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In this episode, Trent examines a troubling trend that could lead to grave sin among Catholics who otherwise are some of the most faithful defenders of the Faith.
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Transcript:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist Trent Horn. At the Counsel of Trent, I try hard to not get involved in Church drama, especially involving the bishops or the pope. There are many other channels you can go to where you have people offering commentary on whether a bishop did a good thing with a certain policy decision. Since a lot of people talk about that already, I don’t see a need for me to lend my voice. I just want to show the Catholic faith is true and respond to the common objections that lead people away from the Church, such as those made by atheists or Protestants. I also want to defend the Church’s moral teachings that are under attack in our culture.
And by the way, if you want to help us keep doing that, please like and subscribe to our channel, it would be really appreciated.
However, I feel the need in this episode to address something related to Church drama that really worries me. I see it in comments and social media posts from Catholics who are otherwise really faithful. They go to mass every Sunday. They affirm the Church’s major teachings. But then they say the absolute worst things about the bishops and the pope. And it’s not just mean things, it’s essentially an outright rejection of their authority.
That’s what it sounds like when these people say “I don’t care what the bishops say” or “the bishops are all garbage” or “I don’t listen to Bergoglio” since they refuse to call Pope Francis you know Pope Francis. Here are some other examples I found on social media.
Now look, I’m not saying the bishops and the pope don’t deserve their fair share of criticism. They do. Canon 212 of the code of canon law even says “The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.”
I’m also not saying we have to follow everything a bishop says. Sometimes bishops speak about things beyond their area of expertise, like climate change, and we don’t have to agree with their opinions on matters beyond faith and morals. But I am saying that at some point thoughtful criticism of the bishops can turn into a vicious contempt that’s bad for the Church and bad for our souls. It also creates obstacles for non-Catholics to come to know Christ through his Church.
You get Catholics who say out of one side of their mouth, “oh I can’t stand the bishops. oh who needs the bishops, they are just a bunch of liberal heretics” and then out of the other side of their mouth they tell their Protestants friends, “Why aren’t you Catholic? Don’t you know that without Christ’s church you have all this denominational chaos? Don’t you know that outside the Church there is no salvation?!”
Think about how weird that sounds. “Listen, you can’t go to heaven unless you are in communion with a Pope I think is a heretic!”
I’m sure their Protestant friend would tell them, “Wait. Didn’t you just say the bishops are garbage and untrustworthy? Why would I join the Catholic church if you think the Church’s leadership isn’t necessary? If you can find the true faith apart from the bishops, why can’t I? Maybe I should just be Orthodox, or high church Anglican, or anything else based on my own authority? If you are allowed to decide doctrine on your own authority, then why can’t I do the same?”
In response, a Catholic who holds the bishops in contempt might say the Catholic faith is more than the current bishops and that’s true. But the Church isn’t just a static handing on of past tradition. The Church has a living magisterium that teaches with authority right now, in the present moment. After all, the traditions Catholics pass on were once taught in someone else’s present moment by a living magisterium that was sometimes far more scandalous than anything we see among today’s bishops.
What I worry about are Catholics who say they don’t need the bishops, they just have the Catholic faith that has been handed on to us today. But who decides what traditions in the past belong to the Catholic faith and which ones don’t? The Orthodox say one set of traditions comprise the faith. Schismatic Catholics say another. Is it just certain faithful lay people who know? Which ones? Pope Paul VI dealt with this very problem when he said the following in 1976:
“It is even affirmed that the Second Vatican Council is not binding; that the faith would be in danger also because of the post-conciliar reforms and guidelines, which there is a duty to disobey to preserve certain traditions. What traditions? Does it belong to this group, and not the Pope, not the Episcopal College, not an Ecumenical Council, to establish which of the countless traditions must be regarded as the norm of faith!”
When you say certain charismatic laity or lone bishops have the Faith rather than the worldwide communion of bishops, you walk down a dangerous path that can you lead right out of Christ’s church. And I know this because it has happened multiple times in Church history.
For example, not too long ago there was an ecumenical council at the Vatican, you might have heard of it, and a vocal minority of Catholics said that this council was a rejection of Catholic teaching and so they rejected its teachings. Some of them even left the Church to form their own society in response to what they saw as an abandonment of the Catholic faith and the creation of a new, counterfeit Church.
Now, you might think I’m talking about the second Vatican council that ended in 1965, but I’m actually talking about the first Vatican Council that ended in 1870. At that time, you had Catholics who believed teachings like papal infallibility contradicted what the Church had always taught about the Pope and some of them broke away to form what we now call the Old Catholic Church. One of their head theologians, Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger had the following exchange with Archbishop Gregor von Scherr of Munich:
Archbishop: “Let us now begin to work again for our Holy Church.”
Döllinger: “Indeed, for the Church of old.”
Archbishop: “There is only one Church that is neither new nor old.”
Döllinger: “They [at the Council] have made a new Church.”
