Join us this week as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council and remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. This week's guest, Dr. Edmund Mazza, joins us to talk about Pope Francis and what we can learn from the events of the past 60 years.
00:00:00.000Individual 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.
00:00:21.160So 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.
00:00:41.100Something 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.
00:00:53.540So of all the confusing things on the planet today, none is more confusing than Pope Francis and what is going on in Rome.
00:01:03.540And 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.
00:01:15.640And it certainly seems like we're reliving some of that now.
00:01:21.060And 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?
00:01:31.960We have that for you today with the return of Dr. Edmund Mazza to The John Henry Weston Show.
00:02:22.640So we are in the midst of absolute craziness.
00:02:26.740We have just seen the proposals from the German Synod for the Synod on Synodality.
00:02:34.340We've seen the Belgian bishops just proffer a blessing for homosexual couples.
00:02:40.480We then learned that, at least according to one of those bishops, Bishop Bonny, said that Pope Francis agrees with him.
00:02:49.140Many 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.
00:02:58.200So, of course, there's been silence from Rome.
00:03:00.820But at the same time, we have Father James Martin and his promotion by the Pope himself.
00:03:07.640And everybody knows his stance is in line with the Belgian bishops.
00:03:12.260Yet we know that the Church can't change its teaching.
00:03:15.880So we're in utter confusion and hoping you can bring us some light.
00:03:38.900So this business of synodality has its roots over 60 years ago in something called collegiality.
00:03:48.400And 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.
00:03:57.520But 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.
00:04:19.480And 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.
00:04:35.720He says here, let me see if I can find the dialogue here, that the monk's name was Dom Lambert Baudouin.
00:04:45.620Probably nobody's ever heard of this person, but he had a big influence.
00:04:49.480He was a Belgian monk who, in the 1920s, was experimenting with the liturgy and making plans to have the laity actively participate.
00:05:03.280He was also one of the leading figures in the budding ecumenical movement.
00:05:07.740And 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.
00:05:19.420You might remember that Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical basically saying that Catholics cannot participate in these Protestant ecumenical exchanges.
00:05:31.680But I'll just read from the diary here.
00:05:36.280In 1958, Father Roger Polman found himself one day at Chavinton in Father Baudouin's room.
00:05:45.080And the two engaged in a crude dialogue about the ailing Pius XII.
00:05:50.240Baudouin, I warn you, he will die very soon and his steward will be Roncalli.
00:05:57.040And for those that don't know, that was the baptismal name of John XXIII.
00:06:04.180And Polman said that nuncio from Paris.
00:06:08.820And the monk Baudouin said, well, yes, you'll see.
00:06:12.560He'll announce the council and he'll do it from an ecumenical perspective.
00:06:18.160And 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.
00:06:36.180So 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.
00:06:48.380Now, I actually talk about this in an upcoming course that I'm offering online, which is a history of the papacy.
00:06:57.660And so if folks want to learn more about that, they can go to edmundmazza.com.
00:07:01.980But 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.
00:07:09.280And 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?
00:07:32.120Well, 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.
00:07:49.800And 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.
00:08:02.880In 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.
00:08:10.840But 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.
00:08:27.880And that's where we get this idea of collegiality.
00:08:30.280OK. 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.
00:08:48.780They're often smacked down by the bishops' conference.
00:08:51.600But we were quick to point out there's not supposed to have any real authority.
00:08:56.640Yes. 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.
00:09:13.280That 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.
00:09:21.820But 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.
00:09:41.780But 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.
00:09:57.260And what they did was they threw out the old schemas.
00:10:27.260Then the Council says he receives not only the munis to teach and to sanctify, but also to govern.
00:10:38.140And 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.
00:10:57.280So, we are confronted today in the Church with something very severe.
00:11:05.040I was just at a conference, the Catholic Identity Conference, and I was asked a question by Timothy Flanders, who writes for 1 Peter 5.
00:11:15.460A great guy, great journalist, but he asked a very clear question and was very hard to answer.
