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In this episode, Trent rebuts Fr. James Altman’s case that Pope Francis is a heretic and so he is not actually the Pope.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. In today’s episode I want to talk about Father James Altman and what he said about Pope Francis, but first, check out the new studio. We’ve got new lights, new paint, lots of other things to brighten up the space in here and make things look a lot better. There’s going to be a few other prerecorded episodes with the old design in the next few weeks, but I’m really grateful to our patrons at trenthornpodcast.com that made all of this possible to keep upgrading our studio set. So, please consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com and definitely subscribe to the channel. All right, so Father Altman is a priest in the Diocese of La Crosse who was removed from ministry by his bishop in 2021. In today’s episode, I want to talk about how he now rejects the authority of Pope Francis and has embraced a kind of sedevacantism. So, a video he released a few weeks ago is called Bergoglio is Not the Pope, which is a reference to Pope Francis’ given name, Jorge Bergoglio.
Now most sedevacantists believe the papacy has been empty since 1958, but Father Altman seems to hold what is called the benevacantist view, the idea that Pope Benedict XVI was the last valid pope. This is a dangerous position because the catechism says the sin of schism involves the refusal of submission to the Roman pontiff or of communion with the members of the church subject to him. Father Altman is encouraging people to not be in communion with the Roman pontiff, plain and simple.
You can’t say he’s not schismatic because that requires recognizing someone is the pope and not submitting to him. The fact that nearly every Catholic on Earth, as well as all of the cardinals and bishops recognize Pope Francis is the pope is enough to show Father Altman is in error and he should repent. He’s acting like a married man defending an affair by saying, “Well, my wife isn’t really my wife,” even though every ecclesial authority says that she is. So, to say that Father Altman’s one solitary voice is correct and the entire church hierarchy has been corrupted, well, that follows the same path of destruction Martin Luther laid out 500 years ago.
So, I’m not going to go through his entire video because a lot of it’s just rhetoric or bald assertions set to, I’ll admit, good camera work and emotional music. It’s not a sound argument, it’s just manipulation. Instead, I’m going to focus on Father Altman’s main points he uses to back up his claim that Pope Francis isn’t really the pope. Before I do that though, I want to point something out. Father Altman sounds just like a Protestant fundamentalist in his arguments against Pope Francis. If you dialogue with Protestants, then you’ve probably had this conversation. Your Protestant friend says, “Well, how can you believe the pope is infallible when he’s just a man whose sins like you or me?” And you say and reply, “Oh no, infallibility only protects the pope under limited conditions from formally teaching heresy. He still sins and makes mistakes.”
We’ve had some pretty bad popes throughout church history, but the Holy Spirit kept those popes from infallibly defining a heresy through something like an ex cathedra statement. But in his critique of Pope Francis, Father Altman abandons that framework, he makes it seem like the pope must be infallible not just in ex cathedra statements, but in everything he does. However, instead of saying this disproves the papacy as a whole, which a fundamentalist Protestant might say, Father Altman focuses on Pope Francis and claims all this means that Pope Francis isn’t really the pope, but his argument would also apply to many other popes throughout church history, which is ironic because Father Altman claims he knows a lot about church history.
Father James Altman:
All the more, do they not have the first clue about church history, but I am informed about church history, so in my informed opinion, if there has been any man in the history of the Catholic Church deserving of what Jesus called the great millstone, it is Jorge Bergoglio, the bishop of Rome.
Trent Horn:
I’ll talk about the millstone later, but Father Altman’s claim about church history is very unlikely given that if he applied his standard consistently, Father Altman would prove dozens of other popes weren’t really the pope because of their sins, scandals, and theological errors. This exact same argument is used by traditional sedevacantists to argue that John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and every other pope after Pius XII wasn’t actually the pope and Protestants use these arguments to try to disprove other popes all throughout church history. So with all that in mind, let’s look at Father Altman’s argument. His main point, which is one that sedevacantists often make is that a heretic cannot become pope and a heretical pope automatically loses his office.
Father James Altman:
Again, as always, don’t take my word for it. Cardinal St. Robert Bellarmine, doctor of the church wrote, “For men are not bound or able to read hearts, but when they see that someone is a heretic by his external works, they judge him to be a heretic, pure and simple, and condemn him as a heretic.” Go look at De Romano Pontifice, Book II, chapter 30.
