EENS:
Answer this question for me, please. Who was more Catholic in the following examples:
Year: AD 1377
Pope Gregory XI - Pope in Avignon
OR
St. Catherine of Siena?
Year: (1492-) 1503
Pope Alexander VI (with mistress and illegitimate children)
OR
St. John of God?
Hm… sounds to me like in at least some circumstances that non-Popes are MUCH more Catholic than the Pope (I assume St. Anthanasius need not even be brought up, let alone Pope Honorius, who was condemned as an heretic by the Sixth General Council).
If the Pope is not fulfilling his duty as Supreme Pastor over all men, then certainly some holy people will be “more Catholic than the Pope”, especially in such a case where said Pope is condemned as an heretic…
You are misreading the historical and theological situation here, though it’s tempting to do so, I admit!
Historical: in both cases, the Pope was doing something unpleasing to God. Avignon, where the popes (all French at that point) had set up the papal court, was not Rome: it was a case of the absentee bishop (a scourge of the middle ages, and something not fully put right, despite Trent, till the late eighteenth century) on a huge scale. Alexander VI was living an immoral life, with mistresses, illegitimate children and so on (I think it was he who, on being elected to his position, said: “God has given us the Papacy: let us enjoy it!” Popes, being human, sin: some more so than others. St Peter himself was, you’ll recall (Protestants throw it up at us enough!), scolded by St Paul for hypocrisy - having eaten with Gentiles initially, he pretended he hadn’t when the Jerusalem mob paid him a visit in Antioch. And there are innumerable cases where Popes have been gravely sinful. In those cases, any one of the faithful may be called by God to rebuke the sinner: though it’s generally a saint who is so called(perhaps on the grounds that anyone else would become so puffed up by pride that it would imperil their salvation…I think Savonarola might fall into that category, but that’s going off at a tangent).
Theological: in neither of the cases you adduce - and in no other similar ones in my recollection - were those who challenged the Pope calling into question their teaching. Poor Gregory knew what he had to do, but he was terrified to do it (rightly, in human terms: he did die shortly after returning to Rome); St Catherine gave him backbone. Alexander was, as Ronald Knox points out, in a position to change his whole way of life, just as St Thomas Becket did when made Archbishop of Canterbury: he didn’t, and may well be suffering for it for eternity, but at no point did he teach heresy. And after all, if you believe that the Church, with the Pope at the head of the College of Bishops, teaches infallibly, and that the gates of Hell won’t prevail against her, then you have to have the courage of those convictions, and grant that the Church, necessarily including the Pope, will not teach heresy.
Please don’t bring up St Robert Bellarmine at this point: he tackled the hypothetical question of whether a pope could be a heretic, and answered in the affirmative - but since we know, by the Vatican I dogmatic definition, that a pope is protected from teaching heresy when speaking ex cathedra, presumably a pope’s heretical teaching, like that of John XXII on the Beatific Vision, which can only take place when he acts as a private teacher, will never impact permanently on the faith of the whole church. This means that (for instance) the 1969 rite of Mass, while one may believe that it’s not a patch on the TLM, cannot be invalid. Indeed Archbishop Lefebvre taught that quite emphatically in the early days: he said a lot of very nasty things about it, but always maintained that it was valid. The SSPX still say that, though they hedge it around with so many qualifications (the last thing I read from - I think - Richard Williamson said that it was valid but objectively evil, though I can’t remember how he reached that conclusion) that this means very little.
To sum up: it is possible to be holier than a pope; it is possible to have far more of a sense of the faith than a pope; it is even possible to teach more acceptably than a pope. It isn’t, however, possible to be more Catholic than a pope in his role of infallible decision-maker.
Sue
