The Traditionalist Honeymoon Is Over

by Unknown

We're approaching the one-year anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict XVI, and for a lot of "ultra-traditional Catholics," the honeymoon is clearly over.

In the age of the Internet, there are too many papal critics and so many examples to cite, now that almost everyone has a computer and can blog his way to authority and set himself up as judge, jury, and executioner of the Holy Father. From the Mail must choose one lo highlight what it considers to be a very dangerous trend and an even more morally harmful attitude: that of former Wanderer contributor Thomas Droleskey.

In a recent rant delivered to his cyberspace groupies, Dr. Droleskey issues his condemnation of Pope Benedict XVI under the silly title, "The Potomac Flows Into the Tiber," an essay in which he seconds the opinion of SSPX Bishop Bernard Fellay that the Holy Father is clearly wrong when it comes to his teaching on the separation of Church and state.

After pulling a quotation from Pope Leo XIII's 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei, Droleskey comes to the following conclusions:

• "Pope Benedict's erroneous beliefs [emphasis added by FTM] about the state, clearly contradicted by every pope in the history of the Church prior to 1958 and thus part of the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium of the Catholic Church, is the result of the flowing of the Potomac, if you will, into the Tiber: the influence of the Americanist heresy, a species of Modernism, on the minds of leading Catholic intellectuals in the past fifty years, including that of Joseph Ratzinger."
  
  
• "Pope Benedict XVI is clearly a Modernist in his belief that the secular state is the `only mode of existence within the Catholic view of social organization'. . .
  
  
• "In the meantime we pray for our Holy Father to have his mind enlightened by the unalloyed clarity of the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church so that he will respond with joy at the prospect of undoing the harm he has caused throughout his priesthood by his embrace of Modernism."

By what right does Dr. Droleskey claim the authority of a General Council of the Church?

The Throne And The Altar

From the Mail will answer the itinerant professor with the words of Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, the epitome of the ultramontanist, and chief support of Pope Leo XIII, whose views of the separation of Church and state are identical to those of Pope Benedict XVI.

But first, this timely reminder from Hilaire Belloc, who wrote that the chief cause of the terror inflicted on the Church during the time of the French Revolution was its close identity with the state. As Belloc put it so succinctly at the end of the chapter, "The Catholic Church," in his The French Revolution (Oxford University Press):

"The centuries during which the throne and the altar had stood as twin symbols, especially in France, the very terminology of religious metaphor which had been forged during the centuries of monarchical institutions in Europe, helped to found the great quarrel."

The cause of the terror against the Church, Belloc showed, was its leaders' attachment to a corrupt political system. He writes, for example:

"While in the wealthy, the bureaucratic, and the governing classes, to ridicule the faith was an attitude to be taken for granted, seriously to attack the privileges or position of its ministers was ungentlemanly and not to be allowed." He observed that at a time "in which the Catholic faith was at a lower ebb than it had ever been since the preaching and establishing of it in Gaul" in the first centuries of the Church, the Church had money, power, and official standing greater than it had ever had before — and it was resented and hated as never before, and had staked its survival to a moribund institution.

Five Theories

In his Inaugural Address of 1868, cited, in part, in this place several weeks ago, Cardinal Manning explained the types of cooperation or relations possible between Church and state, observing: "The supremacy of Caesarism is past. The supremacy of the democracy will be the next form of ecclesiastical authority....

"There are only the five following conclusions or theories possible:

"First, that the Church and the state should stand in relations of mutual recognition, amity, and cooperation, under the supreme direction of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, Pontiff, and King; or,

"Secondly, that the Church be established, and thereby subjected to the state, as in Constantinople after the schism, in England by Henry VIII, and in Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; or,

"Thirdly, that the state should establish and endow all communions alike, and assume a supreme control over them all.

"Fourthly, that the state, holding itself aloof from all contact with religion and religious communions, shall nevertheless exercise a supreme control over them all.

"Fifthly, that all religious communions in a country be disestablished, that is, tolerated, but not incorporated in the public laws, the state ceasing to interfere in any way with them.

"The first is the ecclesiastical supremacy for which St. Thomas [Becket] and Sir Thomas More laid down their lives.

"The second is the royal supremacy of Henry VIII. [By the way, FTM writes this on the anniversary of Henry VIII's suppression of the monasteries in England — the greatest Act of State plundering in the history of mankind.]

"The third has been proposed by many English statesmen, and is recommended now by many for Ireland.

"The fourth is the theory to which the rationalistic liberalism of this country is tending.

"The fifth is the state to which a power higher than theory, the irresistible current of events, is carrying us. They who promote it may be adversaries of the Church, but the Church will know how to use it for its own liberty and mission to the world.

"It may not be unreasonable to examine these several theories, because with surprise and regret I have observed that even among Catholics the true relations of the Church and the state have been so imperfectly defined, that some confound the union or concord of Church and state with what is called the Establishment of the Church."

The entire history of the Catholic Church in England, up to Henry VIII, Manning showed, manifested the separation intended by Jesus Christ when He founded the Church; that is, the Church was "recognized as a body or corporation, to use a later language, as a moral person, and is so treated by the public law of the land. Secondly, it was declared to have a liberty or immunity of its own, which the public law respected and preserved. Thirdly, it had its judgments, that is, its tribunals, jurisdictions, and sentences. Fourthly, it had its revenues, pensions, and tributes, which were held by the Church, and recognized by the state. Lastly, in its prayers for the king it made intercession, not by any royal command, but by the instinct of Christian piety."

