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I express my sincere appreciation to Pope Leo XIV for readopting Thomistic principles as the supreme rule governing Magnifica Humanitas. After tracking papal addresses the past months available on the Holy See’s website, the pedigree of papal principles has proven to be mixed. While a recent address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission was quite solid, and even Thomistically informed, his address to Italian social security administration proved out of bounds:
the social teaching of Pope Francis, particularly in the Encyclical Fratelli tutti, where the Welfare State emerges as a genuine universal right, the social teaching of the Magisterium granted an absolute right to the ‘Welfare State’ (sic!).
I am in no privileged position to know how much or how little OnePeterFive’s contributors are – like the case of Dominicans nipping at the heels of Pope John XXII on the beatific vision – exercising a conscience-forming role for ghost writers and consultors of the Holy See in this first encyclical of the present Holy Father; perhaps none at all, but I’d like to think that OnePeterFive with its massive readership by clergy and Vaticanists is providing a service to the Holy Father for which he too can be grateful, as Magnifica Humanitas (MH) signals:
The Final Document of the Synod identifies a culture of transparency, accountability and evaluation as key practices for missionary transformation (MH, no. 86).
Since traditionalists are not yet enfranchised as part of the evaluation process desired by Pope Leo XIV, they are principally offering their peer-review of the Church on sites like OnePeterFive, which per its editorial stance, is attempting to build up Christendom by providing – among others – the Holy See with serious critiques that should be taken as referee-style review of the Holy See’s semantic drift away from the perennial or universal ordinary Magisterium of the Church. It is a romantic but perhaps motivating thought that serious scientific study and publishing on the Holy Father’s and Holy See’s actions in the public forum are capable of reminding him that he is a custodian of saving Tradition.
All authority is at the service of the People of God. This ministry of service is expressed not only through our faith celebrated […] and in the adoption of a synodal style […]. […] Regular assessments of the exercise of ministerial responsibilities should be encouraged, not as judgments on individuals, but as tools for learning and correction oriented toward mission. (MH, no. 89)
In this spirit, the Holy Father’s writers ought naturally to welcome the contributions of traditionalist platforms like OnePeterFive, weighted to inform the faithful and to provide reflection for the ecclesial conscience, principally located in the occupant of the See of St. Peter.
The OnePeterFive reader, who has worked through the laudably modest quantity of verbiage in MH, may be surprised that I praise portions of the document, but do no lead with misgivings about other portions. It is this same spirit that those of us old enough remember Michael Davies (RIP) counseling traditionalists to support Cardinal Joesph Ratzinger (prior to and after his election) for his overall orientation most aligned with the traditionalist cause in comparison to his peers. Out of everything that has emanated from the Holy See in the years following the controverted abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, this document most signals a willingness to return to the guiding principles of scientific theology, whose overarching grammar essentially and really neuter triggering rhetoric and secular signaling in modern lingo found elsewhere in the document. That we possess now a document designed to absorb the last decades’ meandering word salads, as published in the Acts of the Apostolic See (Acta Apostolicae Sedis), to absorb and even neuter their most unstable and potentially insidious implications for the social doctrine of the Church, is no small intervention. I write not in praise of reform, nor because of a return to recognizable constancy in matters theological, but in recognition of a Thomistic intervention, signed by Pope Leo XIV, that provides a respite to novelties of language in the ordinary magisterium.
Magnifica Humanitas commits dicasteries to an official interpretation of the Francis papacy – if awkwardly – under the light of perennial principles. It is always the case that a return to the sources of scientific theology, after being shut up in the tower of Babel, should celebrated. After this partial return of the remnant from Babylon, the Temple still needs to be rebuilt, but the weightiest magisterial document published in the current papacy has subjugated previous documents of the ordinary magisterium, in their more localized contexts, to the higher authority of Magnifica Humanitas. Given the challenges for Fr Prevost, reared in in the Augustinian milieu of the 1970s and partially formed in Peru by the circle of Pachamama, this is no small step, to foreground Tradition over Liberationist orientations, even if not eliminating them entirely. Furthermore, given Pope Leo’s clear emphasis on prayer and piety, we might yet hope for a pastoral heart to make room for what generations professed constantly, without the need to absolutize the passing theological fads and customs of an aging generation whose predictions of renewal are not born out by any metrics that human sciences can measure.
