The John-Henry Westen Show - What happens if the pope is a heretic？ Church history professor explains

00:00:00.000 Individual popes could go to hell. Their faith is not guaranteed. But he says the second privilege, without a doubt, did extend to Peter's successors, meaning that they could never teach something against the faith or that there would never be found one in the sea who would ever teach against it.

00:00:21.160 So how do we understand that? And then Bellarmine finishes by saying, the power of Peter's keys does not extend to the point that the supreme pontiff can declare not sin. What is sin? In fact, this would be to call evil good and good evil.

00:00:41.100 Something that will always has been and will always be very far from the one who is the head of the church, the pillar and the foundation of the truth.

00:00:53.540 So of all the confusing things on the planet today, none is more confusing than Pope Francis and what is going on in Rome.

00:01:03.540 And on that matter, today we're celebrating or recognizing the 60th anniversary of the start of the Second Vatican Council, also of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:01:15.640 And it certainly seems like we're reliving some of that now.

00:01:21.060 And wouldn't it have been great to have an expert on the papacy to speak to us, to give us some explanation of what is going on?

00:01:31.960 We have that for you today with the return of Dr. Edmund Mazza to The John Henry Weston Show.

00:01:37.840 Stay tuned.

00:01:45.640 Dr. Edmund Mazza, thanks for being with us.

00:02:09.740 Oh, it's a blessing to be with you.

00:02:12.220 Well, let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.

00:02:14.200 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

00:02:20.100 Amen.

00:02:22.640 So we are in the midst of absolute craziness.

00:02:26.740 We have just seen the proposals from the German Synod for the Synod on Synodality.

00:02:34.340 We've seen the Belgian bishops just proffer a blessing for homosexual couples.

00:02:40.480 We then learned that, at least according to one of those bishops, Bishop Bonny, said that Pope Francis agrees with him.

00:02:49.140 Many suggested in the Church that, well, if the bishop's conference has put out a blessing for homosexual couples, obviously the Pope has to correct it.

00:02:58.200 So, of course, there's been silence from Rome.

00:03:00.820 But at the same time, we have Father James Martin and his promotion by the Pope himself.

00:03:07.640 And everybody knows his stance is in line with the Belgian bishops.

00:03:12.260 Yet we know that the Church can't change its teaching.

00:03:15.880 So we're in utter confusion and hoping you can bring us some light.

00:03:22.920 Well, I'll certainly do my best.

00:03:25.080 But I just want to say right off the bat that, unlike Papa Bergoglio, I don't have a direct connection to the great Western grandmother.

00:03:33.520 So I may be lacking.

00:03:38.900 So this business of synodality has its roots over 60 years ago in something called collegiality.

00:03:48.400 And this was something that was one of the biggest aspects of the Second Vatican Council, which, as you pointed out, we are commemorating the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Council this week.

00:03:57.520 But it's interesting that Pope John XXIII, the Pope who called the Council, when he was elected at the conclave in October of 1958, I'd like to read to you a brief exchange between a certain monk who was actually, it turns out, was a close friend of John XXIII.

00:04:19.480 And he was talking with his abbot, and he said that John was going to be elected and that John was going to call an ecumenical council.

00:04:35.720 He says here, let me see if I can find the dialogue here, that the monk's name was Dom Lambert Baudouin.

00:04:45.620 Probably nobody's ever heard of this person, but he had a big influence.

00:04:49.480 He was a Belgian monk who, in the 1920s, was experimenting with the liturgy and making plans to have the laity actively participate.

00:05:03.280 He was also one of the leading figures in the budding ecumenical movement.

00:05:07.740 And actually, Pope Pius XI had to come down on him and sort of exile him from his monastery because he sort of went too far in that direction.

00:05:19.420 You might remember that Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical basically saying that Catholics cannot participate in these Protestant ecumenical exchanges.

00:05:31.680 But I'll just read from the diary here.

00:05:36.280 In 1958, Father Roger Polman found himself one day at Chavinton in Father Baudouin's room.

00:05:45.080 And the two engaged in a crude dialogue about the ailing Pius XII.

00:05:50.240 Baudouin, I warn you, he will die very soon and his steward will be Roncalli.

00:05:57.040 And for those that don't know, that was the baptismal name of John XXIII.

00:06:04.180 And Polman said that nuncio from Paris.

00:06:08.820 And the monk Baudouin said, well, yes, you'll see.

00:06:12.560 He'll announce the council and he'll do it from an ecumenical perspective.

00:06:18.160 And then during the conclave itself on October 28th, 1958, there was a meeting and Father Baudouin repeats like a mantra, Roncalli will become pope and declare an ecumenical council.

00:06:36.180 So the genesis for the idea of the council owes itself in large part to this obscure Belgian monk that nobody's ever heard of before.

00:06:48.380 Now, I actually talk about this in an upcoming course that I'm offering online, which is a history of the papacy.

00:06:57.660 And so if folks want to learn more about that, they can go to edmundmazza.com.

00:07:01.980 But we're going to be exploring the early popes and councils and how they relate to these controversial questions that we're looking at today.

