The death of Benedict means finally confronting ultramontanism

The passing of Pope Benedict XVI was, of course, not unforeseen; in fact, everyone, himself included, expected him to die during the first year after his resignation. Instead he lived for 10 more. But his death is a cause for sorrow, as it leaves us bereft and with a strange feeling of fatherlessness. I don't know how to characterize his life myself. I appreciate the memorials I have read so far. 

My husband Phil Lawler offers an obituary: 

Unfortunately, governing was not Pope Benedict’s strong suit. His greatest weakness as a manager was his tendency to assume the goodwill of others: to take it for granted that the prelates who surrounded him were honestly dedicated to their tasks, willingly carrying out his policies. He had denounced the “filth” that corrupted the priesthood, but he did not see—or did not know how to uproot—the corruption within the Roman Curia. Financial scandals rocked the Vatican, leaked memos embarrassed the papacy, subordinates resisted his policies. Eventually, Pope Benedict concluded that he lacked the strength, the stamina, and perhaps the decisiveness necessary to right the barque of Peter. So he resigned, in what I see as the one grievous error of his pontificate. His frustration was understandable, but when the shepherd leaves, the wolves begin to circle.

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes with spirit in defense of the great man (archived here if you are not a subscriber):

I predict confidently that he will be one of the only figures of his era to be remembered, celebrated, studied, and beloved in the future.  

In the near term, Benedict will be misremembered as a tough-minded reactionary, the “Panzer Cardinal,” when in fact he was a pioneering liberal, frequent innovator, and gentle-souled cleric. He will be mislabeled as a man whose reputation was fatally compromised by the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, when he was perhaps the sole figure of his era at the top of the church that took on the treacherous responsibility of reform — centralizing the handling of clerical abuse cases in his office and drastically speeding up the process of defrocking criminal priests (a project that has been thrown into reverse by his successor). 

Dom Alcuin Reid writes, "it is for us to thank him by learning daily from his humble and habitual recourse to love—even when our hearts are broken by others whom we thought we could trust."

Father Uwe Michael Lang writes of Benedict's liturgical legacy: 

His reticence as a lawgiver—for instance, there was no new editio typica of any liturgical book during his pontificate—could be interpreted as a lost opportunity. On the other hand, the fragility of legislative decisions was demonstrated when his immediate successor, Pope Francis, cancelled the provisions of Summorum Pontificum.

Against the odds, Pope Benedict did open perspectives for a renewal in continuity with the liturgical tradition, and these impulses have been taken up especially by younger generations in the Church throughout the world. This “new liturgical movement” Joseph Ratzinger desired has the potential to mend the torn threads of Catholic ritual. The best testimony to his liturgical legacy will be to continue his work with patience, perseverance, joy, and gratitude for his luminous theological mind and his long-suffering service to the people of God.

Bishop Schneider offers a concise and consoling summation: 

Pope Benedict XVI made shine brightly his episcopal motto “Collaboratores veritatis”, i.e. collaborators of the truth. With this motto he wants to say to each faithful Catholic, to each priest, to each bishop, to each cardinal and to Pope Francis as well: what really counts is the unshakable fidelity to the Catholic Truth, to the constant and venerable liturgical tradition of the Church and the primacy of God and eternity.

Jacob Phillips speaks of The Benedict XVI Generation:

Benedict XVI was always attentive and responsive to the needs of the present day. His own motu proprio [Summorum Pontificum] on this issue states that “young persons … have discovered this liturgical form [of the Traditional Latin Mass], felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them”. 

His contemporary moment presented a need for a more widespread celebration of this ancient liturgy. This was no attempt to get people running back to the past, but a response to the needs of the present. The modus operandi was to undo the rupture and discontinuity at work in the fact that, for many, the Church seemed to be alienated from its own past by restricting the ancient form of the Mass. He writes, “in the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” 

Like children of divorce, the death of one of whose parents puts an end to fantasies of reconciliation, we Catholics are left with a strange sense of a closure that does not heal.

We are in the position of having something like a step-father Pope, a Pope who we have ample reason to think doesn't love us and is an enemy of his spouse, the Church. The child's dream that Benedict would speak up or offer an explanation for his abdication that would satisfy, as opposed to the one he gave, which seems so thin, is now buried with him. 

So perhaps we have the opportunity to confront the specter of ultramontanism, or hyperpapalism, now that we are left alone, so to speak, with Pope Francis. I have been wanting to write about a two-volume book set from Peter Kwasniewski for a while, called The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism (affiliate link), and the death of Benedict seems an appropriate time to do so.