Turning to MH, no. 26, I have already seen traditionalist criticism where Leo XIV underlines: “In this same vein, I too have reaffirmed that the Church does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth.” We would be justified, were this an essay on what this encyclical could have or should have said but did not, to concentrate on a lack of mention of the Church as the unique depository of all revealed truths given to humanity. Instead, in a sigh of relief, I underline that although these premises remain unspoken and, make it harder to see the thoroughly Thomistic premise, it is described metaphorically. Truth is participated in not exclusively possessed by one knower. The Neo-Platonic formulation, the basis of Augustinian-Thomism, is best summarized thus: The locus theologicus according to Melchior Cano’s De locis theologicis (as universally adopted into the subsequent Thomistic outlook), is that philosophical truths (viz., natural law) are participated in by all rational beings and that pagan philosophers (e.g. Aristotle) especially participated in the truth since the common concepts of a proposition can simultaneously be possessed completely and simultaneously by all men of the universe and yet not exhaust truth, such that a near-infinitude of men can possess the same truth together, whether baptized or no. I concede that MH, no. 26, does not remind “men of good will” that the Church is the “pillar of truth” qua revealed knowledge along with those natural truths that are structurally needed by reason to understand every infallible catechetical proposition (e.g., “God is three persons”). Yet, let the naysayers beware of finding error in these premises whose opposite negates the entire theological tradition of the Church on natural law, starting with Romans 1:18-26 and Romans 2:14-15. The metaphor of a monopoly (a clever image in an encyclical that treats economics) is defined in Greek (which definition endures today, just as in Latin), where it denotes the possession of a right to trade or to conduct business that excludes all others from participating in the same business. In the business of truth, Paul teaches that Gentile participates in knowing the oneness of God, the evil of idols, and the sinfulness of unnatural acts between two men or two women. Likewise, St. Thomas (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, a. 4) and the entire Catholic Tradition with him affirms the likes of the pagan philosopher Cicero upholding the Stoic notion of natural law as truth, over which Christians alone have no monopoly, as it is a universal good, traded by all and precious. Participated truth by all human beings is affirmed on the authority of St. Ambrose and this extends to all human intellects and the earthly truths they naturally know by the light of reason (See St. Thomas, De veritate [On Truth] question I, 1, article 8).
As such, I invite sincere Christians to read chapters one and two, which foreground the eternal principles and revealed truths, stated as such, that constrain any subsequent catch phrases and trite slogans that, alas, are indeed taken up in later chapters. What the Thomist sees, however, is how Liberationist secularism has been stretched onto the Procrustean bed of scientific theology and its legs have been amputated, removing all its salient power, as far as magisterial endorsement is concerned.[1]
Far be it from me to bet on practical policies of the Vatican that come after, if we were to consistently follow the contributions of the laudable ghostwriter and editors of MH. Instead, due to the complex personality of Pope Leo XIV and also the continuity of personnel between Francis’ and Leo’s papacy, I fully anticipate poor performance metrics with regard to actualizing these principles. Although Thomism is clearly given its due in this document by Pope Leo XIV, there are not signs yet that the pope has imbibed its grammar and logic fully or even principally into his life of prudence and papal action (see my footnote on slavery below). This is where the Roman Catholic must have recourse to prayer, not a deus ex machina, but to the dignity of causality (see Summa Theologiae, part I, question 103, article 6, response & part II-II, question 83, article 2, response), whereby St. Thomas teaches that the Christian, who meritoriously offers prayers and fulfills the plans of divine providence and foreknowledge, then satisfies a divine condition for God intervening into a moment of history; in this case to orient the interior life of Pope Leo toward the Tradition and away from novelty.
