Thread by @RorateCaeli

Highlights of the masterful lecture given by our contributor Prof. Peter Kwasniewski on the "Pope's boundenness to Tradition as a Legislative limit":

rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-po…

"Catholic apologists have done a lot of great work over the decades. ... But the same apologists do not perform so well when they turn their sights to intraecclesial affairs, particularly when it comes to explaining the nature, purpose, and limits of papal infallibility. ...

"I want to explain how we reached a point of such absurdity that a Roman Pontiff can dare, with the stroke of a pen, to consign to the margins and to eventual oblivion an unbroken liturgical patrimony of millennia and to claim that the new rites created by committee under...

"...Paul VI are the 'only' (unica) lex orandi or law of prayer of the Catholic Church—and the even greater absurdity that there are Catholic apologists defending him and his purported 'right' to do so. The fundamental flaw of these apologists is that, like their doppelgänger...

"...Protestant opponents, they have fallen for the technique of proof-texting. Instead of sola scriptura, it is often solo papa; where the Calvinist quotes St. Paul on justification by faith alone, the papalist quotes a conciliar dictum on universal papal jurisdiction. ...

"1st:Liturgy cannot be reduced to a matter of discipline alone; it always concerns doctrine of faith and morals as professed by the Church over her entire history, and as expressed in the Magisterium of every age. The pope is not a soloist but a member of an orchestra, and the...

"...score he’s playing already exists before he comes to office—the more so, the later in history we are. ...

"2nd: Papal jurisdiction over disciplinary matters does not exist in a vacuum: it is a component of the office of the papacy, which has its own nature, purpose, and...

"...duties.The power to introduce, remove, or alter liturgical rites is not a kind of Ockhamist omnipotence with no reference to wisdom, goodness, or rightness: : there are conditions inherent in the papacy that delimit and condition the power, that endow its use with authority."

"3rd: just because something is stated in a magisterial document does not mean it is stated in the best possible way, or in a way that does not open it to an erroneous misunderstanding. ...

"In order to grasp the relationship between the papacy and liturgical legislation, we must start with the fundamental question: what is the pope’s obligation to tradition? ... According to this thirty-ninth session of Constance, the newly elected pope was to make an oath of ...

"...faith that included this passage: ... 'I will follow and observe in every way the handed-down rite of the ecclesiastical sacraments of the Catholic Church.'
...

"Such texts are not bizarre outliers but reflect a common consensus of pope’s boundenness to tradition,so much so that eminent canonists & theologians could maintain that a pope deserves to be resisted if guilty of injuring either tradition or the Christian people who rely on it.

"Vitoria says: 'If the Pope by his orders and his acts destroys the Church, one can resist him and impede the execution of his commands.' Bellarmine concurs: 'As it is lawful to resist the pope, if he assaulted a man’s person, so it is lawful to resist him, if he assaulted ...

"...'souls, or troubled the state, and much more if he strove to destroy the Church.' ... Note—and this is a crucial point—that all of these authorities assume we are capable of recognizing that the pope is assaulting souls or destroying the Church at a given moment or policy."

"To see that the position I am defending here is not extravagant, we should consider a famous proponent of it in recent times: none other than Joseph Ratzinger. In The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000), Ratzinger writes: 'After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that...

"... 'the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. ... The pope’s authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not “manufactured” by the authorities. ...

"...'Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity.... The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.'"

"Ratzinger favored a gradual and conservative liturgical reform. Even though he always acknowledged the sacramental validity of the Novus Ordo,he understood the break that had taken place owing to a pope who, unlike hundreds of his predecessors, had failed to act as a gardener...

"... and chose rather to act as a mechanic or fabricator, resulting in a form of the Roman liturgy so different from its preceding tradition that it had to be seen as a year zero, the start of a new 'tradition'.

"I think we are now in a better position to see why the first and most basic mistake the papal apologists make is to assume that liturgy is merely “disciplinary,” and pope’s “universal, immediate” jurisdiction endows him with the power to change anything."

"To say that the pope alone gets to determine when and how he exercises his disciplinary authority is to say that there is no possible way the pope can ever abuse it—or abuse anyone or anything. It is to say he has rights, but no duties; power, but no limits—natural, divine,...

"...ecclesiastical—to his power. Those who maintain that the pope has the authority to abrogate or abolish an immemorial liturgical rite and replace it with a new construction show that they have abandoned historic confessional Catholicism in favor of a caricature. It is...

"...a reductio ad absurdum of the papacy, which plays into the hands of Protestant and Orthodox controversialists who would be entirely right to object to it."

"Recall a fact that seems astonishing to us today, but would have surprised no one for most of the Church’s history: the liturgy of the Western or Latin-rite Church existed in its many varieties for 1500 years—for fully fifteen centuries—before any pope wielded papal authority...

"...to codify or define a liturgical book. ... far from “creating his own missal” (as some people ignorantly continue to say), Pius V took the most conservative action possible in the circumstances: he acted precisely to conserve tradition in the face of a massive heretical...

"...onslaught with its innumerable innovations. ... If the statement 'the pope can change liturgy as he pleases' is accepted without qualification, then tradition means essentially nothing. And this is not a Catholic view (never has been), but a nominalistic/voluntaristic one."

"How did we reach this point, where instead of a pope who receives, guards, promotes, and hands on tradition, we have a pope who has attempted to unleash a global war against Catholics, against priests, religious, and laity, who are doing what he is supposed to be doing?"

"The first cause is ... an endorsement of a hyperpapalism that concentrates all authority, all truth, all law, and the sum total of “Catholic identity” in the papal office and in the very person of the pope. ...

"The second cause of our crisis is Modernism, which emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, reaching its first apogee during the reign of Pius X, and then, having gone underground, reemerged with greater force during the pontificate of Pius XII & Vatican II."

"What should be our response as Catholics to a truly catastrophic situation in the Church? The answer is as simple as it is ancient: ora et labora, pray and work. That is how the Benedictine monks and nuns kept the light of Faith burning in the Dark Ages."