00:11:22.400It 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.
00:11:31.460Resistance, in effect, in effect, to that very Pope.
00:11:36.900So, I told him, I'm not a theologian, I told him, I don't know how to answer.
00:11:43.660The 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.
00:11:57.180Because I think, as Catholics, we should know the basics of faith, and they don't change.
00:12:08.800Again, I don't have my lucky turkey bone with me, but I will give this a shot.
00:12:14.820You 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.
00:12:25.240It's called The Pope and the Prayer of Christ.
00:12:28.400And basically, I go through the exegesis on Luke, chapter 22, verse 32, down through the centuries.
00:12:42.720Now, I'll just cut to the most important commentator on this passage.
00:13:10.780And 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.
00:13:32.600However, Robert Bellarmine would go further than that.
00:13:37.560I 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.
00:13:48.420But this exegesis of Luke 22 goes a little further than that.
00:13:55.700Bellarmine says that there are two privileges here that Christ is giving to St. Peter.
00:14:03.820One, that he personally could not ever lose the true faith when he was tempted by the devil.
00:14:12.480The 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.
00:14:27.500And 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.
00:14:41.760You know, their faith is not guaranteed.
00:14:44.100But 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.
00:15:02.120And 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.
00:15:15.660In 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.
00:15:33.280Those are some very strong claims that we can always rely upon the popes to teach us properly.
00:15:39.420Well, 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.
00:15:55.180Pope Liberius lived at the time of the great Arian heresy.
00:15:58.980And an Arian emperor basically put Pope Liberius in exile and replaced him with an anti-Pope, Felix.
00:16:11.180Now, historians differ because of the sources and because it was so long ago.
00:16:15.680So 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.
00:16:35.120Anyway, how does St. Robert Bellarmine interpret this?
00:16:38.960And this goes back to your original question.
00:16:41.320What 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?
00:16:56.240The Roman clergy, stripping Liberius of his pontifical dignity, they went over to Felix, whom they knew to be a Catholic.
00:17:10.220And from that time, Felix began to be the true pontiff.
00:17:16.920And listen to this next line because this is a mic drop moment.
00:17:20.560For although Liberius was not a heretic, nevertheless, he was considered one on account of the peace that he made with the Arians.
00:17:33.860And by that presumption, the pontificate could rightly be taken from him.
00:17:41.800And this next line blows everybody away.
00:17:45.220For men are not bound or able to read hearts.
00:17:51.620But 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.
00:18:06.020Now, I could build on this point by bringing up a more contemporary example, if you want me to.
00:18:12.020It would be interesting, only because these issues are so contentious.
00:18:18.740I think at this point, after some nine years, most of the faithful have seen this go on and on and on and on.
00:18:29.540I went through a laundry list in my talk.
00:18:31.120But if there is another example of another pope, that would be, I think, very interesting.
00:18:36.080Well, 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.
00:19:00.080Desirati, 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.
00:19:16.500Which, 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.
00:19:51.320And we should point out to the folks the difference between formal heresy and material heresy.
00:19:58.080Now, 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.
00:20:12.720There are some websites that list these items that are taken from the councils, from statements of the popes in Denzinger.
00:20:24.700There's maybe 200, 300 different statements that would fall under the category of de fide.
00:20:30.380So it's not just any statement that can be a heretical statement.
00:20:35.360It's got to be something that goes directly against one of these statements that has to be believed with divine and Catholic faith.
00:20:42.500So this particular issue, for example, is one of them.
00:20:48.160It is the Council of Trent condemned as anathema anyone who says that faith alone is enough to worthily receive Holy Communion.
00:20:58.880But 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.
00:21:17.280Cardinal Stickler, he was a professor of canon law, and he was the official librarian for the Vatican.
00:21:24.860And he was a great friend of the traditional mass.
00:21:30.100I remember he set a mass, I think it was at St. Agnes' Church in Midtown Manhattan back in the 1990s.
