Cutting the gordion knot

Some thoughts on the ordinary magisterium and the sedevacantist's mistake.

Today’s newsletter is pressed right to the buffers, so we’ll dive in directly. In two recent discussions, I’ve come to a better understanding of at least one flavor of sedevacantist opinion. I am not persuaded, but I understand better why I disagree with them. 

As I understood my interlocutors and the +Sanborn lecture they cited, they demand that we evaluate a very specific syllogism. For its major premise, they assert a maximalist, ultramontane view of the magisterium—the church’s teaching authority—generally and the papacy specifically, and for a minor premise, the legitimacy of the incumbent. If legitimate popes possesses vast, fearsome, and irresistible power (major premise), and the incumbent holds office legitimately (minor premise), the conclusion must flows that the pope is irresistible. Sanborn et al embrace the major premise with uncommon vigor. (Thus, this newsletter will refer to them as the “Maximalists.”) But they also dispute the conclusion. They deny things said by and through the post-October-1958 papacy. This creates a tension they resolve by denying the minor premise. That lets them have it both ways, retaining their expansive view of the magisterium while also denying the legitimacy of recent popes and especially of the Second Vatican Council. (“Vatican 2,” putatively the 21st Ecumenical Council and which for purposes of this newsletter is “the” council in references to the “preconciliar” and “postconciliar.”) 

By contrast, the Maximalists think the “recognize and resist” position (“R&R”) of SSPX et al denies the major premise, or at least cabins it to an unacceptable degree. R&R means recognizing that postconciliar popes were/are validly-elected incumbents of the Bishopric of Rome while resisting their “vision for the Church.” This, the Maximalists assert, Catholics cannot do. The major premise of their syllogism stands athwart it. The Maximalists fault the associated concept of “sifting” on both practical and magisterial grounds. Notably, however, the authorities they cite (here’s another example) are always the writings of post-tridentine popes. Have they nothing older? If the only way to reach this supposed doctrine of whatever-the-pope-says-goes is with second-millennium materials, the implication’s either that the historical record is incomplete (i.e. these doctrines were always taught but we have no record of it, which is not immediately plausible) or that the early, universal faith was incomplete (i.e. Catholic doctrine has changed, which is not immediately credible). 

My own view rejects the major premise entirely. Sanborn et al take for granted that if any pope has ever said x, ergo x is Catholic doctrine, and in defense of that position, they will string-cite at you what popes y and z (usually Pius IX and Leo XIII) said about the authority of popes (i.e., their own). But that is a proposition in itself; what, in turn, is the authority for that? To see why Maximalism is an unsound premise in Sanborn’s Syllogism, we need to evaluate the proper role of the pope as teacher.

The Pope is not a king. He’s not a prophet through whom new revelation flows (as, if memory serves, Richard A. Posner once suggested). He is, rather, a bishop.¹ Of Rome, yes, and as such patriarch of the Latin church; and as to the other Churches (Constantinople, Antioch, etc.), whether or not they recognize it and whatever it actually means,² he’s Successor of Peter, leader of the Apostles, overseer of the overseers, moderator and court of last resort.³

But these descriptions belong to the episcopacy’s governing role. It’s conventional to remark that the episcopate has a “triple munus,” a threefold role of teaching, governing, and sanctifying (qua ministers of the sacraments). As to their role as teacher (magister), Popes wear two distinct hats as to the two distinct magisteria. There is the extraordinary magisterium, “solemn proclamation[s]” of “a general Council or . . . the Roman Pontiff speaking ex cathedra,” and there is the “ordinary and universal magisterium.”⁴ For the former, popes share a coordinate role with the bishops of the world gathered together in an Ecumenical Council, and the other, they share with the bishops spread throughout the world.

It’s the extraordinary magisterium that gets all the glitz. The First Vatican Council (“Vatican 1”) holds that popes, when speaking ex cathedra, can “infallib[ly]” “define[ ]” dogma. With Ladislas Orsy SJ, see The Church: Learning and Teaching » (1987), I tend to think this an infelicitous translation piled atop an infelicitous label. It might be better understood as a charism of inerrancy when settling some doctrinal disputes. And it’s an authority shared with (and so a special instance of) the authority of an Ecumenical Council, which in turn is a representation of the Universal Church. Solemn proclamations don’t make dogma, they preserve and clarify (in a word, ha ha, sift) it, not against the Church but with it. That reading aligns Vatican 1’s holding with its rationale: “[T]he Holy Ghost was not promised to the successors of Peter that by his revelation they might make known new doctrine; but that by his assistance they might inviolably keep and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith delivered through the Apostles.”⁵