00:07:09.280 And I'll just finish by saying that in a letter to a Vatican scholar, Cardinal Suwens, who was one of these questionable Belgian prelates at the Second Vatican Council, he actually said in a letter that how did Pope John XXIII come up with the idea for a council?

00:07:32.120 Well, it's partly the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but he says, quote, I believe that Father Lambert Baudouin played an important role when Cardinal Roncalli, the future pope, was an apostolic delegate in Istanbul, he held talks on the subject.

00:07:49.800 And Baudouin argued at length with him about the need to balance Vatican Council I after the promulgation of a new council that would work out these unfinished questions.

00:08:02.880 In other words, Vatican Council I was focused on the powers of the papacy, and maybe we'll get into a little bit of that later.

00:08:10.840 But these people that were interested in collegiality, they wanted to make the main thrust of the Second Vatican Council, I'm sorry to say, to weaken the power of the centralized papacy and increase the power of the bishops.

00:08:27.880 And that's where we get this idea of collegiality.

00:08:30.280 OK. Obviously, I think the idea of collegiality has been taken far, far, far away when you had, you know, individual good bishops in a country who tried to do the right thing on pro-life or pro-family things.

00:08:48.780 They're often smacked down by the bishops' conference.

00:08:51.600 But we were quick to point out there's not supposed to have any real authority.

00:08:55.400 But nonetheless, that happened.

00:08:56.640 Yes. You see, traditionally, the ecclesiology of the church was that the jurisdiction of the bishops, their power to govern, is given to them by the Pope, by the Holy Father.

00:09:13.280 That all jurisdiction in the church is his, and then that flows down to the bishops that he appoints, Bishop of Milan, Bishop of Paris, etc.

00:09:21.820 But Vatican II actually changed that, which is hard to understand because Cardinal Ottaviani, who was the head of the Holy Office back then, thought that it was theologically certain that this question had been settled, that jurisdiction comes to the bishops from the Pope.

00:09:41.780 But at the Second Vatican Council, that language, in fact, the preparatory schemas for the Second Vatican Council, which were prepared ahead of time, were rejected by the Council Fathers, I believe, very early on.

00:09:57.260 And what they did was they threw out the old schemas.

00:10:27.260 Then the Council says he receives not only the munis to teach and to sanctify, but also to govern.

00:10:38.140 And so this has become quite controversial, because the progressives, the leftists at the Council, use this as a tactic of weakening the central authority of the Pope and increasing the authority or the synodality of these synods of bishops or conferences of bishops for their own ends.

00:10:57.280 So, we are confronted today in the Church with something very severe.

00:11:05.040 I was just at a conference, the Catholic Identity Conference, and I was asked a question by Timothy Flanders, who writes for 1 Peter 5.

00:11:15.460 A great guy, great journalist, but he asked a very clear question and was very hard to answer.

00:11:22.400 It was, you know, Catholics are known for their obedience and allegiance to the Pope, and yet there we were at a conference talking about resistance.

00:11:31.460 Resistance, in effect, in effect, to that very Pope.

00:11:36.900 So, I told him, I'm not a theologian, I told him, I don't know how to answer.

00:11:43.660 The only thing I know how to answer is that, you know, I'm a father and a Catholic, and there's no way I can let my children's faith be corrupted by what I know is untrue.

00:11:57.180 Because I think, as Catholics, we should know the basics of faith, and they don't change.

00:12:03.860 So, very difficult indeed.

00:12:05.520 I'd love to hear your take on it.

00:12:08.020 Thank you, John Henry.

00:12:08.800 Again, I don't have my lucky turkey bone with me, but I will give this a shot.

00:12:14.820 You know, in addition to my course on the history of the papacy, which I'm also, in a few weeks from now, going to be releasing a book, by the grace of God.

00:12:25.240 It's called The Pope and the Prayer of Christ.

00:12:28.400 And basically, I go through the exegesis on Luke, chapter 22, verse 32, down through the centuries.

00:12:37.620 And let me just read that.

00:12:39.080 It's a very short passage.

00:12:41.480 And the Lord said,

00:12:42.720 Now, I'll just cut to the most important commentator on this passage.

00:13:10.780 And that is St. Robert Bellarmine, who was a great figure of the Counter-Reformation, who was a doctor of the Church, and was the principal person that the council fathers of Vatican I turned to when they tried to come up with the dogmas, the wording of the dogmas of the Holy Father, how when he speaks ex cathedra, he is infallible.

00:13:32.600 However, Robert Bellarmine would go further than that.

00:13:37.560 I mean, everybody, not everybody, but most Catholics today would know that on certain occasions when the Pope speaks from the chair of Peter, he is guaranteed not to be able to teach error on faith and morals.

00:13:48.420 But this exegesis of Luke 22 goes a little further than that.

00:13:53.160 I'll just read St. Robert.

00:13:55.700 Bellarmine says that there are two privileges here that Christ is giving to St. Peter.

00:14:03.820 One, that he personally could not ever lose the true faith when he was tempted by the devil.

00:14:12.480 The second privilege is that he, as quote-unquote Pope, could never teach something against the faith, or that there would never be found one in his sea who would teach against the true faith.

