The Councils that Roman Catholics Prefer to Forget

More about the councils of Pisa, Constance, Basel, as ignored by Vatican 1, From Paul Bassett: “The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity”

The post-Vatican II era has created a serious problem for Roman Catholics. And that problem is precisely how to reconcile the claims of the church with the facts of history – and sometimes with the facts of its own history! It is not that this is a new problem but rather that the world and how the church relates to the world has so changed as to now lay bear the glaring contradictions that previously had been covered over by structures of authority which Vatican II has made more transparent. Perhaps the most obvious examples are the claims made by Vatican I regarding the papacy and its foundation, continuity and extent. As it turns out none of those claims is supportable in history and modern Roman Catholic scholars are now free to plumb the depths of these errors however much they are enshrined as “de fide” pronouncements.

But what is new in all this is not the errors but the fact that they can be discussed openly. We know from history that John Calvin himself cajoled the Roman Church for its false claims and showed in his famous letter to King Francis I that all ordinations after the Council of Basel were fraudulent. Calvin showed how political machinations and not “apostolic succession” had made necessary the removal of some popes and the appointment of others with little regard for ecclesiastical involvement. And that those depositions and appointments had broken whatever alleged continuity Rome claimed theretofore from the Apostles.

Read more…

Paul Bassett to Dean Obeidallah – “U S Laws are based on the Bible!”

Paul Bassett has had some brief interactions on Twitter with Dean Obeidallah, wrote about some concerns that the rise of Mike Hucakbee and Rick Santorum may lead to what he calls a “Christian Sharia”.

Thx Dean. US Laws based on Bible here: http://t.co/LbqsjB5GHJ Rich get into heaven: think King Solomon, Job! @Deanofcomedy @johnbugay

— Paul Bassett (@Colossianstwo8) February 23, 2014

Here is Paul’s larger response to that: U.S. Laws based upon the Bible:

I think Dean has missed the point and I would like to set the record straight. In his recent tweet to me he expressed concern that our laws should not be based on the Bible.

First of all, America’s laws are already based on the Bible. Nine of the thirteen colonies that came together to form the United States had established Christian religions. The Founding Fathers were Christians and were committed to creating a new system based on Christian principles. And that trend predated the Constitutional Convention by at least 150 years....

So when the Founders came together in Philadelphia they were not acting contrary to the history of the colonies they there were there to represent. In fact, the Christian foundation of the American culture was so established around the world that the famed German historian, Leopold von Ranke declared that John Calvin was the true founder of America! ...

... when America’s Constitution – the “Supreme Law of the Land” – was contemplated and enacted it was done by professing Christians whose intent was to create a Christian nation. The colonies that sent representatives to the Constitution had either established Christian religions supported by the taxpayer or had overwhelmingly Christian populations without an established church. They only sent people to represent them at Philadelphia that could swear allegiance to a Trinitarian Christianity....

See the entire article here.

“The Tradition of the Roman Catholic Church is to deny religious liberty”

Paul Bassett has published an exceptional study of the recent history of Roman Catholicism with respect to “religious liberty”:

http://anactofmind.com/2013/05/11/the-death-of-roman-catholic-tradition/

Here are a few items. He begins by describing a speech given by...

the Most Reverend Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia to a group in Greensburg, PA. What I found fascinating about the Archbishop’s address is that he while he admonishes his audience to remain true to their Catholic heritage he does so on a Protestant foundation. In other words, he had to abandon Catholic teaching and Tradition on the issue of religious liberty and build his case on the work of the Protestant Founders of America.

His Excellency encouraged his audience not to “dilute our zeal as Catholics” and reminded them that they cannot “achieve good ends with impure means”...

Official “Church Teaching” on Religious Liberty: 1776-1958
At the time of the American Revolution of 1776 and through the period where the U.S. Constitution was drafted, ratified and implemented, the pope of Rome was Pius VI. Here is an example of Pius VI’s idea of “religious liberty” in the Papal States over which he presided:

…at the time of Pius VI came to St. Peter’s throne in 1775 and issued his order reinstating all the old restrictions, Jews lived in eight ghettoes, locked in each night behind high walls and heavy gates. Everyone was able to tell who was a Jew, because, in another sixteenth-century papal provision reiterated in the 1775 edict, Jews were required to wear a special badge on their clothes…Jews were not allowed to keep shops or warehouses outside the ghetto and their social isolation was to be strictly enforced.

If you were a Jew living in Rome at the time of the American Revolution, “religious liberty” meant being imprisoned, giving up your possessions and being harassed by the Catholic Church.

