Do You Believe in the Papacy? Take this brief Test and Find Out!

You might be surprised!

Do You Believe in the Papacy?
Take this brief Test and Find Out!

Frequent visitors to this web site know that the topic of the Catholic Papacy is continually broached here. The reason for that is that a correct understanding of the Papacy is absolutely crucial, especially in our times, and is ironically rejected — wittingly or not — by a large majority of those who call themselves traditional Catholics, specifically by those who accept Francis and his five inglorious predecessors as true Popes but at the same time attempt to remain faithful to the religion of Pope Pius XII and the Popes before him.

As doing so is a theological impossibility, the result is that people must — and instinctively do — let go of the one or the other: Either they accept Francis & Co. as true Popes but, not accepting their teachings and laws, they necessarily reject what the Church teaches about the Papacy; or they accept the true teaching about the Papacy but must then necessarily dump the “Popes” after Pius XII.

The latter, in a nutshell, is Sedevacantism. The former is what, alas, most people in our day mistakenly believe to be traditional Catholicism; thanks to the horrendous damage done by writers and commentators such as Michael Davies, Michael Matt, Christopher Ferrara, John Vennari, and even clergy such as Abp. Marcel Lefebvre, “Fr.” Nicholas Gruner, and “Fr.” Chad Ripperger.

While of course things were not clear right away in the heyday of the Vatican II Modernist revolution of the 1960s or even in its immediate aftermath, we are now in the year 2020. This means we are enjoying the benefit of decades of hindsight so that there is simply no excuse for not putting all the pieces of the puzzle together — the pieces, at least, that are available to us. Nobody has all the answers, but at least we can know that the Modernist religion raging in the Vatican since the 1960s is not Catholicism, that the institution which officially promulgates this religion is not the Roman Catholic Church, and that the Chief Modernist at the top is not the Pope.

That, of course, leads to all sorts of questions as to what happened to our holy Catholic Church, which is indefectible and cannot disappear from the face of the earth — questions which not all sedevacantists answer the same way, hence there can be found some disagreements among them — but these legitimate questions cannot change the fact that we know that Club Francis isn’t the Catholic Church, because what cannot be true, is not true. Where Peter is, there is the Church — but from this it follows logically that where the Church is not, there Peter is not, either.

The embedded video at the top of this post is a 6-minute clip that presents some of the rich doctrine about the Papacy taught by genuine (i.e. pre-Vatican II) Roman Catholic Popes. It includes excerpts from papal documents that people will not typically see quoted by the mainstream (non-sedevacantist) traditionalists because the true doctrine of the Papacy presents an insurmountable problem for their position. In fact, the entire traditionalist resistance of the non-sedevacantists is an enormous contradiction of Catholic teaching on submission to the Pope. Therefore, if they could prevail in their resistance, Catholicism would still lose. Nothing is gained by teaching one heresy in order to defeat another.

The above video clip, then, can serve as a little self-test for traditionalists. A lot of people simply do not know what the Church teaches about the Papacy because they were never taught, even by their supposedly traditional Catholic teachers. The question each viewer of this video must ask himself is this: Do I accept Francis, or do I accept the Papacy? To do both is not possible, certainly not without becoming a full-blown Novus Ordo. This challenge, then, can be a good way to introduce friends and family who are recognize-and-resisters to Sedevacantism. Of course there are other options, too.

Virtually all papal encyclicals (not, however, most other papal documents) can be found online at PapalEncyclicals.net. Just be aware that that web site is Novus Ordo and so naturally includes also the Modernist junk published by the Novus Ordo antipopes from 1958 to the present. Papal encyclical letters were not common until 1740, which is when the first such document was published by Pope Benedict XIV, entitled Ubi Primum. Prior to that, papal documents were mostly briefs, bulls, or Apostolic Constitutions.

Probably the best English-language source for the Catholic teaching on the Church, the Magisterium, and the Papacy is the collection of excerpts produced by the Benedictine Monks of Solesmes, translated by Mother Elizabeth O’Gorman, published in 1962. It is called Papal Teachings: The Church (Boston, MA: St. Paul Editions) and is part of a larger series on papal teachings. This is the book used in the video clip.

Ironically, Papal Teachings: The Church was intended chiefly as a doctrinal aid for the upcoming Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Little did the good Benedictine monks know that the Vatican II participants would essentially take their book and dump it irretrievably into the trash. Nevertheless, for true Catholics this collection is a priceless treasure. Today it is, unfortunately, out of print, and used copies, when available, tend to be very expensive. However, an electronic (scanned) version of the book is available for download at The Catholic Archive for a one-time subscription fee.

Lastly, our own topical page on the Papacy includes countless excerpts from the papal Magisterium and is occasionally updated with more quotes.

The true magisterial doctrine on the Papacy, then, is available to anyone who is serious about finding it. How many of those who call themselves traditional Catholics actually believe it, however, is quite another question.

Image source: internet meme
License: fair use