00:14:27.500 And then Bellarmine says, from these privileges, we see that the first did not remain to his successors, meaning that, you know, individual popes could go to hell.

00:14:41.760 You know, their faith is not guaranteed.

00:14:44.100 But he says the second privilege, without a doubt, did extend to Peter's successors, meaning that they could never teach something against the faith, or that there would never be found one in the sea who would ever teach against it.

00:15:00.260 So how do we understand that?

00:15:02.120 And then Bellarmine finishes by saying, the power of Peter's keys does not extend to the point that the supreme pontiff can declare not sin, what is sin.

00:15:15.660 In fact, this would be to call evil good and good evil, something that will always has been and will always be very far from the one who is the head of the church, the pillar and the foundation of the truth.

00:15:33.280 Those are some very strong claims that we can always rely upon the popes to teach us properly.

00:15:39.420 Well, the problem with that is there's a little fly in the ointment is that there's a handful of popes down through the centuries who seem to have taught error in some capacity, in some way.

00:15:51.940 For example, Pope Liberius.

00:15:55.180 Pope Liberius lived at the time of the great Arian heresy.

00:15:58.980 And an Arian emperor basically put Pope Liberius in exile and replaced him with an anti-Pope, Felix.

00:16:11.180 Now, historians differ because of the sources and because it was so long ago.

00:16:15.680 So they differ whether or not Pope Liberius may have signed, obviously under duress, a semi-Arian formula that Christ was of like substance with the father and not of the same substance as the father as declared at the Council of Nicaea.

00:16:35.120 Anyway, how does St. Robert Bellarmine interpret this?

00:16:38.960 And this goes back to your original question.

00:16:41.320 What are non-theologians supposed to make of the situation when a pope, a putative pope, right, is making what seems to be putative heretical statements?

00:16:52.740 This is what St. Robert teaches.

00:16:55.440 Bellarmine says,

00:16:56.240 The Roman clergy, stripping Liberius of his pontifical dignity, they went over to Felix, whom they knew to be a Catholic.

00:17:10.220 And from that time, Felix began to be the true pontiff.

00:17:16.920 And listen to this next line because this is a mic drop moment.

00:17:20.560 For although Liberius was not a heretic, nevertheless, he was considered one on account of the peace that he made with the Arians.

00:17:33.860 And by that presumption, the pontificate could rightly be taken from him.

00:17:41.800 And this next line blows everybody away.

00:17:45.220 For men are not bound or able to read hearts. 0.97

00:17:51.620 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.

00:18:06.020 Now, I could build on this point by bringing up a more contemporary example, if you want me to.

00:18:12.020 It would be interesting, only because these issues are so contentious.

00:18:18.740 I think at this point, after some nine years, most of the faithful have seen this go on and on and on and on.

00:18:29.540 I went through a laundry list in my talk.

00:18:31.120 But if there is another example of another pope, that would be, I think, very interesting.

00:18:36.080 Well, what I'll say is this, as you as you allude to, just last month, Bishop, I guess it's Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas, and Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazakhstan, and Bishop Henry Grissida and others, other bishops, other lay people, rightly pointed out that in his Desiderio Desirati.

00:19:00.080 Desirati, that Bergoglio issued last June, on the day that he allowed Holy Communion to be given to Nancy Pelosi, basically says the only thing that you need to receive Holy Communion worthily is faith.

00:19:16.500 Which, as the authors of the document point out, and the signers agree with, that goes against, that's material heresy, that goes against the teachings of the Council of Trent.

00:19:28.960 Okay?

00:19:29.580 Now, there's a difference between...

00:19:31.460 Yeah, what they said was they drew that direct connection.

00:19:35.000 They said, in their own words, that it was contradicting the faith.

00:19:38.220 And then they just quote from the Council of Trent, which calls that belief heresy.

00:19:44.500 So it was the most formal correction of Pope Francis, I think, that ever was.

00:19:50.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:51.320 And we should point out to the folks the difference between formal heresy and material heresy.

00:19:58.080 Now, material heresy is when a person writes or speaks something that is against a dogma of the Church, which has to be held with divine and Catholic faith.

00:20:12.720 There are some websites that list these items that are taken from the councils, from statements of the popes in Denzinger.

00:20:24.700 There's maybe 200, 300 different statements that would fall under the category of de fide.

00:20:30.380 So it's not just any statement that can be a heretical statement.

00:20:35.360 It's got to be something that goes directly against one of these statements that has to be believed with divine and Catholic faith.

00:20:42.500 So this particular issue, for example, is one of them.

00:20:48.160 It is the Council of Trent condemned as anathema anyone who says that faith alone is enough to worthily receive Holy Communion.

00:20:58.880 But let me give you an example here of what, well, perhaps, in fact, this person, John Henry, maybe you even might have known him personally, Cardinal Alphonse Stickler.

00:21:17.280 Cardinal Stickler, he was a professor of canon law, and he was the official librarian for the Vatican.

00:21:24.860 And he was a great friend of the traditional mass.

00:21:30.100 I remember he set a mass, I think it was at St. Agnes' Church in Midtown Manhattan back in the 1990s.

