While the sede of St. Peter remains officially vacante for the next couple of days at least, it’s a unique moment to reflect very frankly on the painful pontificate of Francis without fear of being labeled a sedevacantist. In a recent op-ed for OnePeterFive, Danielle Heckenkamp urged Catholics not to “focus on the confusion and the errors of the past twelve years” and to instead marvel that God’s grace has moved amidst this darkness, notably in the “acceptance of orthodox Catholic teaching [that] has exploded under the pontificate of Pope Francis.” Although she is certainly correct on the second point, I would argue that, on the contrary, it is essential for Catholics to make sense of what the Church has endured for the past decade to avoid falling into the trap of another umpteen years of “recognize and resist” Francis 2.0.
This week on May 7, about 130 cardinals will vote on a successor for Francis. Within days, perhaps, a new Pope will be elected. He will assume the role of earthly head of the Catholic Church, and Catholics will be required to submit to his authority, “to acknowledge [him] as Father, Pastor, and Universal Teacher, and be united with him in mind and heart.” No amount of hype on social media about Cardinal Robert Sarah is going to change the outcome. Indeed, if the attention Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is currently receiving in the corporate press is any guide at all, the next successor of St. Peter is less likely to be an orthodox prelate from Guinea, and more likely to be the individual who, with Pope Francis, allowed disgraced former cardinal, the late Theodore McCarrick, to help hash out the infamous Vatican-China accord.
The stakes shouldn’t be this high. There is a temptation to treat the conclave as something in between a presidential campaign and a horse race, with favorites and front runners and underdogs. Catholics should shun discourse that categorizes candidates as “moderates” or “conservatives” or “liberals.” Such labels are an illusion: one is either Catholic, or one is not. One either embraces orthodoxy, or lapses into heterodoxy. One is either faithful to Catholic dogma, or is instead seduced by heresy. One either steadfastly perseveres in the faith, or apostatizes.
Unlike a change in a political administration, the election of a new pope does not – or at least, should not – herald a change in Catholic dogma. The Pope receives and safeguards the precious deposit of faith; he may need to articulate or clarify it, but he doesn’t get to overhaul, revamp, or modernize it. Hence in the normal course of events, Catholics would be approaching the next pontificate with a “business as usual” mentality: same teachings, different pope.
And yet who can honestly say that they feel that way? After Francis’ pontificate, there is understandably a desperate yearning for correction and cleansing. Anyone who follows my writing knows I’ve had plenty to say about Pope Francis over the past several years. None of it has been positive. I criticized what became over the years his trademark equivocation on human sexuality and marriage. I lamented his malicious targeting of the Tridentine Liturgy and the supercilious spurning of Traditional Catholics who prefer the orthodoxy, reverence, and rightly-ordered worship of the ancient rite, to the lukewarm preaching and liturgical calamities and abuses of the Novus Ordo. I denounced his hobnobbing with the who’s-who of pro-abortionists, globalists, depopulation junkies, transgender surgery advocates, and climate change alarmists. I mourned his treatment of honorable bishops like Joseph Strickland – and yes, I’ll go around that buoy once again – for reasons that never saw the light of day.
I reported on how serial sex abuser McCarrick had scandalously been allowed to act as unofficial wheeler and dealer for the Vatican in working out the elusive terms of the China-Vatican agreement. I amplified the eerie warnings of George Neumayr, late editor of the American Spectator, who was concerned that McCarrick, even after his fall from grace, was continuing to pull strings behind the scenes via “Teddy’s Nephews”, even to the point of influencing the next conclave.
Most of all, I rejected Francis’ embrace of religious indifferentism, and his scandalous undermining of the kingship of Christ, as expressed in the 2019 Abu Dhabi document on human fraternity, his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, and more recently in comments made during an interreligious meeting with young people in Singapore.
Yet despite my outspoken censuring of Pope Francis, I’ve struggled in private to make sense of the whole Francis dilemma. I couldn’t rationalize it for my husband when he was preparing to convert. I am at a loss to explain Francis to my Protestant friends and colleagues. I avoid the topic entirely with my children for fear of casting aspersions on the throne of Peter and undermining the papacy.
Indeed, that’s precisely what the incessant rebuking and reprimanding – mine included – have done to the papacy. Catholics who spent the twelve-year pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio paradoxically recognizing and resisting his authority, have unwittingly perpetuated an absurdity of epic proportions: How can a Catholic unquestioningly and obediently follow the Vicar of Rome, and yet disregard pretty well every word that emanates from the Pontiff’s mouth?
Catholic writers learned, of course, how to dress up the language in as charitable a manner as possible: Francis’ “un-Catholic teaching;” his “deviation from Catholic doctrine;” the Pope’s “departure from core dogma.” I know these euphemisms well because I’ve availed myself of all of them.
Yet the point of the flowery language is to mask the malodor of papal heresy. Now we come to the material point, which was succinctly encapsulated in a syllogism formulated in a recent objection to Dr. John Lamont’s essay on the consequences of Francis’ theology:
No true pope is a notorious heretic.
But Francis is a notorious heretic.
Therefore, Francis is not the true pope.
I applaud the use of formal logic to attempt to reason through the Francis fiasco, but it was a shame that neither the article nor Dr. Lamont’s subsequent response adequately analyzed the syllogism in question. Instead, the anonymous author, in a futile effort to counter the Lamont argument, proffered a range of competing syllogisms, whose validity in all but one case was questionable. For the Lamont argument to be proven unsound, it must be shown to be invalid and/or untrue in itself. Now, according to the rules of formal logic, this syllogism certainly is valid, so the only way to reject the argument as unsound is for one or both of the premises to be proven false. If this cannot be done, then the conclusion must be true as it necessarily follows from the premises.