In 1873 Pope Pius IX blasted these schismatics for consecrating a theologian named Joseph Hubert Reinkens to be the first German bishop of the Old Catholic Church. Pope Pius IX called him a pseudo-bishop and said of the Old Catholics “these men having progressed more boldly in the ways of wickedness and destruction, as happens to heretical sects from God’s just judgment, have wished to create a hierarchy also for themselves, as we have intimated.” He said they “deny also the indefectibility of the Church and blasphemously declare that it has perished throughout the world and that its visible Head and the bishops have erred.”
Does this sound familiar? The Old Catholics would say, look we love the Church. We love tradition. We love the Catholic faith. We are just trying to protect the faith from the current bishops who have become the true heretics. In 1909 Pope Pius X gave this allocution which applies equally to those who reject the first Vatican council and prophetically to those who reject the second Vatican council:
“Do not allow yourselves to be deceived by the cunning statements of those who persistently claim to wish to be with the Church, to love the Church, to fight so that people do not leave Her . . . but judge them by their works. If they despise the shepherds of the Church and even the Pope, if they attempt all means of evading their authority in order to elude their directives and judgments . . . then about which Church do these men mean to speak? Certainly not about that established on the foundations of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
Now with 150 years of hindsight most traditionalists would say the Old Catholics were the real heretics. Today, the Old Catholic Church allows its members to use contraception because they don’t recognize papal teaching after 1870, including on contraception. They trusted in their idea of tradition over the authority of the bishops and look where it got them. Once again, I’m not
saying the bishops are always right. In Donum Veritatis the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith led by Cardinal Ratzinger said:
“it could happen that some Magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies. Bishops and their advisors have not always taken into immediate consideration every aspect or the entire complexity of a question. But 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 judgments, or that it does not enjoy divine assistance in the integral exercise of its mission.”
I think about this when people bring up examples like the German bishops to justify saying the bishops in general are unnecessary or untrustworthy. Bringing up minority cases where you can validly disobey bishops to justify invalidly disregarding the bishops’ authority in general, is like when pro-choicers bring up minority cases where you can validly act and an unborn child dies, like removing an ectopic pregnancy, to justify invalidly disregarding the right to life of unborn children in general.
I’m all in favor of people studying the Church to understand the limits of the bishop’s authority and how to question and struggle with Church teaching while still remaining faithful. There are even limited cases where theologians can reserve assent to some teachings and seek clarification from the bishops. I’ll post some links below with resources on all of that. But that’s way different than endorsing a widespread ignoring of the bishops’ authority. But to be fair, I am mad at the bishops too because they dropped the ball on issues like McCarrick or the abuse scandal and this led many people to think that the real authority in the Church lies with certain charismatic laity or priests who preach “true Catholicism” instead.
In 1896 Pope Leo XIII said “those who arbitrarily conjure up and picture to themselves a hidden and invisible Church are in grievous and pernicious error.” That would certainly apply to people who say the true church is found in a certain understanding of tradition certain teachers have rather than in what the publicly identifiable Catholic bishops teach.
I also find it amazing that some Catholics will look to older magisterial teachings to defend a very strict view of wives submitting to their husbands, but they won’t defend a strict submission to the bishops that also is found in those same documents. Consider what Pope Pius X said in the 1906 encyclical Vehementer Nos:
“the Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of per sons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its
members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.”
This reminds me of St. Ignatius Antioch who said in the second century “Let nothing be done without the bishop. See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father.”
Now a Catholic who is hyper critical of the bishops might say, just as a wife doesn’t have to submit to an abusive husband, the laity don’t have to submit to abusive bishops. But these Catholics would probably also say that what some modern wives call “abuse” are often just decisions from their husbands they don’t agree with, and so the language of abuse is exaggerated and being misused. Likewise, the laity who describe any episcopal decision they disagree with, even merely imprudent ones, as “spiritually abusive” to justify ignoring the bishops whenever they want do the same thing.
Obeying the bishops without question is a kind of clericalism that can lead to sins like abuse. But obeying the bishops only when you already agree with them, or treating the bishops as just being a stamp of approval for your personal view of Catholic tradition can lead to sins like schism. The Catechism defines schism as “the refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.”
This is a serious sin. The Church’s code of canon law says that along with manifest sinners, public apostates, heretics, and schismatics cannot be given Catholic funerals. Now, there can be cases where a person doesn’t submit to the pope out of ignorance because they think the office of the papacy doesn’t have divine authority. Pope Pius IX said in 1854 that “they who labor in ignorance of the true religion, if this ignorance is invincible, are not stained by any guilt in this matter in the eyes of God.”
But if you reject the Pope because you just disagree with some of his judgements or decisions, then you risk your soul through the sin of schism. This can be the case for Catholics who grudgingly say Francis is Pope and the bishops are the apostles’ successors, but they live in a de-facto kind of schism where they just ignore what these bishops say unless it already agrees with their personal interpretation of Church teaching. Or, they say they only have to obey what the Church infallibly teaches not what the current bishops teach. But Pope Pius XII said in 1950 that even non-infallible teaching on faith and morals made by bishops in the present must be obeyed. He wrote:
“Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority. For these matters are taught with the *ordinary teaching authority*, of which
it is true to say: “He who heareth you, heareth me”;” (which of course is a quote from Jesus telling the Apostles that they speak on behalf of him)
And it’s almost certainly the case for those who think Pope Francis isn’t really the Pope and derogatively call him Bergoglio instead.