00:21:36.540 And he defended the position that the Tridentine mass was never forbidden or proscribed, which Benedict XVI, when he issued Sumorum Pontificorum in 2007, confirmed.

00:21:50.040 So he was a great friend of tradition.

00:21:52.220 And back in the early 70s, Cardinal Stickler, because he was a great scholar, he answered another scholar who was attacking the idea that the church has always taught about papal infallibility.

00:22:07.060 And this is what Cardinal Stickler says in his response to this scholar.

00:22:15.060 He says, the Pope stands for the church, which has never erred, which cannot err, in questions that involve eternal spiritual salvation.

00:22:26.680 Therefore, he, he, the Pope, is the absolute and consequently implicitly infallible guarantor of the truth, which one who wishes to be Catholic must profess.

00:22:41.200 He, he, he and the Church of Rome, can never be conceived as two disjunct or even less opposed things.

00:22:51.420 The Roman Pontiff is the Church of Rome, and therefore the inerrancy of the Church of Rome is the inerrancy of the Roman Pontiff.

00:23:02.140 If the person of the Pope becomes a heretic, he no longer holds the office of Pope. 0.99

00:23:12.500 Just as a judge who has become clinically insane, even though he remains the same person, can no longer be regarded as a judge as far as the effects of the office are concerned.

00:23:25.180 Consequently, there is no difficulty in referring to the Pope, the affirmation of the canonists who exclude the possibility of error on the part of the Church of, of Rome.

00:23:40.440 And so what, what Cardinal Stickler is saying here is that, in fact, he adds this, he says, if the Pope really errs in matters already defined, he is no longer Pope, and therefore does not compromise and cannot compromise papal infallibility.

00:24:02.600 So if I was to sum that all up, what Cardinal Stickler, who just said this a few decades ago, was arguing, is that, as far as he was concerned, if we look at the history of the Catholic Church, we look at the history of the Roman Sea, of the papacy, there has never been a Pope who directly opposed something that was already defined as a matter of faith and morals.

00:24:28.940 There have been Popes who have used ambiguous phrases, for example, there was Pope Honorius, Pope Honorius lived in the, I guess it was at the time of the controversy over the will of Christ.

00:24:45.100 He wrote a letter in which he made it sound like Christ had only one will, where actually a ecumenical council was subsequently held that said Christ has two wills.

00:24:56.940 And so people pointed to him as a heretic, but he really wasn't a heretic because it had not been defined yet.

00:25:04.180 He was not contradicting something that had been defined.

00:25:06.920 Pope John XXII, who lived in the 1300s, as a private person, as a private teacher, was spreading the idea that we don't see God directly after we die.

00:25:18.360 We have to wait until the general judgment.

00:25:19.980 And people at the time and people since then have said, oh, that's heretical.

00:25:24.820 But technically speaking, it had not yet been defined.

00:25:28.920 In the case that we have right now with Pope Francis and the Council of Trent, this is something that's already been defined.

00:25:37.800 So it's impossible that a Pope could contradict that.

00:25:41.180 And according to Cardinal Stickler, he would automatically lose his office.

00:25:46.300 Now, I have to add this because this is supremely important.

00:25:50.340 And that is that the church teaches, and you can find this, I can give you the quotes, you can find this in, for example, the good manualists who wrote before the Second Vatican Council, like Dr. Ludwig Ott, the Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma.

00:26:05.760 You can even find it in, of all people, the notorious theologian Karl Rahner.

00:26:13.900 Back in the 1940s, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi, on the mystical body of Christ, in which he said that heretics, schismatics, and apostates are not members of the church.

00:26:30.140 And Karl Rahner, it was the young Karl Rahner, in an article a couple of years later, says, in fact, it's the almost unanimous opinion of the theologians that even just a material heretic, someone who might be objectively innocent and guiltless before God, is not a member of the visible church.

00:26:56.200 And what's the consequence of that? Someone who's not a member of the visible church cannot hold a position of authority within the church.

00:27:05.160 So a bishop, or a cardinal, or even a pope, who is not an occult heretic, someone who is secretly heretical, but if that person were a public, even just a material heretic, but a public one, a manifest one, that person would automatically lose their office.

00:27:29.500 And we see here the Cardinal Stickler and St. Robert Bellarmine would agree with that position.

00:27:35.160 Just a quick note before we return.

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00:27:58.900 And now, back to the video.

00:28:00.300 I think Bishop Schneider seems to be of the opinion, the contrary opinion, that basically any, it doesn't matter about heresy per se.

00:28:15.540 The pope is the pope because he's recognized that way, and therefore nothing can be done other than prayer and realizing that God's in charge.

00:28:27.520 But I guess, from what you're saying, Bellarmine would have had a different position on that.

00:28:31.460 Precisely.

00:28:32.820 And I love Bishop Schneider.

00:28:36.260 I love the good work that he does.

00:28:38.440 But we actually have a council, an ecumenical council of the church.

00:28:43.480 I'll read it to you.

00:28:44.380 It's very brief.

00:28:44.940 The council of the council of Constantinople that was held in the year 869, it says the following.

00:28:53.180 And they're quoting Pope Adrian II, who a few months earlier held a council in Rome.

