How to Disagree with the Pope

Joe Heschmeyer, author of Pope Peter – Defending the Church’s Most Distinctive Doctrine in a Time of Crisis, is back with more help explaining how to deal with the modern papacy. In this episode, we talk about talkative popes and the proper way to disagree with them when what they say seems out of bounds.

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Cy Kellett:
Is there a right way to disagree with the pope? Joe Heschmeyer next.

Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host.

Poor Joe Heschmeyer, he wrote the book Pope Peter, so we come to him whenever we have a question that might have a negative connotation towards the pope. If we have to ask, “Is the pope a bad pope?” that kind of thing, we make Joe answer that question, and he’s kind enough to come in and do it.

This time, we just wanted to know about disagreeing with the pope, because a lot of people are disagreeing with the pope these days. There’s no reason for us to avoid it or elide it, the pope is a lightning rod. When he speaks, lightning strikes. Especially when he does so on an airplane, that kind of situation, or maybe in an interview, often the lightning will strike and we end up having to figure out, “Well, where does that fit in Catholic teaching?” And we have to make a decision, “Do I agree with that, or do I not agree with it?” Turns out, it’s okay to disagree with the pope, but there are some tips Joe can give us about the right way to disagree and the wrong way to disagree.

Cy Kellett:
Hi, Joe Heschmeyer. Thanks for doing this with us.

Joe Heschmeyer:
I’m happy to.

Cy Kellett:
The book Pope Peter: Defending the Church’s Most Distinctive Doctrine in a Time of Crisis, which you wrote, now has marked you as the person we will go to whenever we have a pope question.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Fortunately, that’s a pretty much full-time job.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah, because there’s a lot of pope questions these days. Actually, throughout the whole media age, the papacy has been an interesting phenomenon. Still adjusting, I think, to the media age. Would you agree to that?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think there’s some really interesting stuff. You can see a shift in tone in how popes talk, really, with John XXIII, where he starts telling more stories, even in papal documents, about just stuff from his life. It’s like he’s suddenly aware that the microphone is on, and that people other than just bishops are actually reading these things. I think he does a pretty effective job of writing to them, and he’s still pretty widely beloved by a lot of people. But it is a different thing to be writing for a handful of other bishops versus writing for the whole world, or giving an interview where any stray comment gets amplified and distorted and twisted and it’s front page news on the other end of the world. That’s a totally different world than most of the Church’s history.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah, that’s interesting that you point to John XXIII because he is beloved in many ways because he was so different from all the Piuses and the Leos that came before him.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. There’s the address that he gives where he talks about the moon, and it’s a very human kind of thing. It’s a beautiful evening. He notices this fact. He encourages mothers to give their children a kiss from the pope. It just is extremely touching, very human, very relatable. Suddenly, the pope seemed like he was just in your living room. I think it’s hard to overstate what an incredible transition that was. I think he felt something, he discerned something correctly, and it’s been hard…

I think John Paul II is the other person who’s really used that well. His background is in theater and stage, and so he understands what it is to be in a role that is inescapably a little bit performative. I don’t want that to be understood in a negative way. I’m not saying they’re just pretending to be pious. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying you’ve got to be really much more cautious about what you say and how you say it. That doesn’t just mean avoiding error. If you want to inspire people, you can’t just lay out coldly, “Here’s what the definition is,” which a lot of older papal documents, they’re not going to make compelling news. They’re not going to make good radio or good TV.

Cy Kellett:
But there is a consequence to all of this which means the papacy has become a more ordinary office. You would’ve thought of, I don’t know, Pius X maybe as a distant monarch in a way, where you think of Pope Francis as a local pastor.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I think there’s very much this sense. I think in some ways Pope Francis intends to exercise the papal office a little bit more like the local pastor writ large. I think he is exploring the possibility of, how much can you just be a pastor to the entire world’s flock?

It’s been kind of an interesting experiment, and I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the limitations are. I think there clearly are limitations to that. There’s a reason why the church has subsidiarity, that not everything needs to come immediately from the pope. You do have a pastor for a reason. You do have a local bishop for a reason. These aren’t just lackeys. They’re not just intermediaries. The bishops are the successors to the apostles in their own right. This is one of the, I think, distortions that we risk.