Trent Horn:
But this framework is a theological opinion, it’s not church teaching. It was held by Bellarmine, but other theologians disagree. Bishop Athanasius Schneider recently wrote the following, “No one in the church has the authority to consider or declare an elected and generally accepted pope an invalid pope. It is clear from the constant practice of the church that even were a papal election invalid, it would defacto be healed through the general acceptance of the newly elected by the overwhelming majority of cardinals and bishops. Even were a pope heretical, he would not automatically lose his office. The theory of the automatic loss of the papacy due to heresy is only an opinion. Even St. Robert Bellarmine noted this and did not present it as a teaching of the magisterium. The perennial papal magisterium has never taught this as a doctrine.” But even if the theory Father Altman cites were the magisterial and official one, his argument can’t get off the ground because his examples of the pope’s manifest heresy come nowhere close to proving Pope Francis is a heretic.
At best they prove the pope is imprudent, incompetent, or sinful, but none of them shows Pope Francis is a manifest heretic and as I noted earlier, these examples would apply to many popes throughout history. They would tear down the entire church just to make a jab at Pope Francis. It’s like running around your house with a blowtorch when you try to kill a spider. You risk burning down the very thing you were trying to protect. So, Father Altman lists about 20 errors to prove the pope is a heretic, but most of them are very weak or brief references to ambiguous statements or just bad appointments.
By the way, this is something sedevacantists often do. It’s called a Gish gallop. They list as many allegations as possible against the pope and hope this will overwhelm a person into just thinking there’s no way to answer all of them. This is as dishonest as an atheist who tries to refute the Bible’s authority by rattling off as many Bible difficulties as he can think of. I’m not going to cover all of his examples, but here’s a representative sample. So from the first category of errors, they just involve Pope Francis making bad appointments or supporting poor political policies or just being associated with people whose beliefs contradict the faith.
Father James Altman:
In the moment Jorge Bergoglio walked out onto the balcony for the first time with his St. Gallen’ Mafia BFF Cardinal Danneels, who Bergoglio knew had tried to cover up for another one of his brother bishops who had molested not one but two of the bishop’s nephews, from the moment Bergoglio rehabilitated his BFF boy raper Theodore McCarrick leading up to the summer of shame of 2018 when the Catholic Church was made the laughing stock of the world and Catholics left the church in droves because of the continued coverup of even Cardinals who raped boys, from the moment Bergoglio appointed boy raper McCarrick’s housemate Cardinal Farrell to be head of the Vatican cabinet post for family life. You remember Cardinal Farrell who like Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes was all, “Oh, I saw nothing. I know nothing.” From the moment Bergoglio just had a big photo op with Bill Clinton and the Soros spawn. Remember, Bill and Hillary Clinton refused to stand and applaud Mother Theresa. The moment Bergoglio just received notorious, blasphemous artists into the Sistine Chapel, Bergoglio and his American cardinal cronies promoted and fostered the diabolical debacle at the southern border.
Trent Horn:
This is supposed to prove that Pope Francis is a heretic, and so he is not the pope, but none of this involves heresy. The catechism says heresy is, “The obstinate post baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same.” A heretic is typically someone who rejects a dogma like Mary’s perpetual virginity or the deity of Christ and they have to obstinately reject it. If they make a mistake in their speech or conceptual framework and they later accept correction, then they are not obstinate in denying these dogmas and so they’re not a heretic, but all of these allegations just deal with making bad or imprudent decisions.
Having a public policy that promotes migration to the United States is not a theological issue, neither is meeting with questionable people or making questionable appointments for someone to become a bishop or a cardinal. Now, Father Altman might say that these bad decisions prove that Pope Francis, well, he doesn’t really believe in the church’s teachings on, for example, the wrongness of blasphemy because the pope met with someone who blasphemed Christ. The idea is that even if the pope doesn’t commit blasphemy, his actions say otherwise and actions speak louder than words, and so they prove he embraces blasphemous heresies. I don’t know, here’s how Father Altman puts it.
Father James Altman:
But all those 20 examples demonstrate what is known in the law as a course of conduct. In common language, actions speak louder than words. A course of conduct reveals the underlying character nature of the person. It reveals the truth about what a person truly believes, and those 20 examples, there are more irrefutably demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt that Bergoglio is not Catholic now, and because you know a tiger doesn’t change his stripes, as those same 20 examples demonstrate, as his same course of conduct demonstrates, he was not Catholic at the moment he entered the conclave.