00:29:00.380 And his document was read aloud at Constantinople IV, which is one of the ecumenical councils of the church.

00:29:08.080 And it says, quote, this is, you know, Pope Adrian talking here, although we have read of the Roman pontiff having passed judgment on the bishops of all the churches, we have not read of anyone having passed judgment on him.

00:29:25.680 For even though Honorius was anathematized after his death by the Easterners, it should be known that he had been accused of heresy, which is the only offense where inferiors have the right to resist the initiatives of their superiors and are free to reject their false opinions.

00:29:52.960 Now, let me try to explain this, because my PhD is actually in medieval history.

00:30:00.880 So I know a thing or two about how this has worked out through the centuries.

00:30:05.040 There's an old adage, and it's in canon law, that the first C, meaning the Pope, is judged by no one.

00:30:13.600 That is to say, juridically judged.

00:30:16.980 Now, stick with me on this.

00:30:19.540 Follow the logic of this.

00:30:20.740 Because no one can judge the Pope, there is no Supreme Court of cardinals or something that would be higher than him that can pass a sentence on him or an emperor or anything like that.

00:30:32.940 So some people have said that the way to deal with our current situation is to have what's called an imperfect council.

00:30:40.320 But the problem with that is that if you, you know, in American jurisprudence, we have this notion, right, that you are innocent until proven guilty.

00:30:53.760 Now, if we applied the same principle to the Pope, we would have to say that he is Pope until he is proved not Pope, right?

00:31:04.540 But the problem is, if you went into an official proceeding with cardinals and bishops or whoever, from the Eastern Church, the Western Church,

00:31:11.820 if you went into those proceedings, assuming that he is the Pope, you know, presuming that he's the Pope, it could never pass a sentence on him.

00:31:22.480 Because, again, the first C is judged by no one.

00:31:26.040 So the only time a group of cardinals or a council could ever get together is simply to acknowledge something that has already taken place ipso facto.

00:31:37.680 Or otherwise, it would be an illegitimate council, if you follow my meaning.

00:31:41.260 Now, I could bring up another historical example that people may not have heard of, where a layman took it upon himself to judge that his bishop was a flagrant heretic.

00:31:56.740 And this was the case in Constantinople around the year 430, when a lawyer by the name of Eusebius, who worked for the emperor, was in the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia,

00:32:10.980 when its new bishop, Nestorius, gave an infamous sermon in which he claimed that Mary was not the mother of the Logos.

00:32:21.640 She was not the mother of God.

00:32:24.440 She was not the Theotokos, the God-bearer. 0.94

00:32:27.560 She was more like his valet.

00:32:31.740 She dressed him in human...

00:32:33.420 Anyway, that layman stood up and said that that's heresy.

00:32:40.080 Not only did he stand up in the church and correct his bishop publicly, but he put together a document.

00:32:46.280 You can find this online.

00:32:47.380 It's called the Contestatio, in which he takes statements from his bishop, Nestorius, and compares them to Paul of Samosota, who lived a couple of generations earlier,

00:33:00.520 and who was a heretic because of his rejection of certain beliefs concerning the divinity of Christ.

00:33:06.620 And he compares their statements.

00:33:08.540 And at the beginning of this Contestatio, he says, whoever reads this document, and he put it up everywhere.

00:33:16.420 He put it up inside Hagia Sophia.

00:33:18.260 He put leaflets throughout the city.

00:33:20.240 Whether you're a clergy, a monk, or a layperson, I bind you under an oath to declare with me the heresies of this bishop,

00:33:30.040 because he's talking just like Paul of Samosota.

00:33:32.820 What was the end result of this?

00:33:35.980 Well, the end result is that Pope Celestine I wrote to Nestorius, and I won't bore you with the long letter,

00:33:47.160 but he basically tells him, someone like you is deserving of anathema from the moment that you began to preach this.

00:33:56.280 And from the moment that you began to preach this, you could not excommunicate anybody or, you know, put somebody into schism.

00:34:05.960 And in fact, the whole city has deserted you.

00:34:10.780 And the Pope was saying, you know, good for them.

00:34:13.900 And he never sanctioned Eusebius.

00:34:16.660 In fact, Eusebius would later go on to become a bishop himself.

00:34:19.520 And, of course, Pope Celestine and St. Cyril of Alexandria got the Council of Ephesus done in 431,

00:34:30.200 which formally declared the Marian dogma that Mary is the Theotopo.

00:34:35.960 She is the God-bearer.

00:34:38.360 And so Nestorius has ever since been a very infamous heretic. 0.96

00:34:42.920 Okay. So if we follow the same principle here, and if we follow what St. Robert Bellarmine says,

00:34:50.960 is that, you know, people cannot read hearts.

00:34:53.900 But when they see that someone is a heretic by his external works, they judge him to be a heretic, pure and simple.

00:35:00.440 And he says that the people who did that in Rome were justified in stripping Liberius of his pontifical dignity

00:35:07.860 and accepting Felix as Pope, even though, technically speaking, Pope Liberius was not a formal heretic.