Again, the current article is designed to highlight what is surprising and good in MH, not to sidestep or ignore not a few problematic and infelicitous turns of phrase that often suggest Pope Leo’s personal hand interrupting the flow of what was perhaps originally a much cleaner draft. By comparing Leo’s papal allocutions (which had not been prepared by a Dominican or Thomist theologian), to those emanating from his own mind, the contrast is stark. Traditionalists are sensitive to patterns and signaling by the Holy See to miss the irritants in MH, but as a result they may also be distracted by their itch from many valuable pieces that they might pass over which are specifically helpful to their cause: rebuilding, restoration, and defense. For example, Pope Leo has signed onto a policy in MH, no. 25, which will test the public image of the Roman Curia at the DDF after the SSPX ordination upcoming:
In order to rediscover the evangelical approach of a gentle proclamation of truth that is not imposed, Saint John Paul II invited us to examine honestly the times when acquiescence was given to “intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth.”
As my articles in OnePeterFive in evaluation of SSPX argued, this parallel society is best explained by imposition of allegedly non-essential and innovative changes in liturgy and doctrine, and represents a clear case of intolerance for Christians who simply did not experience their culture and their customs as needing radical reform since what was once holy and orthodox cannot later be thought irreverent. The response of the Holy See from Pope Paul VI and Annibale Bugnini used violence against traditionalists to try to force them to abandon the universal inheritance of the of former generations: “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.” John Paul II took this policy to its extreme in Ecclesia Dei adflicta by excommunication, only to have the very same papal act reversed by Pope Benedict XVI, requiring no change of action in SSPX or Ecclesia Dei communities, while Pope Francis even extended the legitimate pastoral reach of SSPX initially, asking nothing in immediate exchange.
Yet, from the time of Pope Paul VI, the norm was closing of churches to traditionalists, refusing their priests (whether incardinated according to canon law or not) shrine access, and using lawfare to suppress them – these are all forms of violence in the service of bureaucratic truths that claim continuity with the liturgy and dogma of the past, all the while considering it a crime to express it in the historical modality that it enjoyed prior up to 1964 celebrated by the very Fathers of Vatican II themselves.
Leo has officially proclaimed:
The truth of the Gospel is not imposed from above, but grows over time within concrete interweaving lives, communities and cultures. This is not a truth that fears diversity, but instead welcomes and guides it (MH, 25).
The gradual suppression of the formerly known Ecclesia Dei communities, and active suppression of diocesan Tridentine parishes, chapels, and apostolates should, above all, press Pope Leo to reverse the optics of Francis’s persecution and to allow flourishing communities that are diverse with respect to other Latin rite communities, excepting perhaps the tinier Anglo-Catholics.
Next, it is a relief to see in the most explicit terms the following: “Rerum Novarum […] defends private property along with its indispensable society role…,” for this was no mere red herring since elsewhere papal signaling within MH (no. 162) calls for and uses the most infelicitous of terms: “redistribution” of wealth. To my relief, we are not seeing the ordinary magisterium err exactly, when MH takes the helm of the magisterial ship, since it technically requires that phrases like “redistribution of wealth” must respect private property, subsidiarity, and distributive justice.
Traditionalists would rightly lament this language as secular-ease signaling socialism, but MH‘s Thomistic architecture oddly spays these pestiferous creatures, preventing them by magisterial constraint from being (temporarily) productive of heterodox meaning or blessing actions of heteropraxy. Semantic shackles that Thomistic principles have slapped onto numerous slogans throughout MH are not occasions for celebration, but for relief. I for one am grateful that perennial principles of the social doctrine of the Church form a cage and prison bars around the slogans otherwise found in this document to deprive them of their original contextual force.
In a previous OnePeterFive article, I underlined how Pope Paul VI and John Paul II also sanitized the liberation theology language of Medellín and Puebla in CELAM’s episcopal documents in the 1960s and 1980s. Admittedly, this is a far less successful document in neutralizing tiresome sloganeering, but it may be a more successful cage preventing previous magisterium of Francis and localized magisterium of Leo from breaking out of Tradition. But this will ultimately depend on whether Pope Leo shows an understanding of the fact that the published version of HM has locked his theology into a holding cell whose restraints were designed by the Angelic Doctor. Vatican future policy, at this point, might presage greater conformity with Tradition, or uneven application, or further semantic drift in localized magisterial statements and policy. My hope is in the former, probability is likely the middle position, but further innovations cannot be a priori dismissed if MH is but a temporary holding cell.