00:21:36.540And he defended the position that the Tridentine mass was never forbidden or proscribed, which Benedict XVI, when he issued Sumorum Pontificorum in 2007, confirmed.
00:21:50.040So he was a great friend of tradition.
00:21:52.220And 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.
00:22:07.060And this is what Cardinal Stickler says in his response to this scholar.
00:22:15.060He says, the Pope stands for the church, which has never erred, which cannot err, in questions that involve eternal spiritual salvation.
00:22:26.680Therefore, he, he, the Pope, is the absolute and consequently implicitly infallible guarantor of the truth, which one who wishes to be Catholic must profess.
00:22:41.200He, he, he and the Church of Rome, can never be conceived as two disjunct or even less opposed things.
00:22:51.420The Roman Pontiff is the Church of Rome, and therefore the inerrancy of the Church of Rome is the inerrancy of the Roman Pontiff.
00:23:02.140If the person of the Pope becomes a heretic, he no longer holds the office of Pope.
00:23:12.500Just 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.
00:23:25.180Consequently, 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.
00:23:40.440And 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.
00:24:02.600So 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.
00:24:28.940There 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.
00:24:45.100He 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.
00:24:56.940And so people pointed to him as a heretic, but he really wasn't a heretic because it had not been defined yet.
00:25:04.180He was not contradicting something that had been defined.
00:25:06.920Pope 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.
00:25:18.360We have to wait until the general judgment.
00:25:19.980And people at the time and people since then have said, oh, that's heretical.
00:25:24.820But technically speaking, it had not yet been defined.
00:25:28.920In the case that we have right now with Pope Francis and the Council of Trent, this is something that's already been defined.
00:25:37.800So it's impossible that a Pope could contradict that.
00:25:41.180And according to Cardinal Stickler, he would automatically lose his office.
00:25:46.300Now, I have to add this because this is supremely important.
00:25:50.340And 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.
00:26:05.760You can even find it in, of all people, the notorious theologian Karl Rahner.
00:26:13.900Back 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.
00:26:30.140And 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.
00:26:56.200And 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.
00:27:05.160So 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.
00:27:29.500And we see here the Cardinal Stickler and St. Robert Bellarmine would agree with that position.
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00:28:00.300I think Bishop Schneider seems to be of the opinion, the contrary opinion, that basically any, it doesn't matter about heresy per se.
00:28:15.540The 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.
00:28:27.520But I guess, from what you're saying, Bellarmine would have had a different position on that.
00:28:44.940The council of the council of Constantinople that was held in the year 869, it says the following.
00:28:53.180And they're quoting Pope Adrian II, who a few months earlier held a council in Rome.
00:29:00.380And his document was read aloud at Constantinople IV, which is one of the ecumenical councils of the church.
00:29:08.080And 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.
00:29:25.680For 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.
00:29:52.960Now, let me try to explain this, because my PhD is actually in medieval history.
00:30:00.880So I know a thing or two about how this has worked out through the centuries.
00:30:05.040There's an old adage, and it's in canon law, that the first C, meaning the Pope, is judged by no one.
00:30:20.740Because 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.
00:30:32.940So some people have said that the way to deal with our current situation is to have what's called an imperfect council.
00:30:40.320But 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.
00:30:53.760Now, 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?
00:31:04.540But the problem is, if you went into an official proceeding with cardinals and bishops or whoever, from the Eastern Church, the Western Church,
00:31:11.820if 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.
00:31:22.480Because, again, the first C is judged by no one.
00:31:26.040So 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.
00:31:37.680Or otherwise, it would be an illegitimate council, if you follow my meaning.
00:31:41.260Now, 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.
00:31:56.740And 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,
00:32:10.980when its new bishop, Nestorius, gave an infamous sermon in which he claimed that Mary was not the mother of the Logos.
00:32:47.380It'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,
00:33:00.520and who was a heretic because of his rejection of certain beliefs concerning the divinity of Christ.