I will have more to say about the extraordinary magisterium’s rare interventions in the life of the Church in a future newsletter. In view today, rather, is the pope’s role as a teacher in the context of the “universal ordinary magisterium” (“UOM”), in which he stands not apart from but shoulder to shoulder with to his brethren, the Patriarchs of the other Great Patriarchal Sees, and comparable footing to his children, the bishops metropolitan and suffragan of his own, Latin Church.⁶

The label “ordinary magisterium” is credited to Pius IX. In Tuas libenter, Pio Nono cautioned that what was binding in Church teaching extended beyond those dogmas “defined by the express decrees” by the extraordinary magisterium; rather, it extends also “to that which has been handed-down [traduntur] as divinely revealed by the ordinary [ordinarius] magisterium of the whole Church spread over the whole world, and for that reason are held to belong to the faith by the constant consent of Catholic theologians.”⁷ The modifier “universal” was added later “to distinguish it from the official attribute of infallibility inherent in the Pontiff.” Bachofen, A Commentary on the New Code of Canon Law 324 n.7 (1918). Preconciliar manuals treated it as “the manner (modus) in which a point of doctrine was determined as an integral part of our faith . . . [t]hrough its consistent affirmation as Catholic doctrine by the popes and bishops . . . .”Orsy, supra, at 60 (emphasis deleted).

The label is new but the idea’s not. The UOM is not a byword for “things wot bishops say” but rather a very specific subset of episcopal teaching. Its office is paradosis: To teach each generation the divine revelation handed down to the Church by Christ. (“Paradosis” is a greek cognate to “tradition,” and like its english counterpart, it can mean be both verb and noun, both the passing down of something and the thing that is passed down. It’s conveniently available for use in a restrictive, term-of-at sense, referring specifically and solely to the Deposit of Faith outside of scripture and the handing on of it by the bishops, which is how I employ it here. Cf. Rahner & Ratzinger, The Episcopate and the Primacy (Barker et al trns., 1962).) The paradosis “is often called Apostolic [Tradition] to emphasize the fact that the whole of it has come down to us for the Apostles . . . .”⁸ Each new generation of bishops are the ministers of the apostolic message, authorized and sent forth by the preceding generation,⁹ “the faithful echo and reecho of the word of God.”¹⁰ That’s why the proto-church was concerned with proper appointment of those who would carry the the apostolic teaching.¹¹

And given this, it should be obvious that bishops have no warrant to substitute a new paradosis, which includes synthesizing “a” “Catholic” answer to questions that have no answer in the paradosis they received. Cf. 2 Thess. 2:15 (directing the faithful to “stand firm and hold to the paradosis that you were taught by [the apostles], either verbally or by writing”); contra Diu satis » 9 (P.7 Encyc. 1800). To put it a little glibly: Ludwig Ott attributes to the magisterium the twin purposes and thus competencies of “preserving unfalsified and of infallibly interpreting the truths of Revelation.” Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma 8 (Lynch, trns. 1960). I doubt the second purpose and competence. Or to put it just slightly less glibly: In law, interpretation means recovering the semantic content of a provision while construction means creating doctrine to apply that content to concrete realities.¹² By the lights of that analogy, strictly-speaking, what I doubt is less the UOM’s competence to interpret than to construe. Anyway: If there is a power in the magisterium to create doctrine, it is not interstitial, filling in holes in revelation where God failed to give us an answer satisfying to theologians, but rather adjudicative, resolving tension between conflicting views. And that’s the business of the extraordinary magisterium, not the UOM.

The problem in the Maximalist position is that they misconceive the UOM. They think that it’s a “living” magisterium and that every drop of ink dripping from the papal nib is an exercise of it. Maximalists may cavil such a bald, unnuanced description. They wouldn’t say in as many words that one pope speaking once can bind the entire church for all time. But these are necessary corollaries of their position, and neither is true.

I read—can only read—that alarming phrase “living Magisterium” through the Scalian–Rehnquistian lens; as implying something that is protean, evolving, changing. See Rehnquist, The Notion of a Living Constitution, 54 Tex. L. Rev. 693 (1975); Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation 38–39 (1997). Or, to put a finer point on it—subject to being changed. Or, to put a really fine point on it, to being scraped and stretched over the exercise of illigitimate lawgiving authority to confer a patina of borrowed legitimacy.