Returning to key features of MH helpful to the future traditionalist struggle, I underline no. 32:
…guidelines remain particularly significant for our own times, currently marked by new forms of global power and growing inequalities: the need for law to take precedence over interests …
This is the very basis of the traditionalist struggle: Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum established a right by law of the Christian faithful based upon the immutability of Apostolic Tradition, and Francis’s Traditionis Custodes refused to address this right, nor to claim it suppressed, but rather to ignore the law. Again, the pressure here is from international and catholic press optics – will Leo XIV be able to quietly reverse Francis, if and when the legal-canonical case is presented by the so-called “united clans” of traditionalists who ask not for mercy, but for “law to take precedence over interests.” An honest brokerage by traditionalists’ cardinal protectors (who have a strong canonical background) could internationalize the case here: Will Pope Leo XIV choose papal “law over interests” or the way of la republique bananiere? That the Vatican should model law over interests is a fair pressure point on Pope Leo from his cardinalate after his publication of MH.
Dignitas Infinita: The Sterilization of Monstrous Fecundity
In a previous article at OnePeterFive on Liberation theology, I addressed the innovation of the non-Latinate and non-Greek phraseology dignitas infinita, where only the divine essence and persons are described as such, whether infinity is treated as a structural or intrinsic property of a divine person’s common essence, or the dignity of each trinitarian person is referred to as infinite in virtue of the infinity of the divine essence. This is the universal Tradition. Created beings are in no wise infinite. Until Pope Francis’s innovation, human persons were created, limited beings and divine persons were not so, but then came the poorest possible anthropology alleged to enhance human rights (I have checked the Italian in Acts of the Apostolic See volume 116(2024), page 589):
1. (Dignitas infinita) Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded (fondata) in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter. This principle, which is fully recognizable even by reason alone (sola ragione), underlies the primacy of the human person and the protection of human rights. […]
2. […] This ontological dignity (tale dignità ontologica) and the unique and eminent value of every man and woman in the world was reaffirmed authoritatively in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Declaration “Dignitas Infinita” on human dignity, nos. 1- 2, emphasis added)
The absurd propositions here are twofold: (1.) The infinitude is found within the essential structure of the created human as an attribute internally contributing to the kind of being each person is, and (2.) this mark is discoverable by studying human existence through reason unaided by revelation. Recall, in Vatican desperation to find some philosophical, let alone theological justification, for calling each human essentially a god by nature (divus per infinitudinem realem instrinsecam), following the scandal among men of good will and dismissal by philosophers, a retcon explanation was published to found this teaching solely on the speculation of the eponymous John Paul the Great. The only source in Catholic philosophical and theological history starts in 1980, at an address to the sick (Angelus, November 16, 1980).
Here, John Paul speculated, drawing on the so-called three Thomistic quasi-infinites:
- The Hypostatic Union (God-man),
- the Beatific vision (created intellect’s participation in God), and
- the Redemption (cf. Summa Theologiae I-II, question 113, articule 9, ad 2).
Nota bene, these are theological quasi-infinites (not philosophical and not literal infinites). The last of the these is the Council of Trent’s and John Paul’s discussion of the redemption through justification by grace. Here, St. Thomas, and summarily John Paul II, emphasize that the divine love (theological charity) explicitly “confer” in a certain respect (not ontologically or absolutely) an eternal good (divine life and never ending glory) on the redeemed.