The centralization of authority in the person of the pope is a paradoxical issue. On the one hand, in a universe where human authority is fatally tainted by the Fall, we need Christ's promise that the Rock upon which He places His church is indestructible. Without authority, the claim to govern (and there always will be claims, no matter how purportedly individualistic the religion might be -- even Quakers have elders!) always becomes a matter decided by personality and power. Only a religion the Master of which died on a cross to prove His love can offer the model of "servant of servants" in authority, and that authority must be traceable to and explicitly established by Him. 

On the other hand, as Kwasniewski argues persuasively in the two volumes of The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism, we now labor in a delusional matrix of papolatry, where every casual utterance of the Pope is taken to be on a par with or even higher than Scripture. We suffer the whiplash of trying to solve his contradictions, a kind of squaring of the circle that some have not quite accepted is impossible. 

Kwasniewski writes of John Henry Newman's prescient concern at the time of Vatican I, which codified the doctrine of infallibility, "that a party of 'ultramontanes' was busy pushing a theologically unsound, philosophically unreasonable, historically untenable, and ecclesiastically damaging version of papal inerrancy that threatened to confuse the pope's office with divine revelation itself, rather than seeing him more modestly as the guardian of Tradition and the arbiter of controversy." Newman didn't deny that the pope has the power to define matters infallibly; he questioned whether it was prudent to make a dogma of that power.

Hyperpapalism has odd manifestations on the ground. I have heard mothers of large families offer as a reason for having so many children, "the Pope tells us to." (I am not making this up.) Now, apart from the rather sad observation that the last pope to praise large families was Pius XII, who died in 1939, this is a strange thing to say. The pope can only encourage large families (if they be granted by God, for not every couple is thus blessed) as a result of generosity and an expression of the love of husband and wife, besides being the purpose of marriage, which is procreation (in response to the command given by God in Scripture, "Be fruitful and multiply"). He cannot order couples to have more children; certainly their begetting would seem to be less likely if his image is invoked as a prelude to the necessary act!

At minimum, it's simply normal for husband and wife to have children! What is not normal is to create of this natural consequence and virtuous response -- the joy, really, of a man and a woman making a family -- a sort of legalistic duty imposed by a remote figure of authority. The truth is that the pope exists to protect something quite outside of his whims or even personal thoughts however deep -- he exists to, in this case, safeguard God's original plan to redeem and restore the world to Himself through the intermediary of the man and woman, as they live out the gift of marriage and co-creation by bringing children into the world. The pope's role is to keep them safe, not to burden them with a task that doesn't originate with him. 

The pope, far from being a capricious monarch invested with unlimited powers, going around (as is now the case) scolding people for not recycling or having too many children, like rabbits, is a steward. I don't know about other cultures, but in the English-speaking world, the idea of an unjust or unworthy steward or false king is an enduring theme that captures our imaginations. From Robin Hood to Denethor in the Lord of the Rings, and in many of our fairy tales, we muse on and explore the tragedy of the steward who is corrupt or who yields to something other than the will of the (absent) king, often due to a forked-tongued advisor. 

One strange, perhaps forgotten episode early in the pontificate of Francis occurred shortly after the four cardinals (Burke, Müller, Brandmüller, and Caffarra) submitted their "Dubia," their (pointed) questions regarding his apostolic letter Amoris Laetitia. On Twitter, his close friend Fr. Antonio Spadaro, nicknamed "Francis' mouthpiece," posted a couple of tweets with pictures of Gandalf and the caption, "to bandy crooked words with a witless worm." Some, including me, thought at first that his account had been hacked. Others (including Ross Douthat) thought Spadaro was calling the Dubia cardinals worms. It seems, most tellingly of all for my false steward/Denethor comparison, that he was joking about critics' view of himself  -- which of course makes Pope Francis the hapless Denethor, who has led his people astray by forgetting the existence of the true King. Denethor's particular error is using the Palantír to probe matters beyond his ken, unwittingly turning his will over to Sauron. If it was a joke, it was one that had more than a dash of truth to it, as all humor does.

In general, we can say that in our legends, the steward easily falls prey to delusions of grandeur. Kwasniewski says that, beginning around the time of Pius X and due to modern popes' abuses of power, "Catholics came to view the pope as a god on earth, a divine oracle who could never be wrong" -- a view adopted in large part with the encouragement of the pontiffs themselves. "[In Pope Francis] the ruptures of his predecessors, which in them had coexisted uneasily with more traditional Catholic pieties, have found an unresisting and unmixed welcome." All exacerbated by our instantaneous, all-pervading media.

The first volume of The Road from Hyperpapalism explores the history of the papacy and its limits. The second focuses on the challenges of this particular papacy. There are dozens of essays and they are all of interest. I will point out one almost at random to recommend, from Volume 1, Chapter 13: Are the "Inopportunists" of the First Vatican Council Being Vindicated? Inopportunists were those who, like Newman, wondered if that council was on the right track. 