The pontificate of the next pope, Pius VII was marked by the struggle with Napoleon. It is interesting that Napoleon freed the Jews imprisoned by the Catholic Church after he invaded Rome at the beginning of the 19th century. Unfortunately the Jews were re-imprisoned by the next pope, Leo XII in 1826. One notable Catholic historian describes Leo this way:

Leo XII’s pontificate was an extremely conservative one: he condemned religious toleration, reinforced the Index of Forbidden Books and the Holy Office (formerly the Inquisition), reestablished the feudal aristocracy in the Papal States, and confined the Jews once again to ghettos.

Leo was followed by Pius VIII who lasted only twenty months who was in turn followed by Gregory XVI. And Gregory was no fan of “religious liberty”. Fr. McBrien once again:

Gregory XVI was as rigid in dealing with theological issues as he was in dealing with political ones. In his encyclical “Mirari vos” (August 15, 1832)…he denounced the concepts of freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and separation of Church and state, particularly the liberal views associate with the French priest Félicité Robert de Lamennais…(Lamennais favored religious liberty and the separation of Church and state….

…

You see, according to the Pope, the type of system the Archbishop thinks is fundamental to defend the religious liberty of Catholics is actually heretical. If the Archbishop were true to his own dictate to remain true to “Church teaching” he would give up this talk of liberty.

And the next pontiff – the “pastoral” Pius X – was no different. It seems that this pope was so set against “religious liberty” that he refused to see the American President Teddy Roosevelt simply because the President was scheduled to speak at a Methodist Church in Rome. I have a hard time finding the “liberty” in that story, don’t you?

Benedict XV’s pontificate seems to have been preoccupied with internecine quarrels as well as with the events of the First World War. But his successor, Pius XI renewed Rome’s march against religious liberty with the encyclical “Martalium animos” which “forbade any Catholic involvement in ecumenical conferences.”[ix]

The last pope that I will mention brings us past the mid-point of the twentieth century; Pius XII. And I have to note him with a truly great sense of irony. You see, Pius XII instigated a “persecution” of leading Catholic scholars of the day including Henri de Lubac, who Archbishop Chaput quotes from to begin [this blog post]! And while it is true that John Paul II later raised de Lubac to the episcopate, the fact remains that he was first an example of the sort of religious intolerance which is the true legacy of Rome.

Read the whole article for fuller quotes and citations.

The Vatican vs the heresy of “Americanism”

Roman Catholic “Social Teaching” today seems to be the one bright light among the darkness of the sex abuse scandals for contemporary Roman Catholics, but in reality, according to Paul Bassett, it is a very recent invention, learned, it seems from Roman interactions in the good old US of A:

On Faith, Freedom and Roman Catholic History

[The] “mystical equality of all people” [written of by the Roman Catholic writer Joseph Pearce] is an innovation in 20th century Catholic anthropology. The Roman Church has historically been built on a caste system. So it was the Protestants who had to call Rome back to the doctrine which Mr. Pearce finds so dear.

The most blatant evidence for this caste system is the ruthless treatment that Jews received at the hands of the Roman Church. Professor David Kertzer describes the extent of this abomination:

Where the popes acted as temporal rulers, as they did in the Papal States until the States’ absorption into a unified Italy over the period 1859-70, discrimination against Jews was public policy…The popes and the Vatican worked hard to keep Jews in their subservient place…and they did all this according to canon law and the centuries-old belief that in doing so they were upholding the most basic tenets of Christianity.

So Pearce’s “mystical equality of all people” is historical amnesia within the context of the Roman Church.

Good Pope John

Paul Bassett sent me the ad nearby. I wrote back to tell him I already have a job:

Habemus Papam!

Revolution in Rome

It’s been a year since the Vatican came under new management. Readers will remember the precipitating event, when Catholic Answers elevated John Bugay to the Pontificate.

As a golden parachute, Pope Bugay offered Benedict XVI the Archdiocese of Detroit. However, that offer hit a snag when Dave Armstrong said Metropolitan Detroit wasn’t big enough for him and the pope.

There was a personnel shakeup at the Vatican City after Pope Bugay took the reins. Robert Sungenis asked the Holy Father to make him astronomer of the Vatican Observatory, where he hoped to reinstate Dantean geology and cosmology, but Peter Pike had already been offered the top slot at the Vatican Observatory.

Sungenis then asked to be appointed to the Commission for religious relations with the Jews, but that post had already been promised to Alan Kurschner.

Rhology became Cardinal Archivist of the Vatican Library, while Turretinfan took over as Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

In other appointments, Jason Engwer chaired the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Evan May chaired the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology, Matthew Schultz chaired the International Theological Commission, and Dustin chaired the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization–while Paul Manata headed the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.

Patrick Chan presided over the Pontifical Academy of Sciences–when he wasn’t moonlighting as a concierge physician in the Hamptons.

For his part, Matthew Bellisario was made commandant of the Swiss Guard–because he looked so darn cute in the pleated gorget, white gloves and pale grey metal morion with the ostrich-feather plume.