I don’t think it’s just the media age. I think also the First Vatican Council is in the process of defining the Church, and they define the papacy, and then the Franco-Prussian War breaks out and the council is abruptly called to an end. So you end up with sort of half a definition of the Church between Vatican I and Vatican II. It led to this view that the bishops are basically just there at the whim and behest of the pope, and they don’t have any real authority in their own right. That’s just never what the Church taught, never what the Church believed, but it’s easy for both people within the hierarchy and within the laity to come away with that view, I think somewhat dangerously. I think we’re seeing some of those things play out.

Cy Kellett:
Well, I’ll get to the other side of it, too, because I think all of this is actually germane to our main topic, which is… I’m going to let you pick the title of the program in a minute here, but it’s germane to the topic of disagreeing with the pope. That is, media has profoundly changed the papacy, but it’s profoundly changed the laity as well. The way that we listen to the pope is very different.

Cy Kellett:
I don’t remember ever in my adult life a pastor saying, “There’s a new encyclical from the pope. We’re going to have a study group. Come and I’ll explain the encyclical to you.” We’re told that in the 19th century, for example, that was common, that an encyclical from the pope would be the occasion for the parish to have a conversation about it, for the pastor to do some teaching. We just get it on the internet and then we complain about it or fuss about it in the various Catholic media. It’s a different way of receiving the pope as well.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I think there’s a few things going into that. One, papal documents have been getting dramatically longer and just way more technical in some ways. By the way, I used to be a lawyer. This is the same problem with Supreme Court decisions. Early Supreme Court decisions were short. They were punchy. You could really study them. Two pages and you got it. Now they’re so long that only a small handful of people read the whole thing. When that happens, they actually lose a lot of effectiveness. If it’s so long that no one is going to read it, it kind of doesn’t matter what you have to say. You’ve already wasted your opportunity.

Cy Kellett:
Exactly, Joe. You are right on the money on that. However, I asked the question about the laity, and you turned it right back onto the popes. I want to put this on-

Joe Heschmeyer:
No, that’s fair. I just mean they’re not reading it. I think the issue here for the laity is, in the same way… If we make a five-hour episode here, people aren’t going to listen to it, and I kind of get it.

Cy Kellett:
Let’s not try, Joe. Well, I have to say I’m very sympathetic to that argument, and I am somewhat unsympathetic to recent popes because, I’ll just confess something to you, my favorite president in the history of the United States is Silent Cal. I love Calvin Coolidge, because he went through his entire presidency without saying a word. He said nothing. He drove people crazy. That kind of personal restraint, to me, is genuine leadership. I’m sure that that’s exaggerated in me just because of my personality, but I love leaders who can just lead and not talk so much.

Joe Heschmeyer:
You’re a big JPI fan, right?

Cy Kellett:
Why, because he only lasted a month?

Joe Heschmeyer:
He doesn’t have a lot of written record.

Cy Kellett:
Had he hung around longer, maybe he would’ve.

Joe Heschmeyer:
He’s just a blank slate people can project what they want onto. You always hear these conspiracy theories about, “Oh, well, he was going to do X, Y, and Z.” You’re like, “Where are you getting this? He was there for 33 days. What do you mean he was going to do all these things?”

But yeah, no, I totally get where you’re coming from. I very much relate to that. There really is this idea that brevity is the soul of wit, and it’s also the soul of teaching. If you teach that long, it’s not going to work.

Cy Kellett:
It’s not going to work, no, and I felt that way… I’m going to be brutally honest about Pope John Paul II. People used to always say what a great writer he is. “Oh, he’s a great writer pope.” I never thought he was a great writer. I thought he was verbose. I thought, “Get to the point.” Some of that is that he… I’m sure these documents will be reflected on by scholars, and his Marian doctrines, Marian scholars will… But it was a lot of words.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think two things. One, Father Garrigou-Lagrange agreed with you. He was his doctrinal instructor, his advisor. He said the same thing, that he was verbose, didn’t get to the point quickly enough. Two, actually, the thing that a lot of people like about him, the thing my wife likes about him especially, is that he approaches an issue from a lot of different ways rather than just making his point and moving on. She likes to really sit with it and savor it. I’ve got to be honest with you, hopefully she won’t listen to this, I’m much more like you. I’m much more just like, “Make the point. Move on. We don’t need four examples of the same thing.” I think when he makes a point, he does it beautifully, and then he makes it beautifully again and beautifully again.

