There has not yet been a very clear and unmistakable statement by bishops, followed by faithful enforcement of the fundamental Roman Catholic belief that this Church is the one and the true Church founded by Christ, to which all men and women must belong if they are to be saved from eternal damnation. Nor have the Roman authorities made any ostensible effort to rectify this grave deficiency in the bishops of the Church.
The relationship of bishops to the Bishop of Rome as Pope and as personal Vicar of Christ is the third heading under which confusion has been allowed to develop. Catholic dogma says that each bishop is the legitimate chief pastor of his diocese, provided he be in communion with the Pope: that is to say, that he hold the same beliefs and moral laws as the Pope and that he be subject to the jurisdiction of the Pope. The Pope, as universal pastor of the Church, is also pastor of each diocese in his own right. All the bishops of the Church, about four thousand in actual number, together with the Pope, constitute the college or assembly of apostles, and they can legislate with infallibility for the Church Universal as members of that college headed by the Pope.
But Roman Catholic doctrine holds that the Pope by himself can do all that this college can do doctrinally and in jurisdiction and in moral discipline; the college of bishops can do nothing without the collaboration and headship of the Pope.
There are, therefore, two distinct relationships: one between each bishop individually and the Pope; another between the Pope and all the bishops as a body. And this relationship is called the collegiality of the Church.
Again by dint of skillful but incorrect reading of texts from the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the persuasion has been nourished by prelates and theologians that a second form of collegiality exists between the bishops of one country. Thus, it is claimed that the national conference of Catholic bishops in a country can legislate in doctrine and discipline quite apart from what the Pope may think, approve or disapprove, and that they can do this infallibly: that is, they will not err in what they propose for belief and moral practice.
No national conference of bishops has as yet had the courage or the gall to come out with a blanket statement to that effect. But already, Catholics have noted over a twenty-year period how their national conferences of bishops have legislated both doctrine and discipline in direct contradiction to the known teaching of the Pope. Needless to say, more than one theologian has proposed theological arguments to bolster this heretical independence of bishops’ conferences.
The idea of the “national Catholic Church”—American, Canadian, French, Brazilian, and so on—has been born. It is not merely an idea; it is the guiding principle of many diocesan activities that have the blessing of the bishops. Bishops and their activist clerics and layfolk are thinking along these lines; they have not as yet had the courage to come out frankly and in bold terms. But we must be careful not to mistake the purpose of such a slowly emerging “national Church.” The ultimate goal in the minds of those who nourish the idea and promote it actively and concretely is not merely to solve local problems—for instance, of American priests who want to get married or of homosexuals who demand homosexual rights or of Latin American Marxists and their North American imitators who claim the right to espouse Marxism and still be called Roman Catholics. In the minds of the purveyors of this new collegiality among the bishops of any one national conference of bishops, there stands as ultimate objective the liquidation of absolute papal control over the dogma and moral discipline in the Church.
In their minds, the truly Catholic Church, no longer called Roman, would consist of a gaggle of “national Churches,” bound together by sentiment and association, always reverential toward the so-called “venerable See of Rome and their brother Bishop” but free in their autonomy to be “mature brother bishops” of the “venerable Bishop of Rome,” and thus be free to arrange the “national” affairs of their Church merely according to the “local culture.”
Obviously, such a liquidation of the Petrine Office could only be effected with the consent of its occupant; and the easiest way in which that could happen would be the election to the throne of Peter of a papal candidate who, prior to his election, is known as favoring such a liquidation. Domination of a papal Conclave by that sort of mind would be a prerequisite for success in this epoch-making venture. For epoch-making it is: to transform the almost two-thousand-year-old tradition of the Roman Catholic Church by ending officially and once and for all the papal primacy such as it has evolved over the centuries and has been asserted by every ecumenical council of the Church, including the Second Vatican Council.