In this chapter, we ponder what I wonder how many are aware of, that encyclicals are a recent development in the magisterium? They came into fashion in the 18th century, before which time popes tended to single out doctrines and promoters of doctrines, by name, to be condemned. As Kwasniewski points out, this practice safeguarded the teaching office not only of the pontiff but of the local bishop, who was assumed, unlike today, to be able to handle "proclaiming the orthodox faith or taking on heretics without the pope leading the way."

Anecdotally, I notice that a tentative "is there an encyclical about that?" is a common response to a self-evident statement about the moral law. What have we wrought? Interestingly, older catechisms (that predate the Vatican II era) simply offer brief teaching on the 10 Commandments and urge the faithful to have a clean conscience. The assumption is that the Christian has the grace to act morally if he knows Scripture and the moral precepts, being united to Christ in the sacraments. I recall a discussion of a scandal in a seminary; the response, from a theologian, was to remark that the seminarians need a course on the theology of the body. My first thought was that they need to be made to memorize the 10 Commandments and lined up for Confession! Somehow we have off-loaded our inner, supernatural life onto a papal platform, making it accessible only by a quasi-academic pathway. Some go so far as to exclude all but theologians from any conversation about all these matters, so arcane have we made what was once plain.

The overall theme of The Road from Hyperpapalism is that we are undergoing a purgation for this error that is not as new as we think it is, and has only grown with the "pop star" view of the papacy, in many ways cemented in the long reign of John Paul II. The cult of personality was, we are discovering now, a high price to pay for the excellence of his thought and the depth of his piety. 

We have to free ourselves from a slavish dependency on the papacy, while affirming it as a necessary safeguard of authority. The problem goes to an excessively legalistic, rather than organic, interpretation of what the papacy is. Instead of seeing the pope as an almost god-like entity, separate in essence from the brethren (meaning all the baptized) he is meant to strengthen, we need to recover a more relational view of things, akin to a family in which the father's authority derives from his submission to a hierarchy he has not invented and which is not identical to his personal attributes; his role as protector and provider. 

Just as a father who arbitrarily and capriciously wields power against the supernatural interests of those entrusted to him quickly loses their respect, the supreme pontiff must remain aware of and devoted to the principle held in the Church and expressed by St. Vincent of Lérins: "Yet teach still the same truths which you have learned, so that though you speak after a new fashion, what you speak may not be new." This precept is backed by Scripture, which warns us, "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!" (Galatians chapter 1)

All that is valid, and well expressed in the two volumes of The Road from Hyperpapalism. But stepping back from the edifying details, we must recover the central gift of God in the New Covenant to us as followers of Christ: that we, all the baptized, are called to have the life of Christ within and thus to be able to act divinely, with divine goodness, as opposed to being mere keepers of the law, doomed in our flesh to fall short (as St. Paul warns in Romans chapter 7). 

Ultimately, this is the false promise of ultramontanism and hyperpapalism: while in practice it hides God's Law, which after all is written on our hearts as we learn from Scripture, from the faithful, by keeping their minds focused on papal decrees and even random remarks, it nevertheless represents a form of religion that will always fail. It is a false religion that keeps its adherents tied to rules and pronouncements "from on high" -- but not high enough. It distracts from the Gospel and from Tradition, offering instead novelties and ever-changing expressions of power to be submitted to.

Christ came, as Benedict of dear memory so admirably explicates in his Jesus of Nazareth, to reveal Himself as the Law incarnate, Goodness itself. The whole argument of that book, hidden to a certain extent in his gentle, explorative style (he speaks not in sound bites but in long paragraphs), is that it's this claim of Christ's that is so radical and such a stumbling block to the Jews, who rightly see their covenanted mission to be witnesses to that Law, but are blinded to the revelation that it has been made into a living stone, Himself. 

Christians are called to live in the freedom of being children of God, of being united, sacramentally, by means of Christ's blood, to divinity itself. “God became man that man might become God" -- no less an authority than Athanasius proclaims this shocking truth! We moderns are content to imitate His example; the ancients knew our destiny is to be incorporated in Him.

In his Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Benedict XVI) says:

"The essence of Christianity is not an idea, not a system of thought, not a plan of action. The essence of Christianity is a person: Jesus Christ himself. To become truly real means to come to know Jesus Christ and to learn from him what it means to be human." 

The Church must recover her mission to make us "become truly real." We are not exempt in some new, human dispensation from this mission, nor can we escape from it by waiting for the pope's latest proclamation. In God's challenging providence, this recovery will not be mild. We are, again, in the midst of a vast purgation, the likes of which we cannot see whole, but the parts of which we continually batter ourselves against with tears of frustration and anguish. The death of Pope Benedict is the closing of a door.

May we quickly find the right path to the truth; may God have mercy on that admirable, beloved, heart-breaking Holy Father.