Cy Kellett:
That’s very well-said, all of which brings me to Pope Francis. Now you get to choose the title for this episode.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Is it multiple choice?

Cy Kellett:
It’s multiple choice. You get two choices. How to Disagree with the Pope, that’s choice A. How to Disagree with Pope Francis, that’s choice B. How would you like to title this episode?

Joe Heschmeyer:
You know what, B is going to get a lot more clicks, but I think A is going to be more honest for the-

Cy Kellett:
That’s the thing. B would get a lot more clicks. You made an episode with us that’s by far our most popular episode. It’s about, basically, what if Francis is a bad pope? It’s a hypothetical. Many people are mad at us because we posed it as a hypothetical, some of the comments, “He is a bad pope. Shut up,” that kind of thing. Then some people are mad at us because we posed the hypothetical at all. But it was very popular because I do think it’s fair to say Pope Francis is an upsetting pope.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I like that there was a lot of subjective tense comments, a lot of people who were tense about the fact you put it in the “if Pope Francis is a bad pope.” Yeah, you’re right, he is a more controversial pope than we’ve had in decades. I think, conservatively, since Paul VI. I think if you don’t include Paul VI, you could be going back a lot further, in terms of just people having very polarized reactions to him.

You got some of this with Benedict XVI, but a lot of that debate wasn’t within the Church so much. People within the Church who were really bought in tended to really like him, and the people who really hated him, they maybe hadn’t been to church in years. It didn’t have the same feel to it. But now you’ve got, in a parish, you don’t know what the feel is going to be about how do they feel about Pope Francis. Certainly, as someone who gives talks in parishes, I don’t know how much work I have to do to be like, “Look, he’s the pope. You’ve got to respect…” You don’t know where people are, basically.

Cy Kellett:
Right. No, you could give a talk in a parish about some other topic, and then at the end of it, “Why don’t you say more about what a terrible pope Pope Francis is?” You’re like, “I wasn’t talking about Pope Francis.” Yeah, it’s polarized. It’s heated.

Joe Heschmeyer:
There’s one other figure in the modern world that has this same kind of reaction, but no one wants to associate the two of them in any way.

Cy Kellett:
Is it Lady Gaga?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Close. Former President Donald Trump.

Cy Kellett:
Oh, Donald Trump. Oh, yes, that’s right. There’s another-

Joe Heschmeyer:
How quickly you forgot.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah. But a similar reaction to Jesus, so-

Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, true. This is a weird trifecta.

Cy Kellett:
We don’t want to say that it’s bad to be controversial. It’s not bad. It’s not an accusation against Pope Francis to say his papacy is upsetting. Sometimes the greatest leaders in the world upset people. They have to.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” John 6. Certainly, you can be rejected for doing the right thing.

Cy Kellett:
So what do you want to name this? You said you want to just name it How to Disagree with the Pope?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think we should. It’s more honest. You’re not that kind of operation.

Cy Kellett:
We just love getting clicks, though.

Pope Peter: Defending the Church’s Most Distinctive Doctrine in a Time of Crisis is your book, Joe. I want to ask you to give us, I suppose, in a way, a theological reflection on disagreeing with the pope, because it’s an odd office. It’s an odd office in that it is divine and it is human. It has aspects of it with which I am bound in conscience absolutely to be faithful to and submissive to, and it has other aspects where I can just roll my eyes and go, “That’s nuts.” I like sharp, clear lines, and this is not an institution or an office with a lot of easy-to-spot lines.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. You know what institution is a little bit like that? The family.

Cy Kellett:
Oh, there you go, Joe. I thought you were going to say Donald Trump, but all right, the family.

Joe Heschmeyer:
I’ve tried baiting you to go into really more controversial waters, but you’re not going to take it.