Trent Horn:
Once again, by this logic you would depose many other popes throughout church history. For example, awful ecclesial appointments, you can find those all throughout the church’s history. In fact, the word nepotism, which refers to unethically promoting family members to positions in an organization, it comes from the Latin cardinalis nepos, cardinal nephew. In the 16th and 17th centuries, popes would make their nephews and other relatives, including illegitimate children, cardinals, about a dozen of these cardinals later became popes. So, this argument would end up showing that dozens of popes throughout church history were heretics merely based on scandalous behavior, and so they weren’t really the pope. You’d have people like Pope Benedict IX who sold the papacy, Pope Stephen the VI who dug up the corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus and put him on trial, or John XII, the 18-year-old pope who murdered people and committed adultery and was eventually murdered by the husband of one of the mistresses that he was sleeping with.
Or what about the first pope, St. Peter? Remember, a lot of these examples Father Altman gave against Pope Francis involve mistakes or moral failures, but if actions speak louder than words, then Father Altman just refuted the entire office of the papacy. In Galatians 2, St. Paul rebuked St. Peter because Peter refused to dine with gentile Christians. He was worried about what the Jewish Christians who thought circumcision was necessary for salvation, he worried what they would think. Paul even said, “I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel.” Father Altman says actions speak louder than words though, so that would mean St. Peter was preaching the heresy that circumcision was necessary for salvation and being a heretic, he wouldn’t be the pope, just because Peter cowardly accommodated those who defended this heresy. But if Peter wasn’t really the pope because of his heretical actions, then nobody else in church history has ever been a pope either.
Once again, you see how this argument trying to show, “Oh, Pope Francis isn’t the pope because he made a bad decision,” well, tons of popes throughout church history have made bad decisions. If they weren’t really the pope, none of their appointments were valid, the church would cease to exist. St. Peter himself wouldn’t be a pope under this standard and we wouldn’t have the church. You’re burning down the house just because you’re trying to chase a spider. Also, if Pope Francis is not pope because of his bad decisions related to the McCarrick scandal, then say goodbye to Pope Benedict XVI and John Paul II. They were also implicated through action or inaction in McCarrick’s rise in the church. And the sex abuse crisis became public in 2002, you can blame that on the bad appointments from Pope St. John Paul II. Even though he’s a saint, it doesn’t mean he always made the best decisions in his life, same with Cardinal Ratzinger during his time at the Vatican.
And 70% of the abusers in the church abuse crisis were ordained before 1970. This isn’t just a Novus Ordo problem, this is something you can see from bishops, seminary rectors, and popes long before the Second Vatican Council. So, all this shows that the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t prevent bishops from always making bad decisions. It prevents the church as a whole and the pope in particular under limited cases from infallibly teaching error. Now, the second to Father Altman’s examples of Pope Francis’s heresy are just things the pope says that were taken out of context. They don’t deal with dogmas, so they can’t possibly be heresies, and when you look at them, they’re not even errors when you fairly read them. Here’s a few examples that he offers.
Father James Altman:
The moment Bergoglio insidiously inferred that Catholics should not breed like rabbits.
Trent Horn:
All right, think of Father Altman’s position here. If the pope ever says anything that can be taken the wrong way, even if he’s speaking informally or off the cuff, then he’s not the pope. That’s insane. By that standard, the papacy went out of existence a long time ago. Even in this case, there’s nothing wrong with what Pope Francis said when we look at the whole context. It was about a woman he met in Rome who had given birth to seven children by C-section, and was now pregnant with her eighth child. So according to one article, Francis asked, “Does she want to leave the seven orphans? This is to tempt God,” he said. Adding later, “That is an irresponsibility. Catholics,” the pope said, “Should speak of responsible parenthood. How do we do this?” Francis asked, “With dialogue. Each person with his pastor seeks how to do that Responsible parenthood. God gives you methods to be responsible,” he continued.
“Some think that, excuse the word, that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits, no.” Father Altman praises Humanae Vitae, but Humanae Vitae has an entire section on responsible parenthood. It says in part, “With regard to physical, economic, psychological, and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised by those who prudently and generously decide to have more children and by those who for serious reasons and with due respect to moral precepts, decide not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time.” The health risks involved with your eighth C-section would be a serious reason. Rabbits don’t think about that stuff. Rabbits take about a month to reproduce and they don’t have a menstrual cycle. So, a female rabbit can produce 1,000 offspring in her lifetime, which is necessary because 90% of rabbits die before they reproduce.
So, Pope Francis is making a perfectly valid point, we’re people, not rabbits, but it could have been worded better because a lot of people treat just having more than two kids as breeding like rabbits. So, his words fuel anti-Catholic stereotypes, but they’re not a heresy. On the other extreme, there are fundamentalist Catholics who would say a woman should have children even if she is on her eighth C-section, which really increases your chances of a severe complication like placenta previa.