At first blush, law and magisterium may seem far afield. They align, however, as to the precise point at issue. In each, we have a corpus that has been given authoritatively at a point in the past, and we have a continuing body of humans who are in some sense tasked with teaching it, announcing its content and applying it to particular circumstances. And in each, the threshold question is not how those humans should read/interpret/construe that corpus, or even the proper bounds of such interpretation/construction. Rather, it is, Does the corpus have a fixed meaning, or does it mean what the humans want it to say? Is the Catholic Faith a finite body of teaching confided by Christ to His apostles and by them to the churches? (Meaning that it’s been available to all generations since, generations who might speak to us in their extant documents about said “Catholic faith”?) Or, does it draw its meaning from the evolving learning of theologians which marks the progress of a maturing faith?¹³ (Meaning that it wasn’t available to the faithful of past ages in its current state, and is not now available to us in the form to which it may evolve in centuries to come?)

Well: I thought we had all agreed that it was the former. Cf. Pascendi Dominici gregis » 13 (P.10 Encyc. 1907) (condemning the proposition that “[d]ogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed” as something “strongly affirmed by the Modernists, and clearly flows from their principles”).

We can identify what belongs to the UOM if we discard the clouding assumptions of Maximalists that it must be comprehensive and of Modernists that it changes. The UOM comprises what “was always and everywhere believed by all the Churches.” That’s the Lerins test. And while the formulae used by the UOM to hand on those teachings can evolve, the teaching of the UOM cannot be in substance different to what was taught in an earlier age. That’s the Newman test. To violate it, a pope would have to teach athwart, say, the Nicene Creed.

Thus I disagree—and insist that I can disagree—with that pope who insists that while the Church’s older liturgy may have been okay in its time, “[t]he more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age . . . .”¹⁴ If you are right now flicking to the footnotes (or googling) to confirm your guess as to which pope said that and when, I think you’ve let the cat out of the bag. That same pope continues: “[N]o sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine more recently elaborated and proclaimed as dogmas by the Church, under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit.” Bet me! These two propositions stand or fall together, and once we have rejected the claim that the Holy Spirit protects the Church in liturgical innovation as contradicting lived experience, the parallel claim that the Holy Spirit likewise protects the Church in doctrinal innovation is shown to be problematic.

To be sure, limiting the UOM to the paradosis requires that we distinguish more sharply than we often have between “what Catholics believe” and “things believed by many Catholics.” I have no beef with theologians dreaming up theories to explain the unexplained. I understand the Thomist ache to know more; to have more clarity and precision than can be strained from the paradosis. I sympathize with the gnawing fear of confessing that we don’t know something; worse, the humiliating truth that we can’t know it. And I understand well how a seductive conjecture can be confused for a proof when we want to believe strongly enough. But that’s a far cry from saying that those theologians (or anyone else) can impose those speculations on the whole body of the faithful if they can only obtain sufficient ecclesiastical power. Instaurating and respecting the magisterium’s limits yields a Catholic faith that is leaner; more muscular and fit for purpose. One unshackled from the desire of popes of one age to bind the faithful to the illiberal demands of their swollen power and egos, see, e.g., Diu satis, supra, 15 (“Books which openly oppose the teaching of Christ are to be burned”); accord Pascendi, supra 50-51, and from popes of another age to bind the faithful to their untutored, illiberal assumptions about political economy, see, e.g., Evangelii gaudium (F.1 Encyc., 2013). One that has learned, in the felicitous phrase of John McKenzie SJ, that while “the temptation to exercise control is very attractive . . . [t]he damage which error works must be weighed against the damage which control works; and this measurement has not been made often enough.” Authority in the Church 135 (1966).

It subtracts nothing from papal capacity to intervene in the doctrinal life of the Church by way of the extraordinary magisterium, whether alone or by convoking an Ecumenical Council. As I said above, I have more to say about that in the future; I also hope to discuss in a future newsletter what exactly an Ecumenical Council is, and the status of the second-millennium councils as “ecumenical.” Neither is before us today. What is before us today, but of which discussion would exceed available space, is to elaborate on what a more limited papal magisterium means for us, practically. Alas. Another day.