But in all seriousness, one of the 10 Commandments says, “Honor your father and mother,” but nobody understands that as an absolute. If you’re a Christian, and your parents are pagans and they say, “Offer incense to the Roman god,” you don’t say, “Okay, well, the 10 Commandments say I have to honor you.” That’s not what it means. You clearly have a divine commandment in the 10 Commandments to obey them, but it’s not understood as an absolute. That same kind of discernment that’s called for in the family, in a way, that’s called for within the Church.

I think that’s important to point out just because if you just have the conversation about the papacy in isolation, I think a fair amount of people come away saying, “That’s too confusing. That’s too murky.” But when you do it with the family, it’s like, okay, you deal with that murkiness day in, day out. What are things it’s okay to disagree with your parents on, especially if you’re a kid, and what are things that you are morally bound to obey and follow?

Cy Kellett:
That is a great analogy. That actually makes me much more sympathetic to every pope because I, as a father… You don’t have this so much because yours is 18 months old. But as a father, I have the experience of my children being wrong about this, of confusing which things were authoritative and which things were optional. I can be sympathetic to the popes on that.

Let me just put it straight out then. It seems like the Church has dealt with almost every question somewhere. Has it ever dealt with the question of how to disagree with the pope?

Joe Heschmeyer:
It has, actually, in a few different places. The Second Vatican Council tackles it a little bit, but doesn’t get into the weeds as much. Then the CDF has a document for theologians especially, which is On the Gift of the Truth, Donum Veritatis. In paragraph 24, it talks about how you go about disagreeing with magisterial teaching. Now, that’s a big one because a lot of people don’t think you can at all.

The Code of Canon Law also has a nod to this fact in Canon 752, when it talks about how when there’s something that is in the authentic magisterium, but it isn’t infallible, you have to give it what’s called religious submission of intellect and will, but you don’t have to give it the assent of faith. That’s already saying, “Okay, well, there’s a distinction they’re making there right there in canon law.” This is not Joe Heschmeyer making this. This is not some crazy theologian making this. Right there in canon law they’re saying, “Okay, you have to give this. You don’t have to give that.” We should be asking, “What in the world are those two things?”

Cy Kellett:
Yeah, help me out. What in the world are those two things?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Religious submission of intellect and will is basically having a filial respect. It’s recognizing that the Church is mater et magistra, mother and teacher, and that you should respect your mother, and you should respect her both as a teacher and as a mother. You’re not going to just be like, “What an idiot.” That’s not an appropriate attitude to have towards your mom on earth or the Church. That kind of disrespectful flippancy, that’s not what it looks like to submit your intellect and will to the magisterium of the Church. Having said that, it also includes within it the presumption that the Church is right even on those things that are not infallible, even on those things that are not being taught definitively. The faithful are called to ensure that they avoid any actions that would not accord with whatever the doctrine is.

For instance, one of the controversial things right now is embryo adoption. The Church has, in a non-infallible way, said we don’t think embryo adoption is right. A lot of theologians say, “Hold on, how do we make sense of this when the alternative is something like children created through IVF being just left to die? It seems like embryo adoption is actually a lot less bad.” There’s a really interesting debate on that, but it would be inappropriate to just say, “I’m going to ignore this because I don’t think that it’s right, because this isn’t settled yet, and I’m going to go ahead and just open a Catholic embryo adoption clinic,” or something like that. That would be acting in a way contrary to the doctrine. One of the things religious submission of intellect and will means is I’m giving the presumption to them. I may differ, but I still defer until there’s some greater clarity on the matter.

Cy Kellett:
Right. I’m safe doing so spiritually, on the spiritual level, where I get unsafe, as far as my own soul goes, if I become too much the authority on which things to be respectful about and which things not.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. St. Maximilian Kolbe, in the Office of Readings for August 14th, which is his feast day, has a beautiful reflection on the role of obedience. One of the things he says is, “Anything you did under obedience you don’t have to answer to God for.” If you had enough doubt, that it wasn’t just like… Obviously, he’s not talking about that your religious superior says, “We need you to go assassinate Tom Hanks,” or something. This isn’t that.

Cy Kellett:
Because of the Da Vinci Code movies. Yeah. Right.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Don’t become an assassin monk, which, by the way, Opus Dei, they don’t even have a monastic side. That movie is implausible-

Cy Kellett:
They have assassins. You know it.

