there are other pillars that can hold up the structure until such time as the first pillar is repaired.
Exactly. The current situation in the Vatican and with its branch managers around the world is like the Chavista regime in Venezuela. Even though the people who run its institutions do not do so for the benefit of its people and really can't even be said anymore to be the legitimate officeholders the country still exists and the government still does exist and still can perform some basic functions, even if those who run it are entirely illegitimate.
Yes. I remember being very struck by an argument in Leo XIII, where he says that having nearly any government is better than total anarchy and the violence and confusion it unleashes. Moreover, he says that human nature is such that a vacuum of power cannot last long but a government must form. The ecclesiastical parallel is not that governments fall and form anew, but that the Church's nature is inherently structured, hierarchical, regardless of the quality of the men who temporarily inhabit it. And this structure, as much as we might complain about the abuses, makes possible many goods we take for granted; we'd be appalled at a world without a visible Church, however bad its leaders are, yet this realization is difficult because we've never in fact been deprived of the Church.
My sense is that this take is very wrong-headed. We should not think in terms of strategic positions; we should seek only fidelity to Christ and the truths that have been authentically revealed to and taught by his Church.
It reminds me of the clearly bad argument offered by Siscoe and Salza, cited by Gaspers:
"For if a Pope were able to fall from the pontificate without the Church being aware of it, we would never know for sure which Popes in the past were true Popes, and which had crossed the line into heresy and lost their office. Hence, we would have no way of knowing if the definitive decrees of the various councils had been ratified by a real Pope, or by one who had lapsed into heresy for a time and secretly fallen from the pontificate. Consequently, the object of the Faith itself (the dogmas that must be believed) would be uncertain, and the determination of which dogmas were defined by true Popes, and which were not, would be left to the private judgment of individual Catholics in the pew to decide. The scrupulous would be paralyzed by doubt, and the unstable would fall into the most outrageous conclusions."
This is silly. The scrupulous will be scrupulous, regardless of what any theologian teaches. And if there is some real question about the legitimacy of past papal teaching and papal tenures, the solution cannot be to scrupulously clutch theological pearls and insist that this cannot be. The solution is to address the issue frankly, honestly, responsibly, and have the question authoritatively resolved by the usual mechanisms whereby disputed questions are authoritatively resolved in the Church. "But that might be hard!" Yup! That's just the way she goes sometimes, brothers!
Happy wedding anniversary to you and your wife! I received a copy of Turned Around for Christmas and am looking forward to delving into it. Thank you for all that you do to defend, explain, and promote the traditions of our Faith!
Many thanks, Chantal!
Very interesting as usual.
Hearing "Mary's Baby" for the first time last year convinced me that a man capable of composing such emotive beauty must be worth trusting...and "following."
I hope I have lived up to your expectations!
Please pray for me, that I may be faithful to the work the Lord is calling me to do.
Absolutely
I also have a question related to Part 3 of the talk by Fr. Bernward Deneke, FSSP. I agree that the reverence and solemnity of the TLM is certainly more likely than the Novus Ordo to induce lapsed/lukewarm Catholics to recognize that they should not receive Holy Communion prior to going to Confession. However, is it enough to just rely on this aesthetic, or do we need more explicit catechesis at our TLMs, such as a regular announcement for visitors on the dispositions necessary to receive Communion worthily? It seems we have a major pastoral problem that did not exist prior to Vatican II, in that the link between Confession and Communion has been largely lost (at least the US). It is great that the young man cited by Fr. Deneke came to the realization of his unworthiness on his own, but I wonder if it is a bit presumptuous to assume this will normally be the case, even at the TLM, without more explicit catechesis.
Our (Oratorian) TLM parish, especially around great feasts like Christmas and Easter, explicitly prints in the mass bulletin and is communicated by the priest from the pulpit during the reading of notices after the homily.
I don't think Fr. Deneke would suggest for a moment that such a conversion will automatically occur at the TLM or that catechesis is not necessary. There is no doubt that some preaching must be given from time to time about conditions for worthy reception, and perhaps it is the case that an urban parish that sees a lot of curious outsiders visiting should post something at the door or put it in the bulletin.
On the other hand, one of the most off-putting things is to have didactic and moralistic preaching on a regular basis. I do think the TLM is at a tremendous advantage because those who are unaccustomed to it are quite turned off or kept at bay by the kneeling at the rail, the reception on the tongue, the whole solemnity of the communion time.
Good points. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that anyone in particular is being presumptuous, just that we have our work cut out for us as a Church to restore the Confession-Communion link that was second nature even to lapsed Catholics prior to decades of bad/non-existent catechesis.
Another advantage of the TLM in this regard is its length. It's not uncommon to see apparent newcomers walk out of a Sunday Sung Mass right around the hour mark, prior to Communion. While only God can judge their reasons, this could be another element that inherently helps prevent unworthy Communions.
I think Gaspers has not properly understood Lamont's position. Lamont writes: "The publicly available evidence for his knowingly and willingly denying the faith establishes that Francis is a public and notorious heretic. ... This single public and notorious heresy suffices to establish that he is no longer the pope. ... He clearly does not believe the Catholic faith, and refuses to profess it; how can he possibly function as the pope or make a claim on Catholics to believe and obey him? Such claims are sheer impudence on his part. An honest man would state that he could not believe the Catholic faith and that he was resigning the papacy in consequence. What is startling is the refusal of Catholics to acknowledge this obvious fact."
All this seems correct. Gaspers want to object that the prelates of the Church still need to act to remove Francis. But obviously Lamont agrees! Hence his conclusion:
"almost all bishops and cardinals have ignored his departure from the faith, and acted as if they belong to a cult where blind obedience and mindless adoration of an evil leader is praiseworthy and compulsory. This is a betrayal of their duty to God, and it has to end. All believing bishops and cardinals should publicly state that Francis has clearly ceased to accept the Catholic faith. For pastoral reasons they might begin by asking him to retire from the papacy because of his unbelief, rather than bluntly and immediately stating that he is no longer the pope. But it is not permissible to continue treating him as the legitimate ruler of the Church."
What Gaspers fails to realize, I would suggest, is that the necessity of the believing bishops and cardinals to act is only a *consequence* of the realized fact that indeed Francis has cut himself off from communion with Christ, and therefore cannot possibly be, or function as, pope. Conversely, if he were still pope, then there would be no necessity, *or even possibility*, of legitimately deposing him. (The case is analogous to an 'annulment,' which is of course in fact a finding and declaration of the *fact* of nullity, not a *making null* of a valid marriage. And we would of course not say that an evidently invalidly married couple ought to be regarded and treated as validly married until such a time as there was an official declaration of nullity by the responsible chancery official or whatever.)
Every day, good sir
And may the Lord grant a year full of graces to Dr Kwasniewski and Tradition & Sanity!