In his capacity as Curator of the Vatican Secret Archives, James Swan discovered a long lost letter from Leo X to Luther, in which Leo admitted that Exsurge Domine was all a big misunderstanding, and preemptively excommunicated anyone who denied sola Scriptura or sola fide.

In other news, Steve Hays retired to the Maldives to write his memoirs.

When History and Philosophy Collide

Paul Bassett asks, “Will the real Council of Nicaea Stand Up? At issue are Roman claims that somehow “papal ratifications of dogmatic canons issued by general councils [are] meant to bind the whole Church”. Paul challenges this notion by providing some actual historical commentary.

On Nicaea, he quotes Bryan Cross as saying that Arianism had to give up its quest precisely because “the visible Church made this decision at that Council by way of the magisterium of bishops in communion with the episcopal successor of the Apostle Peter.”

I’ve already written about the laughable claim that any “episcopal successor of the Apostle Peter” had anything at all to do with this council.

Paul takes Bryan to task not only for his bad grammar, but for this notion:

I take his meaning to be this: the Arians at Nicaea were officially repudiated as a result of the decision of the unified “magisterium of bishops in communion with the episcopal successor of the Apostle Peter.” In other words, it was Rome’s authority that saved the day. Leaving aside the discussion about how the pope never attended the council and that his legates were minority figures there and the more important point that it was the secular emperor, Constantine, who ratified the whole thing the question I have is whether Catholics at the time of the Reformation would have come to the same conclusion using the same historical information.

And, indeed, they did not.

Citing accounts of kings of France and Spain at that time, he notes that the relationship between “church and state” was “precisely the opposite” of the account that Bryan gives. It was Constantine who ratified Nicaea, and it was the kings of Europe upon whose toes the popes stepped at the time of the Reformation:

”This new pretended Council has sought to deprive the King of France of his ancient honour by subjugating him and preferring another [the Pope] to him. This other was elevated to his position long after the institution of the Crown of France, which delivered him from the pagans and the Saracens and installed the Catholic faith by means of the succours and victories of Charlemagne and the Franks.”

The Spanish Inquisition was essentially an organ of royal power, one of whose functions was to ‘protect’ the Spanish Church from influence by outside agencies, including the papacy. Hence the domination of the Church by the crown was perhaps more comprehensive in Spain during the sixteenth century than in any other Europe state, including those with a Protestant, Erastian system.

Until that time, “Nobody looked to Rome for decisions on doctrine or ecclesiology and the Roman position held sway only in those cases where it happened to coincide with that of the secular ruler.”

The payoff:

But here we come to the interesting question: How are Catholics today to resolve the obvious contradiction between what Bryan Cross thinks the Magisterium is and how Catholics in the 16th century viewed it?

If we adopt Bryan’s view, we look to the Magisterium defined as the pope of Rome and the bishops in communion with him. But that system did not exist at all during the Reformation. The bishops of each country were beholden to their sovereign leader, not the pope. So a 16th century Catholic would have nowhere to go. But if we use the 16th century system of appealing first to the King, then the modern Roman Catholic is left with no court of appeal. So the Interpretive Paradigm [IP] of Bryan and his friends would disenfranchise large portions of their own sect depending on only the time in which it is applied!

So the irony is that Bryan Cross actually proves Mark Galli’s thesis. The “Catholic” church at the time of the Reformation did not, in fact, need a magisterium as defined by Bryan. And that is obvious because the Church existed and the Magisterium did not.

We don’t need no magisterium – indeed.

Soli Deo Gloria

When history and philosophy collide, the so-called “Catholic IP” loses.

How did Trent’s Doctrine of the Eucharist Foster Disunity?

Paul Bassett explores this question at Reformation500.

The background leading to The Council of Trent is an intricate patchwork of political maneuvering, self-interest and preservation. The fact that the north German princes had adopted Lutheranism in their territories was an irritant to Emperor Charles for it provided them a club with which to keep him at bay. And this was a vexing annoyance because the Emperor’s attention was drawn continually to the threat of Islam to the east. The more he had to deal with intransigent Lutherans, the less he could focus on the march of the Saracens.

The growth of Protestantism was also a concern for Rome because the more territories that became Protestant the less cash flowed to the Vatican and the more doubt was cast on Rome’s claim to universalism. Additionally, Rome had been selling bishoprics to the highest bidder as a standard practice for a long time. Rich bishops, having procured multiple sees, were simply absent from their dioceses; a situation which caused the locals to wonder what, in the end, they were really paying for. This was another practice badly in need of reform.