Joe Heschmeyer:
They’re not assassin monks is all I’m saying. They’re assassin priests.

Cy Kellett:
We’re just kidding, Opus Dei people.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Please don’t kill us.

Cy Kellett:
Okay, so Kolbe says you don’t have to answer to God for those things you do under obedience.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. That doesn’t mean that they were right. It just means somebody else is responsible for it.

Under U.S. law, just following orders is not an acceptable answer for certain things. The same is actually true in moral law for a certain category. If something is just egregiously openly contrary to the law of God, that’s a different thing. Kolbe is not talking about that. He is talking about, “I think the best thing to do here would be X. My superior or my bishop or whoever thinks it’s Y. I don’t have to substitute my judgment for my superior’s judgment.”

Actually, it’s so much more liberating. This is the thing that’s just so crazy, is when you think you have to decide every issue, you spend all your time running somebody else’s job, and not actually even able to make the decisions. That’s a huge spiritual waste. If you spend all your day… Take kind of a silly example. Let’s say you decided you wanted to decide if everything the president of France did was right or wrong, and you spent every day debating with other people whether the president of France was right or wrong in doing this or that. Hopefully, you could see that’s a huge waste of your time on earth.

That’s a huge waste of the limited period of time you’ve been given to build up the kingdom, and that doesn’t build it up in any way. But we do this for the bishop of Rome. We do this for our own bishop. We do this for the president. We do this for fill in the blank, on and on down the list. So often, I think the most common thing is it probably isn’t a decision you have to decide. It probably isn’t something that you are needing to make a decision. There are a handful of cases where you might be obliged to disobey civilly or if your bishop is particularly bad, but it’s going to be exceedingly rare.

Cy Kellett:
Okay, so let me give you a concrete example, because I love getting people to make negative comments about you online, so I drag you into these things.

Joe Heschmeyer:
All right, let’s do it.

Cy Kellett:
A concrete example that’s out there in the world now, the Vatican, under the auspices of the pope, of course, releases a clarification on the use of the vaccines for the COVID virus. Many Catholics that I encounter online reject this and say, “This is wrong. You can’t do this.” Am I at leisure to say, “Well, the Vatican has spoken on this, and I’m going to just go with what the Vatican said about it”?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes. You know one of the reasons why? Because it’s an area of great technical competence on both the scientific and a moral theological level. In other words, the average layperson does not understand moral theology or vaccine science well enough to jump into the debate in an educated way. They’re not informed enough about the distinctions between formal and material cooperation, between proximate and remote material cooperation. They’re not informed enough about the way the cell lines worked on the vaccine level in terms of which stages things are being used at and what level of cooperation those are in.

There are people who have that competence. There are people who have the expertise and the clarity to look at these things and say, “Here’s what we know based on the facts.” The vast majority of us are just not in that position, and so we should at least default to saying, “Well, this is right unless I know some clear evidence that it’s not.”

I’ll tell you, as someone who has studied moral theology, I haven’t seen one criticism yet that has done a good job of getting the distinctions right between proximate, remote, and formal cooperation. It isn’t something that we’re normally good on. It’s not something you’re going to hear normally preached from the pulpit, and there’s the whole avenue of errors that follow from that. If you say this is wrong, well, can you do things like can you pay your taxes? Because there’s remote material cooperation on things your tax money is being used for. Once you say actually remote material cooperation is always wrong, you end up being in a whole world of pain that a lot of people making these arguments are not aware of.

Cy Kellett:
You can’t go to the gas station because Exxon somewhere did something wrong. You can’t buy gas if you’re going to be that doctrinaire about it.

I could disagree. I could say, “In my estimation, the Vatican got this wrong.” I can’t change what my mind arrives at, but I am obligated to do what?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. One of the things you’re obligated to do is actually get informed on it. One of the basic things that you should do, especially if you are inclined to disagree, is to understand why the Church teaches what she teaches and be able to explain it to the satisfaction of someone who holds that belief. That’s not a very high bar. It’s just saying if you’re going to be in disagreement with some point, infallible or fallible, the Catholic Church teaches, you should understand the Catholic position, because if you don’t, it’s not even a principled disagreement. You just don’t understand maybe the terms of the debate.