Once we see the UOM for what it is—the channel and instrumentality of the paradosis, the apostolic teaching and the handing-down of it, rather than the sum total of all the commentary churchmen have ever advanced—and so confine it to its proper scope, the authorities cited by the Maximalists are no authorities at all. Under any imaginable standard of review, the caterwauling of besieged “prisoners in the Vatican” (for Pete’s sake, mince more, would ya?) lashing out at a world they saw as their enemy, demanding power and respect in ever more hysterical terms, fail. And because these claims to power fail, so also fails their supposed exercise that power, which in turn kicks the chair out from under the Sanborn Syllogism’s major premise.

To illustrate the point, consider the conflict alleged by Sanborn’s fellow maximalist DeSaye between Quanta cura (P.9 Encyc., 1864) (“QC”) and Dignitatis humanae 3 (Vat. Co. 2d Decl., 1965) (“DH”) as to religious liberty.¹⁵ DeSaye perceives but a mirage of conflict, even stipulating that the objectionable text in DH is binding. (It’s not—it’s dicta.) That’s because QC lacks the power to create a position with which SE could conflict. Quite aside from subject-matter, QC fails the afore-mentioned tests of Lerins and Newman, and it cannot shoulder the heavy burden (not even claimed by DeSaye) of enshrouding itself in the mantle of the extraordinary magisterium. Pius IX had no authority in the first place to impose what Vatican II supposedly contradicted, and who acts beyond his warrant acts not. QC is doubtless an expression of Pius’ “mind and will,” as says Lumen gentium, 25 (Vat. Co. 2d Dog. Con., 1964) (dubitante), but the idea that popes can unilaterally pour content into the ordinary magisterium is, as I have said, erroneous. The magisterium is a bank from which clerics can withdraw but to which they can make no deposits.¹⁶

With the falsity of their their major premise exposed, the conclusion so feared by the Maximalists, which drives them to reject their minor premise, will not flow and there is no reason to reject the minor premise. To paraphrase Justice Souter, Sanborn et al strike a suitably gladiatorial pose, but they are thrusting at lions of their own imagining.¹⁷

One last observation. I’m content to accept Sanborn’s Syllogism. By its lights, sedevacantism follows from an unwillingness to re-examine flawed ultramontane assumptions about the papacy. But, why won’t they reexamine those assumptions?

I think that people cling to Maximalism because they want more certainty and less agency than this world can afford. They want “a” “Catholic” answer for every imaginable question—“how did Pius VII cook a hamburger?” (Scholasticism scratches the same itch.) On the Maximalist view, little thought is asked of the faithful Catholic; he only needs to look up what the popes have said about a topic and adhere to it. And this allows them to hold a position without assuming responsibility for it; “obedience is a virtue,” they will say, “and I am but a lamb following my shepherd. Who can fault me for that?”

I have little patience for the urge and none at all for the idea that it’s attainable. I think that “the Catholic faith per se” is old, bijou, and answers only a handful of questions, all of them important and most of them passing the Lerins test. (I accept the holdings of the extraordinary magisterium. I assume, for example, that Vatican 1 merely poured into a suitable mold a metal that dated to the apostles in its substance if not its heat, thereby passing the Newman test.) After all: If that were not so, then what were the antenicene fathers talking about? Early Christian writings speak often of the Catholic faith in haec verba; something by that name existed then, and unless we say that it’s changed, the various doctrinal extrapolations and emanations that have arisen since then are not strictly a part of it. They may be true; but they reside not in “the Catholic faith per se” but in an auxiliary hinterland adjacent to it. (A similar problem inheres in Protestantism, I think, wherein the mediating talisman of faith—“the Bible”—did not come into existence as a single, knowable text until many generations of Christians had already lived and died, and was unavailable if not inaccessible to most people until the last half-millennium.)

My view is that all issues on which the magisterium does not speak directly, clearly, and legitimately are left to the discretion of the faithful. This is not to say that there are not right answers. Rather, that those answers are not contained in the Deposit of Faith—or to the extent they are, only obliquely, ambiguously, or vaguely—and therefore that the Church can’t (or at least shouldn’t) bind the faithful to them. In most things, people must do the thing I suspect the Maximalists fear most: Make up their own minds.

Notes & Queries.

• Lesson learned: Substack allows footnotes, but they count disproportionately against the e-mail length limit. Sorry, folks, you’re just going to have to get used to reading inline citations. This is The Way.

• The British government has backed down on the end-to-end encryption legislation discussed in Top Men.