00:35:16.800 At best, he was a material heretic. 0.91

00:35:19.360 But for Robert Bellarmine and for Karl Rahner and for Cardinal Stickler and for Ludwig Ott,

00:35:27.380 and I could name other people, E. Sylvester Berry, other manualists before Vatican II,

00:35:34.660 they say the Pope falls ipso facto for the very reasons I pointed out earlier.

00:35:40.520 Because if you were to put the Pope on trial and assume that he's innocent,

00:35:45.220 you'd be wrong from the get-go because the Holy See is judged by no one.

00:35:52.360 Exactly. Well, one of the last items I wanted to bring up with you that you suggested for the show

00:35:58.420 was that the idea of the papacy as a sacrament.

00:36:02.420 Anybody who's wondering, I would urge them to go and watch the show that we did before

00:36:09.280 in which you present your thesis about the papacy, the munis, and the ministerium,

00:36:15.120 which you suggest that Pope Benedict XVI did a bifurcation.

00:36:21.080 There was some talk of that by his secretary, the Pope's secretary.

00:36:27.360 And so it's, I mean, it's a thesis that is out there.

00:36:31.680 It's making waves and very, very controversial, obviously.

00:36:35.920 But nonetheless, it provides one explanation of what's going on.

00:36:40.420 But in terms of what you said regarding the papacy as a sacrament being indissoluble,

00:36:47.240 where does that come from?

00:36:48.080 Yes. So the traditional teaching about the papacy is that it's not a sacrament.

00:36:55.660 It's not a grade of order.

00:36:57.520 It is simply an office of jurisdiction.

00:37:02.060 And so because it's an office of jurisdiction and not a sacrament,

00:37:05.920 there is no indelible mark on your soul.

00:37:09.060 You can walk away from it. You can resign from it.

00:37:11.780 And that has been the view of the papacy for at least the last 700 years.

00:37:16.340 But what I was, first of all, we were all surprised that Pope Benedict became Pope Emeritus

00:37:26.200 and not Cardinal Ratzinger again.

00:37:29.280 And that his personal caretaker, Archbishop Georg Ganswine,

00:37:34.520 affirmed in a famous speech at the Gregorian University in 2016,

00:37:38.820 is that Pope Benedict has actually changed the Petrine ministry in a way that has never been done before

00:37:49.000 and bears no resemblance to what Pope Celestine V did when he resigned,

00:37:54.960 who was the last pope to actually voluntarily, completely voluntarily resign.

00:37:59.560 So what I was surprised further to find in my research on the subject is that not only does Pope Benedict

00:38:10.640 in some sense believe that his papacy is sacramental, and so in some ontological sense,

00:38:17.200 he still participates in the Sea of Rome.

00:38:19.800 But I was nearly floored when I found this quote, which I will read to you,

00:38:26.480 from one of the most famous popes in history, Innocent III.

00:38:31.980 Now, Innocent III was the one who approved the rule of St. Francis. 0.78

00:38:36.480 He called the Fourth Lateran Council.

00:38:39.840 He's the pope that approved the Dominican order

00:38:42.180 and who put the kibosh on Magna Carta for King John of England.

00:38:48.780 But anyway, so this is considered the apex of the papacy.

00:38:53.060 Now, I found a sermon that he gave, presumably to the cardinals, to the Coria,

00:38:58.360 on the anniversary of his election as pope.

00:39:00.860 So we're talking about the year 1199.

00:39:04.860 And this is what he says, and so I hope you're sitting down.

00:39:07.700 The sacrament, the sacrament between the Roman pontiff 0.79

00:39:14.320 and the Roman church perseveres so firm and unshakable 0.99

00:39:19.780 that they cannot be separated from one another ever except by death.

00:39:28.640 He goes on to say, the apostle says that after her husband dies,

00:39:33.880 a wife is, quote, unquote, released from the rule of her husband.

00:39:38.660 A husband joined to his wife does not seek a release. 0.98

00:39:44.020 He does not leave her and cannot be dismissed.

00:39:47.900 For, quote, it is according to his lord that either he stands or he falls,

00:39:53.180 and it is the lord who judges.

00:39:56.140 So from my perspective, and again, in my online course on the history of the papacy,

00:40:01.700 I talk about this.

00:40:02.940 If you go to edmundmazza.com, there's more details.

00:40:07.120 But Pope Innocent here is basically saying that the papacy is a sacrament,

00:40:11.660 it's a spiritual marriage, and it's until death do us part.

00:40:15.700 A pope or a husband is not allowed to seek a release.

00:40:18.960 He does not leave her, his bride.

00:40:20.980 And what's interesting about this is that not only did he proclaim this in words,

00:40:26.120 but in the old St. Peter's Basilica, the new one was designed by Michelangelo and Bramante

00:40:32.480 in the 1500s under the direction of Pope Julius II.

00:40:35.840 But in the old St. Peter's, originally built at the time of Constantine,

00:40:40.460 behind the altar in the apse, there's actually a mosaic portraying Innocent III

00:40:45.960 as the bridegroom of the Roman church.

00:40:49.920 And on one side of Christ is Innocent III, barefoot and wearing a crown,

00:40:55.380 standing facing his bride, the church, who is portrayed as a beautiful woman.