You should know that, and you should probably do a fair amount of reading for why it is. You can have some suspicions and some questions and some doubts about the prudence of the thing, but to say, “No, this is actually wrong,” you have to do a little more work to earn that right. You’ve got to do a little more work to say, “Okay, I actually know what I’m talking about here.” It’s something that I think we’re not in the habit of doing, frankly.

Cy Kellett:
Okay. That’s what the religious submission of intellect and will looks like. It looks like when something comes along where the pope says X, and I don’t have enough understanding to say Y, first of all, I’d be obligated to get that understanding before I say X is wrong, but it doesn’t mean I can’t disagree. It doesn’t mean I can’t in my heart say, “I don’t think that that’s right.” But I do have in a certain sense… I have the good fortune, in a certain sense, to have this off my shoulders. I can meet Jesus, and He’s going to have lots of criticisms for me, the way I treated Joe Heschmeyer very close to the top among those, but He’s not going to say, “You listened to the pope about the vaccine, and I was thinking no on the vaccine.” That’s not going to ever happen.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. This is really not just a matter of trusting the pope. This is a matter of trusting God, that He’s not putting you in a position where He’s trying to trap you.

If I can add one more thing, though, in terms of how that disagreement proceeds, it needs to be done with a spirit of respect on a much more discerning basis. Here, I want to really give a word of encouragement to people who feel the desire to be totally dismissive to Pope Francis. I’d say, I get it. There have been things that he’s said that I’ve found very difficult or very frustrating. But you don’t want to go down the trap of just writing the whole man or the whole office off.

Here, Donum Veritatis, in paragraph 24, is very helpful. It talks about the fact that not everything the magisterium says is infallible. A lot of the prudential judgments, it could happen that they’re not free from all deficiencies, because bishops and their advisors don’t always take into account the full complexity of the situation themselves. Everything we just said about sometimes when we disagree we haven’t done enough work, that’s also true sometimes when bishops say things. Bishops will jump in on something about economics, and it’s just clear that no one in their office understands economics, or whatever the case may be.

The CDF is acknowledging, yeah, that could be the case. But it says it would be contrary to the truth if, proceeding from some particular cases, one were to conclude that the Church’s magisterium can be habitually mistaken in its prudential judgements or that it does not enjoy divine assistance in the integral exercise of its mission. There’s two things to watch out for. Don’t give up on, is God guiding the Church in its core mission, and don’t get into a default “the Church is probably wrong” mode or “the pope is probably wrong” mode, or even “my bishop is probably wrong” mode. That’s not a healthy attitude to have as a Catholic.

Cy Kellett:
All right, so that gives me a clear understanding. You said there were two parts of Donum Veritatis for us to consider. One was the religious submission of intellect and will. Am I saying that correctly, religious submission-

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.

Cy Kellett:
… of intellect and will?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Obsequium religiosum.

Cy Kellett:
What’s the other one?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Obsequium religiosum is what it’s called in Latin, but yeah-

Cy Kellett:
Oh, I love being called obsequious in Latin.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. Yeah, it’s that idea. There’s a couple distinctions I think that are worth making here. One is a question. When the pope talks, is he acting in a magisterial way or not?

That’s not just true of Pope Francis, although I think there’s a lot of cases where he’s just speaking off the cuff or he’s giving a private interview or he’s talking to somebody on the phone. Those things, by definition, are not magisterial. They’re private. He is not acting in the position of the teacher, of the magister, so it’s not magisterial. Anytime that’s the case, he’s your father, but you don’t have to treat all of it as teaching, in the same way that if you’ve got a professor who is just having small talk, you’re not getting quizzed on that on the final. Those kind of things, they’re not within the scope of what we’re talking about.

But when it is magisterial, then the question becomes, is this something that is infallible? Is it definitively taught? Is it not definitively taught? Is it not infallible? Those are the questions we should be asking, meaning, basically, are they trying to answer a question of faith and morals, and are they trying to do so in an infallible way? Because there are times where they’re not. There are times where they’re giving some sort of piece of guidance, but they’re not taking the trouble to say, “Let’s settle the debate,” because it might be premature to settle the debate. They’re giving just maybe a few insights to consider, and they’re going to let the debate continue or the conversation continue within the Church.