Once again, we’re not rabbits. We can discern when a serious, physical, emotional, or financial reason would justify indefinitely postponing having children. I also want to add another point here. Some people will stomp their feet, plug their ears, they’ll be mad, refuse to hear any explanation I give because it’s supposedly pope-splaining. Now I agree, a person can make specious arguments to try to make the pope look like he never makes a mistake, but the other extreme assumes that there is never a way to understand the pope has said something and it’s taken out of context. The principle of charity requires acknowledging when the pope makes an error and when the critics are the ones who make an error.
Father James Altman:
From the moment Bergoglio had five meetings with an avowed atheist who reported that Bergoglio said, “Those people who do not repent and therefore cannot be forgiven just disappear after death because hell does not exist.”
Trent Horn:
This is regarding interviews that Pope Francis gave with the then 93-year-old Italian journalist, Eugenio Scalfari. He since passed away, but Scalfari didn’t use notes in his interviews. So, the Vatican rebuke Scalfari’s incorrect characterization of the pope, and Pope Francis has said that hell exists on numerous occasions. In one address, the pope referenced the Italian mafia and said, “Convert, there is still time, so that you don’t end up in hell.” In 2016 he said, “The danger always remains that by a constant refusal to open the doors of their hearts to Christ who knocks on them in the poor, the proud, rich and powerful will end up condemning themselves and plunging into the eternal abyss of solitude, which is hell.” And in a 2017 homily the pope said, “Our Lady foretold and warned us about a way of life that is godless and indeed profanes God and his creatures. Such a life frequently proposed and imposed risks leading to hell.”
Father James Altman:
From the moment Bergoglio attacked monasteries and convents and the prayerful cloistered life that has been in the Catholic Church dating way back to the great St. Anthony of the Desert circa 300 AD, since the great St. Benedict circa early 500s, since the great St. Claire circa early 1200s.
Trent Horn:
I have no idea what Father Altman is going on about here. The Vatican has been involved in controversial decisions about closing some monasteries and convents, but that’s going to happen with declining numbers of people entering into religious life. Bishops around the world have to make these kinds of calls when it comes to closing parishes for similar reasons, but Pope Francis loves the religious life. Here’s what he said in a 2023 Wednesday audience, “There is another great witness that runs through the history of faith, that of the nuns and monks, sisters and brothers who renounce themselves and who renounce the world to imitate Jesus on the path of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and to intercede on behalf of all. It will do us good to the extent we are able to visit a monastery because there one prays and works. Each one has its own rules, but their hands are always occupied, engaged in work, engaged in prayer. May the Lord give us new monasteries and may he give us new monks and nuns to carry the church forward with their intercession.”
Father Altman also brings up issues like the Abu Dhabi statement and Pachamama, which I’ve already addressed in previous episodes. For example, I addressed that in my rebuttal to Peter Diamond on sedevacantism. So, if you want more of an in-depth reply on that, you can check that out in the link in the description below.
Father James Altman:
From the moment, Bergoglio attacked the holy mass of the ages, the traditional Latin mass, and instead promoted the godless worship he allows in the new world order like putting a beach ball on the altar, having these air puppets flying around, having a couple perform a tango in front of the altar.
Trent Horn:
Two things here, first, the pope reversing an accommodation of an older liturgy that his predecessor allowed does not make him an anti-pope. Peter Kwasniewski, who’s one of the most outspoken critics of the pope’s restrictions on the traditional Latin mass, strongly affirms that Pope Francis is indeed the pope, in spite of a disciplinary decision he strongly disagrees with. To compare this in history, St. Irenaeus strongly disagree with Pope Victor’s decision to not allow Christians in the Eastern church to celebrate Easter on a particular date, but Irenaeus did not deny that Victor was the pope. Second, the liturgical abuses committed by random priests around the world do not prove that Francis is not the pope. If it did, no pope would ever truly be the pope. Father Altman makes a similar argument here.
Father James Altman:
From the moment Bergoglio and every single other American Catholic, save Cardinal Burke, let Biden and Pelosi commit sacrilege receiving holy communion, and like Cupich’s case let people, non-Catholics like the Jewish Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the lesbian Methodist Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot commit sacrilege as he sat right there.
