Above: Blessed Pius IX addresses the Liberal mob in Rome. Painting by Bryullov Karl (1799-1852). The Barque of Peter, the Holy Catholic Church, has been sailing the seas of history for two thousand years. Sometimes the sea is calm, …
Category: Ultramontanism / Spirit of Vatican I
Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility – Part 2
Editor’s note: this and related articles have now been published in a book entitled: Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility (Os Justi Press, 2022). For part 1 see here. Question I: On the Extension and Limits of Papal Infallibility (Continued) Article 3 …
Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility – Part 1
Editor’s note: the genre of Quaestiones Disputatae is traditionally devoted, among true theologians of the Church, for resolving unresolved theological propositions. Part of the problem today is that 1.) many of the faithful assume that the following disputed questions are …
Ultramontanists: Godfathers of the Trad Movement
Above: Catholic counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre. The crisis the Church is experiencing today is certainly unprecedented in its characteristics, but it is neither the first nor the last in history. Think, for example, of the attack suffered by the Papacy …
Submission to the Non-Infallible Papal Magisterium is Conditional
In a previous article (here), I made the case that the pope, when he exercises his non-infallible teaching authority, as he typically does in encyclical letters, apostolic exhortations, letters to bishops, etc., does not speak therein with the full authority …
Hyperpapalism and the Body Politic
We are at very curious time in ecclesiastical history. On the one hand, the shaky ecclesiology of the Orthodox Churches, already shaken further when Constantinople and Moscow excommunicated each other over the status of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, has received another blow …
The Pope is Not the Church and the Church is not the Pope
In 1967, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith introduced a new formula to be used in place of the Tridentine Profession of Faith and the Oath against Modernism in all cases where those used to be required. This …
A Psychological Approach to Treating the Disease of Ultramontanism
Chesterton affirmed that great writers and artists are symbolic without knowing it. I would go further and say that human beings in general are symbolic without knowing it. Mountains represent a liminal space between heaven and earth, between divinity and …
The “Spirit of Vatican I” as a Post-Revolutionary Political Problem
Above: Bishop Karl Josef von Hefele and Bl. Pius IX. In his fascinating book Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church,[1] John W. O’Malley details the movements, ideas, personalities, and events that coalesced in the First …
On the Limits of Papal Infallibility
We see in the Latin liturgical tradition an interesting thing: with the major feast on June 29 as well as the minor feasts, both apostles are always commemorated[1]. If the feast is chiefly of the Prince of the Apostles, then …