Notice the ridiculous sleight of hand: the John-Paul minor teaching is from revealed theology, even if unique in the annals of history for its shorthand, but creatively applies the idea that in addition to theological faith and hope of the sick, theological love conferred upon sick (together with their humanity) gives them an infinite dignity in a certain respect, by a relation, not through an intrinsic attribute or quality that is natural to them. The equivocation here is where Cardinal Fernández and Pope Francis pretend that a non-natural, separately created accident (viz., grace) – which inheres in the soul and confers a potentially infinite participation by baptism or divine charity on the finite dignity – makes a person in a certain respect quasi-infinite. All of a sudden, for Fernández this a natural property of all humans, requiring no revelation, or reference to baptism, or infused charity. This is not a doctrinal development, it is objectively daft or as Aquinas would put it: “Unde stultissima verba Simonis [viz., Francisci]” (On Divine Names 6, I, 2). Pope Francis and Fernández, abandoning what is referred to as “decadent scholasticism,” nonetheless became victims of their own diagnosis: “Ideas disconnected from realities give rise to ineffective forms of idealism and nominalism…” (Evangelii Gaudium no. 231).
Enter Pope Leo XIV: by putting a Thomist at the helm of MH, 53, he has salvaged, in a retcon reading, Pope Francis, in order not turn each of us into an ontological [sic] infinite being. For that, we are grateful:
The dignity of every human being can be described as infinite, as Saint John Paul II stated,for two reasons: first, because the love of God, who calls us to friendship with him, is infinite; and second, his love is absolutely unconditional, in the sense that, even if we search endlessly, we will never find anything that can erase or deny it.
The poorly written comedy of Francis and Fernández receives its critical review under Leo’s name: God’s friendship (= justification) is a relation to the infinite (referring to Thomas’s quasi-infinite) and God’s act of divine love for himself directly through his essence and for us (who are intelligibly contained virtually in the same essence) lasts forever (viz., infinitely). A Thomist was required to rewrite the comedy and portray the real tragedy that should have never been written.
If the pro-Vatican II apologist wishes sincerely to understand why confidence in the post-Vatican II magisterium has been shaken in the traditionalist mind (not to mention in the conscience of SSPX), we have no farther to look than this three act play: sloppy meaningless sentiment, followed by absurdity, cleaned up by some poor Dominican. To hearken back to Francis: “It is dangerous to dwell in the realm of words alone, of images and rhetoric” (Evangelii Gaudium, no. 231). The inability to distinguish the finite from the infinite intrinsically, the inability to distinguish the natural and the supernatural by grace, and the clean-up of the two former within MH underline the mangling of theology, whereby John Paul II summarized St. Thomas on charity in a Scholastic obiter dictum, which then morphed into a neo-magisterial neologism dignitas infinita, therefrom, which is here to stay verbally, even if Francis-Fernandez semantics will be proven to be definitively incarcerated by the MH Thomist straightjacket. I fear, despite the noble correction of its substance under Leo, the endorsement of this unhappy affirmation in an encyclical bodes an endless replaying of this cacophony by Vatican instruments until every middling theologian finally begins composing his own moral opera using dignitas infinita, as having a ring to it, to become the most sonorous note of a newfangled moral symphony.
Additional Praiseworthy Elements
Returning to MH, 79, there is consolation to be found in the fact that Fr. Prevost was not entirely absorbed into the worldview of the circle of Pachamama in the 1990s. Unlike his peers, he distances himself from their distancing themselves from John Paul II’s transvaluation of Liberation Theology into something Christian and Catholic. Pope Leo endorsed with his own pen the following:
The idea of “social justice” helps us recognize that injustices do not arise solely from the wrong choices of individuals, but also from structures, mechanisms and economic and cultural systems that produce inequality almost automatically. Saint John Paul II spoke in this vein of structures of sin (MH, no. 79).
While the concession may not look like much to the American and European traditionalist or conservative, to the faithful priest of South and Central America this is a admittance, if rhetorically feeble, that moral and personal sin and vitiating circumstances together make an unjust human world. It is not merely government, economies, and businesses that explain injustice, but admittedly each person has a moral constitution and can be personally sinful. This places Pope Leo definitively outside the commitments of the most ideological Liberationists with the Peruvian context. This means that the vertical or supernatural are not merely mediated by institutions but by moral persons who sin or who practice virtue.