Two Powers, Spiritual And Civil

In a later address, "Caesarism and Ultramontanism," Manning wrote:

"Christianity, or the faith and law revealed by Jesus Christ, has, as I have said, introduced two principles of Divine Authority into human society: the one, the absolute separation of the two powers, spiritual and civil; the other, the supremacy of the spiritual over the civil in all matters within its competence or divine jurisdiction.

"I do not know how any man, without renouncing his Christian name or the coherence of his reason, can deny either of these principles." Pope Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam and Vatican I were both, as we would say today, "on the same page" when it comes to the separation of Church and state, said Manning, who explained:

"First, as to the separation of the spiritual and civil powers, the whole history of Christendom is sufficient evidence. The civil sovereignty is coeval with man. Society is not of man's making. The relations of authority, submission, and equality lie in the human family and from it are extended to commonwealths, kingdoms, and empires. The civil sovereignty resides materially in society at large; formally in the person or persons to whom society may commit its exercise. Immediately, therefore, sovereignty is given by God to society; mediately through society to the person who wields it. Both materially and formally, mediately and immediately, sovereignty is from God, and within its competence is supreme and sacred. Civil allegiance to sovereigns is therefore a part of Christianity, and treason is both a crime against a lawful authority and a sin against God, who has ordained that authority.

"Ultramontanism teaches that within the sphere of its competence, the civil power is to be obeyed, not only `for wrath but for conscience's sake.' It is part of the Christian religion to obey `the powers that are.'

"As to the independence of the Spiritual Power, we need waste no words. The existence of the Church and the primacy of its head in these eighteen hundred years are proof enough....

"It is clear that the civil power cannot define how far the circumference of faith and morals extends. If it could, it would be invested with one of the supernatural endowments of the Church. To do this it must know the whole deposit of explicit and implicit faith; or, in other words, it must be the guardian of Christian Revelation. Now no Christian, nor any man of sound mind, claims this for the civil power: and if not, then, either there is no judge to end strife; or that judge must be the Church, to which alone the Revelation of Christianity in faith and morals was divinely entrusted."

Losing Faith

It seems to FTM that the chorus of Catholics proclaiming the "heresy" and "modernism" of Benedict XVI more than borders on impiety and blasphemy: The chorus seems to have lost faith in the Holy Spirit; for, as Cardinal Manning explained:

"[T]he union of the Holy Spirit with the Church is not conditional, but absolute, depending upon no finite will, but upon the Divine Will alone. It is therefore indissoluble to all eternity....

"God has provided that the Church cannot teach falsehood: that what He has revealed should be forever preserved and enunciated by the perpetual presence and assistance of the same Spirit from whom the Revelation originally came. And this gives us the basis of a Divine certainty and the rule of Divine faith.

"The voice of the living Church in this hour, when it declares what God has revealed, is not other than the voice of the Holy Spirit, and therefore generates Divine faith in those who believe....

"The Decrees of General Councils are undoubtedly the voice of the Holy Ghost, both because they are the organs of the teaching of the Church, and because they have the pledge of a special Divine assistance, according to the needs of the Church and of the faith.

"The Definitions and Decrees of the Pontiffs speaking ex cathedra, or as the Head of the Church and to the whole Church, whether by Bull or Apostolic Letter or Encyclical or Brief, in matter of faith and morals, to many or to one, are undoubtedly guided by the same Divine assistance, and are therefore infallible."

The Church Is Triumphing

In another address, "The Triumph of the Church," delivered at a time when a schism was developing among the "Old Catholics" who rejected Vatican I, Manning offered a commentary that has lost none of its potency in the 130 years since:

"Such, then, is the mission and the work of the Church — to bear witness, to teach and to judge; and in doing this, whether men will believe or whether men will not believe, it is accomplishing its triumph in the world.

"The world forgets that there is not only salvation, but there is also judgment; and God, the Judge of all, is putting men on their trial. The Church is fulfilling its office by proposing the way of salvation to men, visibly to the eye by its own presence, audibly to the ear by its own teaching, clearly to the intellect by the evident truth of its own doctrines. It is putting men upon trial, and applying the test to their hearts.

"It tests their faith, to see whether men will believe; it tests their candor, to see whether they will choose God above all things; it tests their courage, to know whether they are ready to take up their cross and follow their Divine Master. The Church says to the men of this day: `Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the Gospel shall save it.

"And in saying this, God is separating between nation and nation, and between man and man....

"The world is on its probation now. It has been for generations and generations driving God and Christianity out of its public life. Christianity is canceled from its public law; Christianity is silent in the legislature; Christianity at this moment lingers in education, but men are endeavoring to close the doors of the schools against it, and so to shut Christianity out of the knowledge of the rising generation....

"The world is laboring with all its might, and all its fraud, and all its riches, and all its public authority, to accomplish this end. I do not say that them who are doing it know what they do; but I affirm they are doing what I say....

"This indeed is the triumph of the world. But meanwhile the Church is triumphing, though men know it not. The Church was never more widespread than at this moment, never more luminous in the eyes of men, never more explicitly known in its faith."

What Do You Think?

To comment on any of the above issues — or on anything else — please write to: From the Mail, The Wanderer, 201 Ohio St., St. Paul, MN 55107.

This item 6836 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org