The failure of the Roman authorities to call down national conferences of bishops on matters in which those conferences have transgressed the papal will and decision: This is what has slowly but surely commenced to ingrain the idea in local Catholic communities that their national conference of bishops indeed does have the last word in dogma and moral discipline. But confusion arises because there are sufficient voices protesting that the will and authority of the Pope are supreme. Again, the lack of enforcement on Rome’s part is only fomenting the confusion.
The fourth vital issue is a complex one and concerns the reproductive faculties of men and women. The statistics here are horrendous. Under the chief headings of contraception, abortion, homosexuality, premarital sexuality and the modern techniques dealing with reproduction, reliable figures assure us that a great majority of Catholics simply do not accept and a greater majority entertain severe doubts about the traditional Roman Catholic teaching on these five issues. Some particular figures—say, those for priests who directly counsel their flock in an un-Catholic sense—are appalling. The confusion, where there is confusion, arises because the Pope insists on the traditional laws concerning these issues, whereas in every community of Catholics there are the theologians, priests and layfolk teachers in Catholic institutions who flatly contradict that traditional teaching. Proper enforcement on the part of the local bishops and of Rome would strip any such theologian or teacher of his right to teach and preach to Catholics. There is no such enforcement, either from Rome or from the bishops.
It seems obvious that all those prelates and priests who have gone along with the de-Catholicizing of people’s belief and moral behavior do believe that they are making the Church more relevant, more practical, more in tune with the modern mind, more understandable and, therefore, acceptable. The parallel with the Judas complex seems complete.
For those who constitute the anti-Church are convinced that their plan is the one that is good for the Church as they conceive the Church to be. The example of the anti-Church attitude to the Eucharist carries frightening signals for the believer’s mind. For the believer, the Church, in its spiritual reality, is the Mystical Body of Christ, which is made up of all those who are spiritually united with Christ by his divine grace. This Mystical Body can have, on this earth, only one tangible and visible form: the Roman Catholic institutional organization. The parallel between the betrayal of Jesus as a living, tangible, visible man by Judas, and the betrayal of the Church by the members of the anti-Church instills a horror in the believer while enlightening him as to the reality of the danger in which the Roman Catholic institutional organization is caught in the late twentieth century. Judas’ betrayal of Jesus concerned primarily the physical body of Jesus; it implied several concomitant betrayals.
Judas, for example, felt no particular imperative to participate in the Last Supper—he got out on the first pretext, in order to proceed with his own plan. He did not partake in the Eucharist, of Christ’s Body and Blood, as did the other Apostles. He had found nothing significant in Christ’s promise of these as the sacrificial means of salvation and membership in his Church. Precisely one major act of malfeasance by the anti-Church indicates a disinterest in that Eucharist as the sacrificial Body and Blood of Christ offered at the immemorial Mass. Replacing that once central Roman Catholic focus with their own wild imaginings, the anti-Church have a vagarious ceremonial, sim
mering with interest in a “common meal” and relying for its effect on the paraphernalia of a hastily put-together “living theater” and the organized “togetherness” of a social gathering. Disinterest—amounting to betrayal—in the Eucharist is the common element between Judas and the anti-Church.
At this point of rejoining the Judas complex in the anti-Church, we come up against what St. Paul calls “the mystery of iniquity.” Judas is the prime example. At the Last Supper, Jesus was quite frank: “It would have been better for that man [his traitor] never to have been born.” But Jesus must have known from eternity and, therefore, from the moment that he personally called Judas to be one of his special Apostles that this man would surely betray him. Yet he picked him out. He trusted him. He gave him the only public office in that select group of followers. If we approach this fact from our human point of view, we will meet only with brain-twisting problems. The mystery—God’s point of view—will always remain opaque to us, but we can accept it in faith.