Against this backdrop, Trent’s deliberations on the Eucharist were not an attempt to articulate what Catholic doctrine had been. Paul makes that clear at several points:

Trent dealt with the doctrine of the Eucharist in two of its sessions: XIII and XXII. In the former it formalized the doctrine of transubstantiation; in the latter it asserted the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist. Transubstantiation was one of several competing doctrines of the age. It “was never made official in the medieval Church, but got weighty backing even before Aquinas’s time when it was used in documents of the Lateran Council of the Church in 1215.” And this fact, that of competing Eucharistic doctrines, goes to the heart of our investigation. At the time of Trent, there was a lack of unity from Rome on this crucial matter. And transubstantiation itself required a foundation in the pagan philosophy of Aristotle, a philosophy that was not universally accepted even within the fold of Rome:

From the fourteenth century, most philosophers and theologians, particularly in northern Europe, did not in fact believe this (Thomistic doctrine). They were nominalists, who rejected Aristotle’s categories… Nominalists could only say of transubstantiation as a theory of the Mass that it was supported by the weight of opinion among very many holy men in the Church, and therefore it ought not to be approached through the Thomist paths of reason, but must be accepted as a matter of faith. Once that faith in the Church’s medieval authorities was challenged, as it was in the sixteenth century, the basis for belief in transubstantiation was gone, unless one returned to Thomism, the thought of Aquinas. Those who remained in the Roman obedience generally did this; but in sixteenth-century Europe, thousands of Protestants were burnt at the stake for denying an idea of Aristotle, who had never heard of Jesus Christ.

The purpose of the Tridentine declaration on transubstantiation was almost certainly motivated by politics and not strictly theology.

And as a result, “Reacting against the Reformers, Trent defined the Mass as a “true and proper sacrifice…but left it to the theologians…to argue over what sacrifice is….”:

And argue they did! In fact, [Robert Daly, S.J.] outlines four competing theories of “sacrifice” that resulted from the Tridentine proclamation in the fifty years following Trent; all with notable Roman Catholic theologians in support and none [of] which received magisterial approbation or rejection.

He says: “We can clearly see that the doctrine of ‘sacrifice’ as imposed by the Council of Trent resulted in more diversity of opinion, and not less. And rather than clarifying what had gone before, the Magisterium simply allowed theologians to ‘work it out’. When the theologians produced more diversity in doctrine Rome did not correct them or create any unity at all.”

Read more about it here.

Rome hasn’t always held “Human life begins at conception”

Pope Innocent III held “abortion caused by monk was ok because fetus had not yet ‘vivified’”.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2270) holds that “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person - among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life”. Rome boldly affirms, “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable.”

But what they don’t tell you is that, in the history of the hierarchy of the Roman Church, that hierarchy hasn’t always held that “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception”.

This factoid has been pointed out by Paul Bassett, a former Roman Catholic with deep family roots, who has also uncovered the Roman “paper trail” in contradiction of itself on this:

St. Jerome held that “the fetus [was] at no point of development a human.” The early church relied heavily on Augustine’s teaching in the area of sexual ethics and Augustine did not believe that full human life began at conception. Much later, Aquinas wrote, “We conclude therefore that the intellectual soul is created by God at the end of human generation…” not at the beginning. And this was the official view of the Roman Catholic Church accepted at the Council of Vienne (1312); said view never having been “officially repudiated.” And that brings us to the truly interesting story as it relates to [the unity of Roman Catholic doctrine]. At least a century before the Council of Vienne, Pope Innocent III supported abortion. Let’s here from the devout Roman Catholic writer (Ph.D. Catholic University of America) John T. Noonan:

“A contrary view was manifested in canon 20 of the title “Voluntary and Chance Homicide.” Canon 20, Sicut ex, was a letter of Innocent III to a Carthusian priory about a monk who had caused his mistress to abort. The Pope held that the monk was not irregular if the fetus was not “vivified.” The wider significance of the letter arose from the usual rules for imposing irregularity. Irregularity was no mere technical deficiency, but a state in which the right to perform sacerdotal functions was suspended…Irregularity was automatically incurred by a cleric guilty of homicide (Decretals 5.12.6). Hence, if the Carthusian monk was not irregular, the plain implication was that no homicide occurred in a stopping of life prior to the time a fetus received a soul. Sicut ex cast doubt on the literalness of Si aliquis, which held contraception to be homicide.”

Pope Innocent III, the Vicar of Christ on earth, did not believe in life “at the moment of conception” and his writings influenced the ethics of the church for centuries.

In fact, four centuries later the Council of Trent upheld the view held by Augustine, Aquinas and Innocent:

“The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, for example, makes it clear that no human embryo could be informed with a human soul except after a certain period of time, as in the hylomorphic (Thomistic) commonplace.”

In further point of fact official Roman Catholic publications forbade the baptizing of fetuses until as late as 1895; [this is] a truly odd prohibition if life does begin at conception. What we have, then, is a matter “of faith” which has received Magisterial attention from at least the time of Innocent III. And we have a doctrine which is clearly contradicted by current magisterial teaching.

Paul is a long-term elder in a PCUSA church in Southern California.