00:40:58.980 Um, now, um, this is a, uh, how shall we say, an apparent contradiction,

00:41:06.620 because about 100 years later, Pope Celestine V actually resigned the papacy.

00:41:14.760 Now, he was in his 80s, and he was completely out of his depth.

00:41:20.660 He was a holy monk, but he didn't know how to run a business,

00:41:24.020 how to run an enterprise.

00:41:25.420 And he was only pope for about three months.

00:41:27.680 And he was the only pope, uh, John Henry, I defy anybody,

00:41:32.940 to go through the annals of papal history.

00:41:35.720 He's the only pope that we have a sure record of,

00:41:39.340 who just completely voluntarily gave up the papacy.

00:41:43.160 Up until the voluntary resignation of Benedict XVI,

00:41:46.660 we don't have anything like it.

00:41:48.920 Uh, and again, I could go into more detail about that.

00:41:51.460 But the point of it is this, which pope are we supposed to believe

00:41:55.360 if this is magisterial teaching?

00:41:57.720 Pope Innocent III, who said that the papacy is a sacrament,

00:42:01.180 and you can't leave it.

00:42:02.700 Or are we supposed to believe, um, not only, um,

00:42:06.780 Celestine V, who resigned,

00:42:09.020 but the, the pope who succeeded him,

00:42:12.160 Pope Boniface VIII.

00:42:14.120 Pope Boniface VIII actually put it into canon law

00:42:16.960 that a pope may resign.

00:42:18.860 It's called the Liber Sextus. 0.93

00:42:21.360 Now, of course, it was in his own interest to say that,

00:42:24.560 because otherwise he would be an antipope,

00:42:26.220 or at least he would be an antipope until Celestine died,

00:42:29.660 which actually, he helped, he helped that to happen.

00:42:34.200 Uh, Celestine V tried to run away. 0.96

00:42:37.380 The, the, the troops of, of the soldiers of,

00:42:39.840 of Boniface VIII captured him,

00:42:42.100 put him in a, in a, in a cell,

00:42:44.020 which is, was so short,

00:42:45.880 you couldn't even stand up straight.

00:42:48.000 And as a result, I don't want to scandalize people,

00:42:50.420 but not all the popes have been rosy.

00:42:52.960 Most of them have,

00:42:53.880 but Boniface VIII was a little,

00:42:56.100 well, if you don't believe me,

00:42:57.140 read Dante,

00:42:57.880 read Dante Alighieri about Pope Boniface VIII.

00:43:00.880 But anyway, long story short,

00:43:02.540 uh, if Innocent III is right,

00:43:05.700 then Boniface VIII would have been an antipope

00:43:07.780 until Celestine died,

00:43:09.880 which is like the first two years of Boniface VIII's, um, term.

00:43:14.640 Anyway, um, I'm not coming up with this stuff on my own here.

00:43:18.420 I'm, I'm discovering this in history

00:43:20.200 and saying that the bishops, the cardinals,

00:43:23.300 they need to read these things.

00:43:24.800 They need to deal with these things.

00:43:26.500 Because if, if Innocent III was right,

00:43:29.240 and, uh, a Pope cannot resign,

00:43:32.860 well, that would mean that Benedict is still the Pope.

00:43:35.400 And that would really clear up the matters

00:43:37.420 that we see here,

00:43:38.660 all these material heresies,

00:43:40.940 the Abu Dhabi declaration by, uh, Francis, right?

00:43:45.240 That God wills the, uh, plurality of religions,

00:43:49.360 just like he wills the plurality of men and women and,

00:43:52.280 and, uh, races.

00:43:54.600 Um, now it is true that when Bishop Schneider

00:43:57.300 pressed him on that privately,

00:43:58.860 uh, uh, and said,

00:44:01.840 Holy Father, you meant the indirect will

00:44:04.900 or the permissive will of God.

00:44:06.140 And he said, oh, yes, yes, yes.

00:44:07.660 But he never corrected that publicly.

00:44:10.480 And it went into the, if I'm not mistaken,

00:44:12.720 that went into the Acta Apostolica Sedis,

00:44:15.120 which is the magisterial teaching of the church.

00:44:18.100 So we have at least, as far as I can see here,

00:44:20.360 two material heresies,

00:44:21.640 uh, Desiderio Desirati,

00:44:25.020 and we have the Abu Dhabi declarations.

00:44:28.180 And, um,

00:44:29.860 what I've been telling you so far,

00:44:31.680 to my mind,

00:44:32.720 at least as far as I've researched it,

00:44:35.020 would seem to account for that.

00:44:36.240 Uh, and I think in a, in a,

00:44:37.660 in a more rational way

00:44:39.320 than some of the other explanations

00:44:40.380 I've heard so far.

00:44:41.920 Yeah.

00:44:42.600 Yeah.

00:44:43.620 Unbelievable.

00:44:44.600 It, um,

00:44:45.680 it certainly,

00:44:46.960 uh,

00:44:48.400 gives us lots to think about.

00:44:50.020 Um,

00:44:50.660 hopefully encourages us to pray

00:44:52.600 that the cardinals take action here

00:44:54.180 because I think

00:44:54.760 the laity are floundering.