Also, surprisingly, the pope opposes the socialist common place of programs indebting future generations by deficit spending and by structures that do not emphasize subsidiarity or local government over totalizing federal models that fit one solution for vast populations (cf. MH, 84). The relevant sections here, not without their slogans and jargon that will muddy reception by traditionalists and magisterially-attentive Catholics, back away from Pope Leo’s localized magisterial statements that formerly endorsed the “universal right of the welfare state.” This more solemn document of the ordinary Magisterium clarifies that, whatever Leo meant by the welfare state, he now specifies it to mean: private property, no forced collectivization, subsidiarity, and economically responsible fiscal policy to secure future generations economic freedom.
Related to economic freedom, as befits men in an ethically free society (particularly to pursue virtue and the common good), Pope Leo addresses what happens when institutions concentrate power in the hands of but a few, without transparency and without accountability to the people whom they are supposed to serve:
When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities (MH, no. 95).
It is the very same logic, and the lack of including traditionalists communities in a transparent and open process, which led to opaque and evasive so-called studies that distorted bishops’ responses to queries about traditionalist communities and distorted their image. The few power brokers of an opaque curia resulted in new kinds of desperate dependencies, directly on the same dicasteries, that mismanaged information, in order to exclude Catholics from the sacramental life to which they had a right by law, and these structures manipulated them out of an equal share of the Church’s treasures, due to power concentrated into the hands of a few. This of course has already been covered in the media (at First Thingsby OnePeterFive contributing editor Dr. Joseph Shaw) as the partial leak of the distorted report on formerly Ecclesia Dei communities and their integration into the Church. Again, from the point of view of Catholic media, and international perception by other ecclesial bodies, the failure to correct this situation might prove a continuous eyesore for Vatican policy, should it remain in public discussion without equitable closure by reversing the reversal. As pope Leo claims:
Yet vigilance and transparency remain first and foremost a grave responsibility for the Church herself, and we must not wait for others to compel us to confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves (MH, no. 138).
Perhaps few examples of just such uncomfortable truths about the Francis papacy exist as his administration’s animus against an integrated group of Christians, whose rights – considered legally apostolic – to follow a form of worship and discipline are guaranteed them by Apostolic Constitution, whose rights have still not been suppressed – only denied – within the juridical bound of the Roman Catholic communion of Churches.
The Gift of Self-Refuting Ordinary Magisterium
An interesting challenge has arisen since the clarification of the conscience-binding power of the ordinary magisterium during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII (Humani Generis, no. 20). While it has always been clear to theologians since the debates about the Decretum pro Armenis (Council of Ferrara-Florence, appendix in AD 1442) that certain formal non-definitive teachings of the Holy See on matters of doctrine were reformable, and therefore the lowest level of doctrinal teaching (below extraordinary and universal ordinary magisterium) is not per se infallible, Pope Pius XII used his papal authority to declare that such teaching obliges mind and will to conform to them out of holy obedience. The logician, philosopher, theologian, and informed member of the faithful can see an unresolved problem in this: What happens when non-infallible and only obedience-demanding teaching proves inconsistent or even contradicted by new ordinary teachings? The pre-Vatican II practice since the time of Decretum pro Armenis, through the Jansenist verbal battles over similar matters in the eighteenth century, until Pope Pius XII had shown little officially sanctioned self-reflection by the DDF (viz., Holy Office) on this problem.
Whenever secular potentates and political-diplomatic concerns were absent, the Holy Father typically resorted to demanding obedience over persuasion and explanation. This curial style, as I already outlined in a previous article, is simply a feature of the then culturally and legally respected and valued Roman law. The American experiment and its political success (and even excess) first penetrated into France and then Europe and then throughout the world. New options for styles of governance exist, some of them reconcilable with Christianity, especially as America’s founding Fathers relied on a philosophical reasoning shared with Greco-Roman logic and rhetoric. As such, the administration of the CDF/DDF left to Cardinal Ratzinger under Pope John Paul II and the style of Pope Benedict XVI worked toward reconciliation with traditionalist communities by reasoned argument and agreement, whether on the natural order of things, or how that order was supernaturalized by divine revelation, grace, the incarnation, and redemption, toward the last things.