Trent Horn:
So wait, if a priest in America gives a non-Catholic the Eucharist, then the pope is not the pope? Once again, by this standard, the church would’ve perished the instant after Jesus ascended into heaven if it requires that every priest in the church never make a mistake, and that’s what happened here in some of these cases. The chaplain who gave Lightfoot communion was horrified by his mistake. I’ve seen allegations Cardinal Cupich gave Rahm Emanuel the Eucharist, but I’ve had a hard time corroborating that, but suppose he did, and you have cowardly clerics who won’t hold pro-abortion politicians responsible for their votes. Having bad bishops doesn’t make you a bad pope, it doesn’t make you a fake pope. And once again, even if you are a bad pope, it doesn’t mean you’re a fake pope. Also, there are bishops like Archbishop Cordileone who have refused to give pro-abortion politicians communion, but more importantly, Father Altman praises Cardinal Burke here as the only good cardinal.
But if that’s true, why doesn’t Father Altman agree with Cardinal Burke that Francis is the pope? In a November 2019 interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Burke was asked, “Do you believe Francis is a legitimate pope?” Cardinal Burke then says the following, “Yes, yes. I’ve had people present to me all kinds of arguments calling into question the election of Pope Francis, but I name him every time I offer the holy mass. I call him Pope Francis. It’s not an empty speech on my part. I believe that he is the pope and I try to say that consistently to people because you’re correct, according to my perception. Also, people are getting more and more extreme in their response to what’s going on in the church.”
Father James Altman:
A memo to Bergoglio and every American cardinal, save Cardinal Burke, when you die, and it won’t be long, and you meet Jesus Christ the Lord, beside him will be standing St. Tarcisius, St. Charles Lwanga, and St. Robert Bellarmine, and they will block the entrance to heaven and watch you fall to your eternal damnation and to the unquenchable fires of hell. That’s how Jesus described it, to which I only can say out of love and concern for you dear family, the eternal souls, they are leading astray. This cannot happen soon enough. Keep the faith, dear family. Keep the faith.
Trent Horn:
This is really dark. Notice that Father Altman does not even pray for these men to repent of their sins that he’s accusing them of. He gleefully rejoices in their damnation. That’s not what scripture teaches. God says in Ezekiel 33:11, “‘As I live, says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.’ Turn back from your evil ways for, why will you die, oh, house of Israel?” Or 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” In fact, it gets really dark in Father Altman’s most recent video where he says Pope Francis deserves capital punishment by being drowned in the ocean. Here’s what Father Altman said.
Father James Altman:
Other family, today we are going to consider Jesus’ teaching on the great millstone as it applies to Jorge Bergoglio and how the best people get mad at me because they say I’m just angry all the time, but the best thing we could do would be to tie the great millstone around Jorge Bergoglio’s neck and throw him into the deep blue Mediterranean Sea. It was not until recently that I came to understand what this meant. It just seemed like a very odd thing to say. Jesus said it’d be better for capital punishment to be administered to the wolf in sheep’s clothing, than to let the wolf lead his lambs astray. So for the record, watch, this is an aside for the record, Jesus approved of capital punishment and even gave express circumstances as to when it should be used against apostates in the hierarchy who are leading the lambs astray.
Trent Horn:
It seems that Father Altman is saying that Christ taught that those who cause confusion for the little ones in the faith ought to literally be drowned to death. That’s what it seems given his saying that Jesus approved of capital punishment, but Christ often used hyperbole when he preached. If he literally says apostates who cause others to sin should be drowned, was Christ literally saying that if your hand causes you to sin, you should literally cut it off, or that if your eye causes you to sin, you should literally pluck it out? Overall, this is just really sad to see a Catholic priest come to this and what he says about the pope and the larger church as a whole. This position eventually leads to traditional sedevacantism, which is itself is just a kind of Protestantism that plays Catholic dress up. How else would you describe sedevacantists who say that on Sunday you should just stay home and pray the rosary and not receive Christ in the Eucharist because there are no valid masses?
Should we really believe that Christ abandoned his church and left it without his Eucharistic presence for decades with no hope in sight for any kind of solution to the problem? Finally, I just want to leave you with a word for those who still disagree with me and say, “You know what? I trust Father Altman, and I’m going to go with what he says about Francis not being the pope. Father Altman’s one of the good ones.” Isn’t Cardinal Burke one of the good ones or Bishop Athanasius Schneider or Bishop Strickland? Aren’t they good ones? If so, why don’t you agree with them and that they say Pope Francis is the pope. What’s ironic is that Father Altman warns about following false teachers?
Father James Altman:
What we are to do when we recognize the false prophets by their fruits, the false teachers who secretly introduce destructive heresies-
Trent Horn:
But by denying what the universal church teaches about Pope Francis, Father Altman has become the very thing he warns against, and I pray that he will repent of this deadly error before he leads others into the sin of schism, which can result in eternal damnation. So thank you very much, I hope this episode was helpful for you all today, and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
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