Cy Kellett:
Okay. In an extreme way, sometimes we Catholics are taught to think the pope is only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra, which in my mind as a child I saw him as going up some stairs, sitting on a chair that was some kind of very special chair, and whatever he says while he’s sitting on that chair. But in some ways, I suppose that cartoonish way of thinking is actually similar to what we think, that the pope, every now and then, does this thing ex cathedra; that’s really the only time that you’ve got to absolutely just submit to what he says.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, that is a very common understanding. I actually was reading an anti-Catholic book, and it was saying, well, basically, the chair… In the Church of St. Peter’s, there’s a big throne of the chair. You have the beautiful Bernini bronze chair, and there’s an actual chair within that that he’s covered in bronze. And they were arguing, “Well, this chair didn’t exist until the 6th century, so papal infallibility must be an invention.” Guys, it’s not literally about the chair. That’s not the debate here.

Cy Kellett:
Right. Okay. Yeah, it’s not a magic chair. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Joe Heschmeyer:
I don’t know how you would get up it now to make it an ex cathedra teaching if you did have to teach from the magic chair because it’s way up high.

Yeah, in Matthew 23, Jesus says that the Pharisees sit in the chair of Moses. This is a reference to the seat of authority. Even when I said seat, it’s a metaphor. Both seat and chair, we’re not literally talking about something you sit in to teach. It’s just a reference to the fact that in the old days the kids stood and the teacher sat, so the chair was the position of authority.

The second thing, yeah, we do totally reduce this and we act like the only thing infallible is this. That’s not true. There’s two things I’d point out here. First, Vatican I doesn’t say that’s true. Vatican I says you can know the pope is speaking infallibly when he does these things. It doesn’t say the only time the pope is speaking infallibly is when he does these things. Second, we know of particular instances in which the pope acts infallibly otherwise, for instance, the canonization of saints. Aquinas has a long thing about why we can trust that the canonization of saints is infallible.

It comes down to this. If it is something that you are required to believe as a Catholic, then it’s infallible. That’s the standard. If you have to believe it to be a Catholic in good standing, if you have to believe it to be orthodox, to be faithful, if you can be penalized or excommunicated or somehow punished by the Church for not holding this, then you can know that it’s infallible.

The reason comes back to something we’ve talked about I think on one of the prior Focus episodes, which is that infallibility is not really about the pope. Infallibility is about you and me, that we’re never going to be in a position where we have to choose between heresy and schism. We’re never going to be in a position where we have to choose to disobey God’s teaching about being one with the Church or disagreeing with God’s teaching about being one in the truth. Rather, oneness in the Church is oneness in the truth. We can count on that.

All those little things that the Church has gotten wrong are not things where someone could disagree and be excommunicated for or anything like that. These were prudential judgments that bishops, or even the pope, would make that there would often be a lively conversation about. This was okay and this was acceptable and this was understood. It’s a myth that everything was treated as infallible in the past, but it’s also a myth that the only things that were treated as infallible are ex cathedra teachings.

Cy Kellett:
Let’s come around full circle then. With all of that in the mind, how do I disagree with the pope? Because many people do face this. They faced it with Benedict. They faced it with John Paul. Especially with this, as we talked about at the beginning, this very public, media-connected form of papacy that we currently have, many people do, in fact, find themselves disagreeing with the pope. How do I disagree with the pope?

Joe Heschmeyer:
Number one, pray for him. If you’re not praying for him, you’re not doing your basic due diligence.

Number two, do whatever research may be required to have an informed decision on it. I think that, I would really stress here, means not just reading things that agree with you, but really find out why the pope is teaching what the pope is teaching. Do your best to find someone at least making the argument.

Number three, do it with a spirit of docility and reverence, and do it in a really loving and humble way. Go back to 1 Peter 3:15-16. Even when you’re disagreeing with a nonbeliever, even when you’re evangelizing to them, he says you should do so with humility and reverence. If they’re owed that, how much more is the vicar of Christ owed that?

Number four, I think you should be aware if you find yourself disagreeing all the time, because that might be a sign that you’re trusting yourself too much and not trusting God or His Church enough.