In the midst of these occupations, Cardinal Ratzinger authored and Pope John Paul II signed an astounding document: Donum Veritatis, nos. 24, 28, 30(e.g., “It could happen that some Magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies”). There, in sum, the teaching Church (viz., CDF/DDF) underwent a self-examination of this age-old question and made the mature conclusion if in other words: Sometimes the ordinary magisterium errs. In 1,900 years these errors are very limited and marginal, and this itself is a credible sign of divine intervention where many bureaucracies after thousands of years have – on the lowest level – reversed course on theologically few matters of a non-universal and non-solemn magisterium.
While ordinarily requiring principled obedience, the Church officially now admits that theologians (and by extension rational men of good will) can disagree with the ordinary magisterium because they encounter claims to have squared circles – provided that they dedicate themselves to prayer, seek communion with the Holy See, and voice their disagreement in respectful formal fora. In this way, they may maintain both their graceful membership as a member of the Church and, as it were, a divine gadfly pricking the Church’s conscience until, perchance, they resolve the contradiction internally (or the Church finally – in one of those rare historical instances – realizes that it needs to come to its senses on a non-defined theological matter insufficiently understood by her, which is left unsaid). Ratzinger never compiled a shortlist of cases, but we might propose that the Decretum pro Armenis is the most famous case, where the matter and form of Holy Orders was taught in that document by Pope Eugene IV and bishops present at the theological discussions with the Armenians. Scholastic debates culminated in the time of Pope Pius XII in 1947. He reversed the decree and ordered the Roman rite liturgical books to be reformed in line with his definitive doctrinal decree, excluding the straightforward reading of Pope Eugene IV.
For traditionalists, an unexpected event (both lamentable and yet exonerating) has arisen in the last two papacies: Pope Francis’s initiative signed into law by Pope Leo that previous ordinary magisterium on Mary as Coredemptrix is illicit and to be avoided (Mater Populi Fidelis, no. 17-22) and, secondarily, in MH, no. 176, that the Church’s insufficient doctrinal opposition to slavery in the fifteenth century until modern times marks a defective omission of the modern magisterium.[2] Notice the principles here, both are documents of the ordinary magisterium (a DDF declaration and an encyclical) and both a dicastery and sitting pontiff judge papal predecessors’ magisterial statements as per se defective. Popes are criticized for novelty and ambiguity of their Marian terminology, and other popes for their moral flexibility on slavery, as with Eugene IV for ignoring the moral crisis magisterially.
What we have now is Pope Francis, Cardinal Fernández, and Pope Leo impugning the ordinary magisterium as prone to exaggerations, miscalculations, and inaccuracies. This provides the traditionalist cause with an embarrassment of riches for its own critiques of recent magisterial formulations that are innovative (modern in terminology and vague in meaning), insufficiently clear on moral matters (e.g., slavery), and exaggerated (using terminology liable to be misunderstood) and thus are all problematic and deserving of investigation, adjudication, and abandonment. “By the measure by which you measure, you shall be measured.”
Prior to Cardinal Ratzinger, there was not canonical basis for formally opposing the ordinary magisterium as intrinsically contradictory; prior to Fernandez-Leo there was no documented history of different magisterial organs rejecting the ordinary magisterium of predecessors in particular as prone to misunderstanding, exaggeration, inaccuracy, and insufficiency. Behold, the real gift of MH:the condemnation of slavery and the opposition to Dignitas Infinita. Every other opposition to an exaggerated, insufficient, deficient, or erroneous anomaly rests on these exemplars, upon which same views not only was SSPX organized but upon which the traditionalist cause is based: the Extraordinary and Universal Ordinary Magisterium are the definitive criteria for including or excluding ordinary magisterium, not vice versa. Therefore, if any decree of the ordinary magisterium cannot be aligned with and reconciled to the perennial teaching of the Church, then it cannot bind the conscience of Catholics in good faith and respectful resistance thereto is not an occasion for juridical penalties. These penalties therefore are powerless to deny the faithful sacramental communion and their rights as Christians and clerics in good standing. While Ratzinger’s claim that such instances are comparatively few, they are now able to listed and counted with greater frequency.