00:44:57.760 They are being left in the wind

00:44:59.820 because the winds that are rocking the church

00:45:02.600 are just legion.

00:45:04.800 And if I may say this,

00:45:06.280 John Henry,

00:45:06.940 um,

00:45:08.100 60 years ago this week,

00:45:09.620 uh,

00:45:10.620 when the shenanigans were going on

00:45:13.280 at the Second Vatican Council

00:45:14.540 by the,

00:45:15.100 by the progressives,

00:45:16.520 which ultimately,

00:45:18.080 as,

00:45:18.540 as Archbishop Lefebvre used to say,

00:45:20.380 there were time bombs

00:45:21.480 that were put into the documents

00:45:23.540 that would be interpreted

00:45:24.580 after the council

00:45:25.660 in a,

00:45:26.560 in a bad way.

00:45:28.740 You know,

00:45:29.340 God was seeing that.

00:45:30.480 And at the same time,

00:45:31.680 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis

00:45:32.980 between the United States

00:45:34.080 and Russia,

00:45:34.800 Soviet Union.

00:45:35.840 And we came about this close

00:45:37.540 to nuclear annihilation, 0.50

00:45:39.680 to the Third World War.

00:45:41.260 And if you read old,

00:45:43.500 uh,

00:45:43.980 books,

00:45:44.340 if you watch old,

00:45:45.120 old films,

00:45:46.800 that people flooded the churches.

00:45:49.140 They understood

00:45:50.000 that we were on the brink

00:45:51.360 of nuclear war.

00:45:52.320 I don't see people flooding churches

00:45:53.960 right now.

00:45:55.140 Um,

00:45:55.660 and we're in a similar situation

00:45:57.280 where we,

00:45:58.260 we're about this close

00:45:59.120 from a terrible catastrophe happening.

00:46:00.980 I don't think it's a coincidence

00:46:02.460 that when the leaders

00:46:05.040 of the church

00:46:05.660 don't lead

00:46:06.800 as they're supposed to

00:46:08.020 and allow heresy

00:46:09.500 and error

00:46:09.980 to be propagated,

00:46:11.320 that God threatens

00:46:13.800 to come down

00:46:15.180 with punishment.

00:46:15.740 As Our Lady of Akita

00:46:16.740 said,

00:46:18.120 uh,

00:46:18.420 fire will fall

00:46:19.320 from the sky.

00:46:21.080 Uh,

00:46:21.700 you know,

00:46:21.960 the,

00:46:22.120 the living will envy

00:46:23.280 the dead.

00:46:24.400 Uh,

00:46:25.220 God is a merciful God,

00:46:26.840 but at some point,

00:46:27.720 as,

00:46:28.040 as even St. Faustina said,

00:46:29.400 at some point,

00:46:30.960 God's mercy,

00:46:31.520 the time of mercy is over

00:46:32.600 and the time of judgment happens.

00:46:34.280 We as lay people,

00:46:35.420 we need to pray

00:46:36.440 and do penance

00:46:37.280 and pray the rosary

00:46:38.340 because today is right.

00:46:40.000 That is the anniversary

00:46:40.660 of the miracle of the sun

00:46:41.840 at Fatima.

00:46:42.940 And Our Lady said, 0.99

00:46:44.220 pray the rosary for peace.

00:46:46.320 And as,

00:46:47.200 and again,

00:46:47.580 if I could quote

00:46:48.040 another good Bishop,

00:46:49.320 Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

00:46:50.660 in an address

00:46:51.760 that he gave

00:46:52.280 at a Marian shrine

00:46:53.360 in 1972,

00:46:54.420 he said,

00:46:55.980 it's the lady's job 1.00

00:46:57.340 to make sure

00:46:59.020 that your Bishop

00:47:00.000 is a Bishop,

00:47:01.140 that your Cardinal

00:47:02.280 is a Cardinal.

00:47:03.200 And we might add

00:47:03.900 that your Pope

00:47:04.540 is a Pope.

00:47:05.860 It's up to the lady 0.99

00:47:07.020 who will save the Church

00:47:08.280 by holding these people

00:47:09.680 accountable

00:47:10.320 to be shepherds

00:47:11.460 of the flock,

00:47:12.480 good shepherds

00:47:13.320 and not hirelings.

00:47:15.820 Amen to that.

00:47:16.940 And we've got to do it.

00:47:17.940 We've got to do it

00:47:18.680 not only for our faith

00:47:20.420 and the good

00:47:20.940 of our nation,

00:47:22.200 we've got to do it

00:47:23.080 for our children's faith

00:47:23.920 because that's

00:47:25.380 also what's

00:47:26.700 under attack.

00:47:27.300 Edmund Mazen,

00:47:28.740 thank you so much

00:47:29.320 for being with us.

00:47:31.240 What a pleasure.

00:47:32.400 Thank you so much,

00:47:33.020 John Henry.

00:47:34.200 God bless you

00:47:35.080 and God bless all of you.

00:47:37.120 We'll see you next time.

00:47:40.180 Hi everyone,

00:47:40.960 this is John Henry Weston.

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The John-Henry Westen Show - October 14, 2022

What happens if the pope is a heretic？ Church history professor explains

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