Some people who think Francis is an anti-pope might have invincible ignorance, but in many cases their ignorance could be overcome if they just listened to what 99.99% of the rest of the Church is saying, including all the bishops, and even the late Pope Benedict XVI who never said after his resignation, “Guess what guys, I am still the Pope,” which is what happened in history whenever an anti-pope challenged the true pope.
If you want more on refuting the claim that Benedict never resigned and Francis was never validly elected, check out the link to Joe Heschmeyer’s arguments in the description. I’ll also link to Michael Lofton’s critique of the claim that an apparition of Pope Benedict appeared to a Columbian nun (who we don’t even know exists) saying Benedict was murdered and that Pope Francis is a false pope. But once again, while Pope Benedict was alive he never said Francis was an anti-Pope which is weird if he was a good man and acted like any other pope in history if an anti-pope succeeded him.
To put all of this into perspective, God often uses flawed men to lead his people. In the Old Testament covenant leaders like Moses, Jephthah, Gideon, Samson, and David committed grave sins, but God still punished those who rebelled against them.
In the early Church the apostles were constantly dealing with believers who felt that certain Church leaders weren’t good enough to justify submission to their authority. This was especially bad in Corinth where Paul said he was glad he didn’t baptize anyone since people were pledging their allegiance to the person who baptized them rather than the person who lawfully led the Church. He writes “each one of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apol′los,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you?” In chapter 12 he says the Church is one body and that “God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.”
The Greek word for discord in this verse is schisma, which means division or tear and is where we get the word schism. Just a few years after Paul wrote first Corinthians, the Corinthians unlawfully deposed priests in their Church and Clement of Rome had to respond to their disobedience by reminding the Corinthians the apostles chose successors. He condemned the “shameful and detestable sedition, utterly abhorrent to the elect of God, which a few rash and self-confident persons” have done and commanded the priests be reinstated. He warned that “If,
however, any shall disobey the words spoken by [Christ] through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and serious danger “
This is why Pope Francis warned in 2019, in the German language no less, of particular Churches being “separated from the entire ecclesial body,” and that “they would weaken, rot and die.”
But along with falling into schism like the Old Catholic Church, this outright rejection of the bishops’ authority reminds me of the Protestant Reformation and can lead to the same results.
Now some Catholics might say that’s ridiculous. Even if we don’t trust the bishops, we aren’t going to be like the Protestants who threw out all Tradition and just went with the Bible alone. We still believe in the Eucharist and other teachings of the Church Fathers.
Now, if you say you won’t leave the Catholic Church because you love Jesus in the Eucharist even though you hate the bishops, then that at the very least sounds like a one-way ticket to Eastern orthodoxy. They also have valid orders and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They even have Western Orthodox rites that resemble the extraordinary form.
But along with sounding like Orthodoxy, it also sounds like the Protestant Reformers because Luther and Calvin didn’t say “Forget about the past 1500 years, let’s just go with what we think the Bible means.” They said the bishops of their time were corrupt and so they just wanted to revive what they thought were the contents of Church tradition. For example, one Protestant website says the following about myths related to the Protestant Reformation: CLIP
These arguments were later picked up in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Anglican controversy. If you go to Google books you can find dozens of books written during this period that try to “refute Romanism” by saying the Church fathers actually supported Protestantism, not Catholicism. I remember reading one of these books several months ago and saw how its arguments about the Fathers not believing in the Catholic view of purgatory were very similar to the arguments Gavin Ortlund was making in his video on purgatory in Church history. Gavin is also releasing a book next year defending Protestantism that argues against the Catholic view of church history and the Protestant scholar Matthew Barrett has a book coming out this June called “The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church”.
I plan to respond to all of this in my own book to be published probably in 2025, but my point is that if you say you don’t need the bishops because you know which past teachings and traditions make up the deposit of Faith, then you are in the dangerous company of other people who didn’t remain faithful Catholics but, as Paul said in 1 Timothy 1:19, made shipwreck of their faith.
So here is my final plea: the sin of schism is real. God gave us a church with an enduring sacred order, heiros archos, from which we get the word hierarchy. It’s not perfect, but the men God chose to lead his people have never been perfect. But if we reject the bishops entirely in favor of our own personal views of the Faith, then we can lead ourselves into spiritual danger or confuse those who want to become Catholic. This might be justified by saying the bishops teach heresy and need to be opposed, but how do you know you aren’t as mistaken as the Reformers or the Old Catholics who said the same thing?
Hebrews 13:17 says “Obey your leaders and submit to them; for they are keeping watch over your souls, as men who will have to give account”. Instead of taking the easy way out and slandering all of the bishops because of a few bad examples let’s pray for the leaders God gave us, submit to their lawful teachings, and when we struggle with a Church teaching or bishop’s disciplinary rule, approach our pastors as respectful children to seek clarity from our spiritual fathers, and not just dishonor them through malicious and slanderous statements.
I hope this was helpful to you guy sand that you all have a very blessed day.