Genti Meae

The Vatican Council, in Pastor Aeternus, defined not only papal infallibility but also papal supremacy. In fact, papal supremacy had already been implicitly defined in Quanta Cura, where denial of the dogma is condemned. These are both documents with which the Society is deeply familiar, as they regularly make use of them to argue for the limits of infallibility and the errors of Vatican II. Yet by their actions, if not by their words, they give the impression that they believe the dogma of papal supremacy is conditional at best and meaningless at worst.  I also have concerns regarding sacramental validity. First, there is what an entertaining blog calls the “Liénart liability.” Certain theologians believed that it is so difficult to have an invalidating sacramental intention that the sacramental minister would practically have to be malicious in order to have such. Though we now know this is not really the case (we don’t assume Anglicans, for example, to be malicious), if there is...

Bishops, not cardinals, are essential to the constitution of the Church. By ecclesiastical (not divine) law, the cardinals are the electors of the pope. But it would not be contrary to her essential constitution for the Church to be left without cardinals. Saint Robert Bellarmine taught that if this should happen, the right of electing the pope “would pertain to the neighboring bishops and the Roman clergy, but with some dependence on a general council of bishops.”  Thus we encounter, again, the problem of jurisdiction. Though a pope can give non-diocesan bishops the right to participate in a general council, as Pius IX did at the Vatican Council, it is true that only bishops with ordinary jurisdiction are entitled to participate by divine right (as opposed to by ecclesiastical law or custom). Now the question must be asked: is it more logical to believe that it is possible for there not to be any bishops with ordinary jurisdiction in the Church today and thus that there must be ca...