Conclusions
I am thankful to Pope Leo XIV. Though I cannot see signs of him recognizing the theological architecture necessary (e.g., dignitas infinita) to advance a truly perennial moral program for the Church, there is much good to be praised in this document: especially the overarching Thomistic paradigm that tames and domesticates the particulars that anomalously appear in later chapters.It goes without saying that many slogans, much jargon, and numerous economically naive statements and philosophical leaps in MH will be subjected to internet criticism in the coming weeks. It also goes without saying that various shades of traditionalist blogs, platforms, and media will take issue with many of the parts and certainly the whole of Magnifica Humanitas.
For my part, I admit that I am concerned when identifying Pope Leo’s wishlist peppering this document, where I detect that he feels the urgency for social change or societal effects that flow from his deep formation within the circle of Pachamama of then Fr. Prevost, in Peru. Yet, if there is a silver lining in these clouds, it is that Pope Leo is almost certainly not motivated by a purely Marxist-laden analysis of history and religion but a multicausal matrix and he does not fear putting a Thomist as his principal helmsman, even if we can wonder what the ultimate direction of the bark of St. Peter shall be in this pontificate. The overt subjection of Liberationist concerns to a clearly Thomistic framework is indeed surprising and welcome. Liberationist themes loom large throughout the encyclical and anti-capitalist criticisms and pet interests (e.g. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela) are inserted gratuitously and sometimes haphazardly.
Yet, what remains important is the fact that Leo XIV’s magisterial work architectonically limits the doctrinal impact of these meandering phrases and wish lists of peculiarities in light of Thomistic principles, adopted as eternal and unchangeable. Secondly, enough performative rhetoric about transparency and internal reform of the papal curia has been signaled to provide human hope for cardinalitial and episcopal agents to open the doors back up to the Tradition of the Church as a legitimate option, even if the idea of Tradition as a mere option sounds as if it ought to evoke despair over positive sentiment.
Lastly, the encyclical shows that Pope Leo was willing to voluntarily constrain his practical vision by the horizon of the Angelic Doctor, and he furthermore muffled the babble undergirding Pope Francis’s attempt to build a new and high tower of innovative language for theology. In short, I suggest to those who hold to the infallible and irreformable teachings of the extraordinary and the universal ordinary magisterium, that a way forward has at least potentially opened as a result of these new guardrails, however temporary they may be, to hold back the full sea of innovations hard pressing again the bulkhead of Peter’s bark.
[1] MH theoretically constrained or internally destabilized key Liberation Theology trajectories while many practical actors likely remain committed to Liberationist-style praxis.
[2] This section is poorly written. Slavery (E.g the US constitution), includes indentured servitude and criminals confined to prison. The species of slavery or a working definition of the object of this condemnation is wanting, possibly in deference to what may be felt as moral urgency to evaluate previous papacies for their faults. Notice how poorly organized the encyclical becomes: (1.) “Indeed, the word of God provides reliable standards for establishing paths of justice and opening ways of reconciliation and peace among peoples” (MH, no. 23); (2.)Sacred Scripture prescribes by God rules for various species of legal slavery (Deuteronomy 15:12-18; 21:20-27; Leviticus 25:44-46); (3.) Then God tells Moses: “You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations around you…”; “You may keep them as a possession for your children after you…” Because Leo’s plausibly personal insertions into this text do not understand the purchase of his architectonic principles, his condemnation does not specify the properties of intrinsically evil slavery nor whether Scripture transcends such definitions. He opens up himself rather obviously to the objection that his condemnation implicates more than Pope Eugene IV but the Word of God itself, which should provide reliable standards for justice in a law code that clearly permits slavery. This is the predictable result of emergency, then action (symbolic condemnation), then justification. This puts him in a box that he cannot extricate himself from without recourse to Roman natural law tradition, patristic strategies of reading Scripture, and Scholastic discussions of the natural law and its application to various species of slavery (e.g., not to criminals involuntarily incarcerated and forced into labor).