I would watch out for those four things, and then maybe a few more concrete things. If it’s something where the pope says this is permitted, and you don’t feel free in conscience to do it, you’re still obliged to follow conscience there. In other words, if the pope says you can eat meat on Fridays, and you don’t feel at peace spiritually about that, don’t eat meat on Fridays. He’s not telling you you have to. Just don’t do it. You don’t have to go disagree. Just don’t do it.

Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re having to judge on the prudence of the papal decision. Just don’t do it. If he is not telling you you have to, and just telling you you can, and your spirit doesn’t tell you you can, your conscience is telling you otherwise, you still have to follow conscience.

There’s a much bigger conversation we could be having about the role of conscience here, but you always have to form your conscience well and listen to your conscience and obey it, because anytime you think you’re sinning and are acting in a way that you think is sinful, it is, by definition, sinful. The example a priest gave that I thought was very helpful is if you think you’re supposed to go to Mass on Ash Wednesday and you skip it on purpose, you’re sinning, even though you actually were free not to go to Mass.

Cy Kellett:
Okay. All right. Fair enough. Where I have permission, I don’t have to use that permission, but-

Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. St. Paul talks about this with the food sacrifice to idols. He’s saying-

Cy Kellett:
I keep coming back to the vaccine. I would be perfectly within my rights to say, “I get it. There is permission for this. I’m not going to do it because whatever.” But I would not be within my rights to say to someone else, “Don’t do that because the permission is wrong.”

Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think you’d be, at least, in a much more dangerous position to do that. There are a small handful of cases in which you could say, “Yeah, I think actually this thing that you’ve been given permission to do, you shouldn’t have been given permission to do.”

Slavery is the glaringly obvious example. There were limited areas in which slavery was permitted, and you get great people like Bartolomé de las Casas who say, “Hey, this is actually wrong.” He’s a priest who’s really standing up for saying, “We’re giving too much latitude here, and it’s being really abused in these ugly ways. I’m seeing it on the ground.” And he’s right, and the Church sees that he’s right eventually.

Those are really going to be exceptional cases. Those are really going to be cases in which… Even there, the person who, in good faith, followed the Church’s guidance, they’re not going to be the ones who are judged for that. It’s going to be the person who told them it was okay when it wasn’t. Or if their conscience told them it wasn’t okay and they still violated conscience, then they’ll be judged for that, not for their obedience. I hope that distinction makes sense.

Cy Kellett:
Yes, it does.

Joe Heschmeyer:
Even if you’re given permission to do something, you still have to listen to your conscience.

Cy Kellett:
Joe, I feel like I know now. I feel like we covered this very well. Thank you for doing it with us. I say that only because if you had something else that you wanted to make sure that we got in before we ended, I wanted to give you the opportunity.

Joe Heschmeyer:
No, I feel like everything I wanted to really make sure we said, I think we’ve covered all those things. I’m sure it was still inadequate in a lot of ways, and I’ve probably ticked off people in a thousand different directions. Sorry about that, everybody. I wish I could’ve answered more directly whatever your particular questions were.

Cy Kellett:
But if you have any problem with Joe, please put it in the comments at the bottom of this. Please put it, and use explicit language. Pope Peter: Defending the Church’s Most Distinctive Doctrine in a Time of Crisis. He regrets writing it because now every time there’s a pope question, we invite him on. Joe Heschmeyer, thank you.

Joe Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.

Cy Kellett:
Shameless Popery is Joe’s website. If you have any problem with anything Joe said, just contact him there and let him know you’ve got a problem with what he said.

These are very difficult and very strange times. I’m sure we’ll talk about this in future episodes. We talked about it in a recent episode when it comes to the German bishops, but there’s so much contention at the highest levels of the Church. At the lowest levels, there’s contention, the middle levels. At the highest levels, there’s contention within the Church. So we’ve got to keep tackling these things. In part, we have to keep tackling them because no matter how much contention there is, we are never excused from our obligation to be obedient to the Church, to love the Church, and to be charitable in the way we deal with one another. That’s kind of what I like about Joe. He does all of those things.

Hey, you’re always welcome to email us. I know, I prefer, if it’s a negative one, just send it straight to Joe. But if you want to email us, send it to focus@catholic.com.

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Well, that does it. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.