Paul used that phrase “the mystery of iniquity” when writing to the Thessalonians about the universal apostasy that will precede the appearance of the anti-Christ, in the last days before the end of all human time. Before those terrible events of the final end, Paul tells his faithful, they will be faced with the fact that, contrary to human expectation, iniquity—the specific attack of Lucifer on the followers of Jesus—will operate on a grand scale. Jesus himself, speaking of those last days, echoed the same note, warning his followers that the servants of that iniquity would do to them exactly as they would do to him, so that even the just would succumb if God didn’t shorten those days of their sufferings. Jesus’ Church would be treated as Jesus had been treated by his enemies.
It is not fanciful but frighteningly impressive to realize that the Judas complex in Churchmen has already led the Church into a condition that reproduces the sufferings imposed on Jesus through the treachery of Judas.
The agony of doubt and fear Jesus underwent in Gethsemane Garden is paralleled by the Gethsemane of doubt and fear that dissident theologians have created in the Church. The neglect and contempt of Judas for partaking in what actually was a sacred event, the Last Supper, is reproduced in the multiple ways that the anti-Church has effectively diminished the sacramental importance of the Eucharist—indeed, the very reality of the Eucharist as the Body and Blood of Christ.
The imprisonment, torture, scourging and crucifixion of Jesus—direct results of Judas’ treachery—have been and still are today reproduced in the bodies of millions who have been betrayed by Churchmen into the hands of cruel governments, in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America, in Africa. More especially, priests and prelates in those places have submitted to indescribable tortures precisely because they embody Christ’s official Church and minister to his Mystical Body.
The desertion of Christ by the Apostles once Christ was arrested finds its mystical parallel in today’s Churchmen: They deny they know him as the Son of God, or even that they know him or stand with him; and many good Churchmen, orthodox in belief, pure of life, flee from any reaction, any strong reaction, to the destruction of Christ’s Church by the anti-Church, thus becoming responsible for the damage they could have prevented by putting themselves and their interests in second position, resisting the anti-Church on the parish and diocesan level.
A peculiar piece of desecration of Christ’s Church is being committed by the anti-Church in its fomenting of the feminist movement among female religious. Jesus, in his sufferings, had at least the consolation of knowing that the women among his followers did not scatter like scared rabbits, nor did they betray him. They stayed with him to the bitter end of Calvary. Today, the women’s movement in the Church, certainly allowed and in some cases encouraged by the anti-Church, is bent on desecrating the Body of the Church in the Sacrament, in the sacred vows of religion, in the precious functions of priest, pastor and teacher. All this can be traced to the Judas complex, part of the mystery of iniquity that is now operating in high gear throughout the Roman Catholic institutional organization.
Such an overall manifestation of the once latent power of that iniquity, now rampant within the Church and directly the doing of the anti-Church, surely orients the mind to at least the beginnings, if not the actual beginning, of that universal apostasy among believers that St. Paul explicitly foretells and insists is the direct prelude to the climactic arrival of the Man of Destiny, the anti-Christ.
35
The Triple Weakness
The overall deterioration of the Roman Catholic institutional structure has now gone so far, indeed with each passing year proceeds at such a sustained pace; and Pope John Paul II and his papal bureaucracy have been pushed or have retreated into such ineffectual isolation from the day-to-day governance of the Church Universal, that now three dreadful outcomes are possible. Any of them could—probably would—entail the final disintegration of this Roman Catholic institutional organization as we have known it, and as men and women have known it for over five hundred years.
The day that a sizable body of Roman Catholics, clergy and laity, become convinced—rightly or wrongly—that the then occupant of the apostolic throne of Peter is not, perhaps never was, a validly elected pope, that day the presently continuous piece-by-piece deterioration of the organizational structure will be quickened into a muffled collapse of the entire organization. The already schism-split and heresy-ridden Roman Catholic body will then be a headless thing, a complicated machine exploding in all directions into fragments, because its secure casing and capstone cover were shattered.