Cornucopia.

• Current developments in chip technology. For a useful primer, see this.

• How Taylor Swift writes a song.

• Dua Lipa’s song Love Again is such a ringer for White Town’s Your Woman that it never crossed my mind that it wouldn’t be so credited. (After all, Lipa called the album Future Nostalgia, and a song that quotes the trumpet sample and paraphrases the bassline of a major hit of the mid-90s would fit with the album’s deliberately retro vibe.) Turns out, not so much. Complicating things is the fact that Lipa was sued frivolously over Levitating. A frivolous accusation early is a good insurance policy against more serious accusations later—you pick up the “here they go again” card for later play. But as to Love Again and Your Woman, the similarities don’t end with the trumpet sample; the progression and feel are identical. I enjoy Lipa and attribute no malice, but if she or her team failed to credit White Town (the nom de guerre of Jyoti Mishra, who’s apparently a decent sport about it) they should.

• While I am not myself an immigration hawk, there’s not enough schadenfreude in the world to express the contempt I feel on their behalf for the immigration demagogues who are only now—now, as Jacqueline White might say, that it’s a whole lot less a someone-else’s-problem—realizing that uncontrolled immigration can occasion logistical problems for the governments on the rough side of it.

1. Cf. Pastor aeternus » 3.2 (Vat. Co. Dog. Con., 1870) (holding that papal jurisdiction is “truly episcopal [vere episcopalis]”).

2. Cf. Harkianakis, Can a Petrine Office Be Meaningful in the Church? in Papal Ministry in the Church 115 ff. (Kung, ed. 1971).

3. See, e.g., 1st Clement (C.1 Epist., circa AD 95) (Bishop of Rome settles a dispute in the Church of Corinth, 628 miles away from Rome as the crow flies and an apostolic see and thus autocephalous church in itself); accord Denzinger, Sources of Catholic Dogma passim.

4. 1917 CIC 1323, abrogated in gross by 1983 CIC 6 § 1.

5. Pastor aeternus, supra, 4.6.

6. “Latin,” “Roman,” and “Western” are used interchangeably as names for the Church of which the Bishop of Rome is Patriarch. “Church,” like “jurisdiction,” is a word with many (perhaps too many) meanings, Steel Co. v. CBE, 523 U.S. 83, 90 (1998) (quoting United States v. Vanness, 85 F.3d 661, 663, n.2 (DC Cir. 1996) (per Randolph, J.), and when the same word is used in different senses trouble is seldom far away, Roland Machinery Co. v. Dresser Industries, 749 F.2d 380, 388 (7th Cir. 1984). I’m using “Latin” here because I think people hear “Roman” Church and think, “ah, yes, Rome, sibling of, say, Milan.” That is, they’re evaluating it at the level of sees, which is one of the many senses in which “church” is used. But while the See of Milan is a sibling of the See of Rome, she is a daughter of the Latin Church; in a certain sense, all bishops of the Latin Church, even Metropolitans, are suffragans of the Roman Pontiff. Things are confused not only because of the variegated uses of the word “church” but also because the Latin Church’s siblings per se are estranged: They are the autocephalous churches of the east. (In the technical vocabulary, the proper term for these is the not-especially-more-revealing “Particular Churches.”)

7. Tuas libenter (P.9 Epist., 1863); accord 1983 CIC 750.

8. Coppens, A Systematic Study of the Catholic Religion 47 (1907).

9. See Ubi primum 22 (L.12 Encyc. 1824) (the apostles’ successors are “the Church’s ministers who speak as their representatives”).

10. Ad Catholici » 26 (P.11 Encyc. 1935).

11. See Humani generis 5 (B.15 Encyc., 1917); accord, e.g., 1 Tim 5:22.

12. See, e.g., McGinnis & Rappaport, The Power of Interpretation, 96 Notre Dame L. Rev. 920 (2021); Solum, The Interpretation-Construction Distinction, 27 Const. Comment. 95 (2010).

13. Compare Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86 (1958) with Providentisimus Deus 14 (L.13, Encyc., 1893).

14. Mediator Dei 61-63 (P.12 Encyc., 1947).

15. DeSaye, The New Doctrine of Vatican II §§ 7 et seq. (2022).

16. Cf. Ad Catholici, supra, no. 23.

17. Board of Ed. of Kiryas Joel Village School Dist. v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687, 708 (1994).