For the only tangible guarantee Roman Catholics have that a man has truly become Pope is the legal guarantee of valid election in a legal Conclave of legal cardinals. Their faith then assures them that through this man and his predecessors they are in historical relationship with Jesus Christ, who founded the Church, and in supernatural relationship with Christ as he now is in the Heaven of God’s glory. The legality—or validity, to use the ecclesiastical term—of a papal election depends on the exact observance, in the presence of witnesses, of the various visible and controllable procedures laid down in the rules for papal elections. The final outcome of the election—a validly elected pope—is attained only with the freely pronounced Accepto of the Pope-elect. This is why Cardinal Laurenti, who became Pope-elect at the Conclave of February 1922, could never be regarded as Pope: He did freely decline to accept the pontificate, having been validly elected by the due majority. No one has to accept the Petrine Office. A pope-elect who refuses to accept is not obliged to explain why he has refused it, just as a pope who resigns the office is not obliged to explain why he has resigned.
What does the term “freely” mean when we say that the Pope-elect must freely accept or reject his election to the pontificate?
Take, for example, the Conclave of 1903, which produced as Pope Pius X Giuseppe Melchiorre Cardinal Sarto. But Sarto was not the prime choice of those sixty-two Cardinal Electors. After one voting session and scrutiny of the votes, on August 1, the first day of the Conclave, it was clear that the required majority (twenty-nine in this instance; Sarto got only five votes in that session) went to Italian-born Mariano Cardinal Rampolla del Tindaro. Rampolla, if allowed, would have pronounced the required Accepto, would therefore have become Pope automatically.
But he was not allowed to accept the pontificate. At that time, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria had the privilege from the Vatican of vetoing any pope-elect he did not fancy. Rampolla he did not fancy—but the majority of Cardinal Electors never found out in their lifetime why it was so. The ostensible reason given for the Emperor’s veto was Rampolla’s record of political opposition to Austria and his support of France. So, on August 2, the Polish-born Jan Cardinal Puzyna of Austria-Hungary stood up in the Conclave and announced the Emperor’s veto on Rampolla.
Rampolla and the other Cardinal Electors bowed to the Austrian veto, because he and all the cardinals knew exactly what damage the persnickety Franz Joseph could
cause the Churchmen in Central Europe, where the domains of the Austro-Hungarian empire stretched. In that sense, Rampolla’s Non accepto was free. He and the other cardinals freely accepted the existence of that veto. But insofar as the Emperor’s veto impeded the cardinals’ having the pope they freely chose, and impeded Rampolla from acceding to their overwhelming wish, neither they nor he was free. Yet no one then or since would hold that Rampolla was the real Pope, that Sarto-—the Pope-elect produced by a later session of voting and scrutiny—was not validly Pope.
It was only in subsequent years that the true motive for Franz Joseph’s veto was revealed. The Emperor was privy to a very closely held secret: Cardinal Rampolla had joined the Lodge of Freemasons. Without any doubt, the Emperor had the right to veto a papal candidate he did not fancy. Rampolla and the Electors bowed to the exercise of that privilege. But an entirely different situation would arise if a pope-elect were prevented from accepting the papacy by someone who had no right to do so, someone who threatened ruin and death to a pope-elect’s reputation and family and person if he accepted his election as pope. Such a threat would be unjust, would be an undue limitation on the freedom of the Cardinal Electors. In that instance, the Pope-Elect would be in no way free. Unjust force and pressure would rob him of his freedom and would rob the Church of its validly elected Pope.
But very tortuous questions can thus arise. Nowadays, for instance, there is no state power or individual to whom the Holy See has granted a formal veto power on popes-elect. There is, however, a different category of persons outside the Conclave that the Holy See recognizes as having a legitimate interest in the actual identity of the new Pope. The Cardinal Electors entering a Conclave today are aware of which papal candidate is persona non grata to which interested outside party. Veto it is not, in the old formal sense; yet the likes and dislikes of such outside parties are certainly taken into account. And, therefore, at least theoretically, the situation can arise in which a duly elected candidate for the pontificate is vetoed.
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