Pope Pius XII on the Unchanging Orthodoxy of the Papal Teaching Office

Papal address of January 17, 1940…

Pope Pius XII on the Unchanging Orthodoxy of the Papal Teaching Office

One of the main services Novus Ordo Watch tries to render to the public is the making available of, or raising awareness concerning, Catholic magisterial texts that are not widely known or have not before been published online in English. There is a wealth of pre-Vatican II papal teaching ‘on the books’ that, unfortunately, is largely unknown even to traditional Catholics; thus we are trying to do our part to help remedy this situation. Thankfully, with recent advances in technology, discovering and spreading it has become easier and easier.

One such hardly-known magisterial nugget is an address given by Pope Pius XII to newlyweds on Jan. 17, 1940, the eve of the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter at Rome. It bears the title Vi è a Roma and concerns important truths regarding the perpetual teaching office of the Pope, who is the “living Peter”.

The full text of the papal remarks can be found here. The following is the most relevant excerpt:

The chair is a seat, somewhat raised and rather solemn, from which a master teaches. Look then upon the chair from which the first Pope spoke to the earliest Christians, just as we speak to you now, admonishing them to be on guard against the devil who goes about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (I Pet. 5, 8), exhorting them to be strong in their faith and not to be led astray by the errors of false prophets (II Pet. 2, 1). This teaching of Peter continues in his successors, and will continue, unchanged, for all time, for this is the mission given by Christ Himself to the head of the Church.

To show the universal and infallible character of this teaching, the seat of the spiritual primacy has been fixed in Rome, after a providential preparation. God Himself, as our great predecessor St. Leo observed, saw to it that people were united in one empire, of which Rome was the head, so that from her the light of truth, revealed for the salvation of all nations, might be more effectively diffused to all its members.

The successors of Peter, mortals like all men, pass on more or less rapidly. But the primacy of Peter will endure forever through the special assistance promised it when Jesus charged him to strengthen his brethren in the faith. Whatever may have been the name, however he may look, whatever may be the human origin of each Pope, it is always Peter who lives in him. It is Peter who directs and governs; it is Peter above all who teaches and spreads across the world the light of emancipating truth. It was this which caused a great sacred orator to say that God established an eternal chair in Rome: “Peter lives in his successors; Peter always speaks from his chair” (Bossuet).

(Pope Pius XII, Address Vi è a Roma, Jan. 17, 1940; underlining added.)

To summarize, we can say the Pope teaches the following, among other things:

• Adhering to papal teaching is the sure way to keep from being misled by error and deception
• Each and every Pope will always teach the same true doctrine, and this doctrine is unchangeable
• All papal teaching is consistently the same because it is always the same St. Peter teaching through his successors
• This is guaranteed by Christ, who gave St. Peter and his successors this special primacy and mission and endowed it with His special assistance
• This special primacy will not cease at some point but will endure until the end of time, for that is how Christ willed it

On the face of it, all of these things are fairly easy to understand. The difficulty facing us today is how to make sense of these truths if we accept Jorge Bergoglio (‘Pope Francis’) as the Pope of the Catholic Church.

The long and the short of it is that it is impossible to affirm both: the orthodox Catholic teaching stated by Pius XII and the idea that Bergoglio is the Pope. If the one is true, the other must be false. This opens the way to the often dreaded Sedevacantism; but we should never fear the truth, for what leads to destruction is falsehood, not truth: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Jn 8:32); “And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying: That all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity” (2 Thess 2:10-11).

Now, the prevailing position among mainstream traditionalists is not Sedevacantism but that known as ‘recognize-and-resist’, which offers a kind of best-of-both-worlds scenario in which you get to affirm Francis is Pope, yet also get to reject/resist all those things coming from his Papacy you deem to be contrary to the Catholic religion as it was known before Vatican II. Ironically, such a position throws overboard the very pre-Vatican II teaching concerning the Papacy which Pius XII underscored in his address Vi è a Roma.

To reject Catholic doctrine on the Papacy in order to hold on to Bergoglio as a true Pope makes no sense and is ultimately self-refuting, for it is no different than trying to borrow one’s way out of debt.

Granted, the recognize-and-resisters cling so firmly to Bergoglio as a valid Pope because they reason that if he is not the Pope (and especially if his other Novus Ordo predecessors, from Benedict XVI all the way back to John XXIII, have not been real Popes either), then this would be tantamount to a denial of the Catholic doctrine of the perpetuity of the Papacy since the papal succession then appears to have come to an end.

But this criticism, though certainly not devoid of a certain merit as it raises a legitimate concern, rests on a misunderstanding. That misunderstanding is the idea that as long as there is always a living individual who legitimately bears the title of Pope, all is saved, regardless of what this putative Pope teaches, believes, legislates, or decrees.

Conceding for a moment, and only for the sake of argument, that the Church must always have a Pope, it is important to understand that simply having a warm body on the Chair of St. Peter is not enough, as the papal address of Pius XII quoted above makes clear. If anything, always having a Pope is only one side of the Papacy coin. The other side, no less necessary, is that this living Pope teaches the true Faith, condemns dangerous errors, makes salutary laws, and governs the Church in accordance with orthodox doctrine. In short, in his official capacity this living Pope will necessarily act only in ways that are consistent with the promises of Christ for the Papacy.

That is what the perpetual succession of the papal primacy guarantees, anyway: that the prerogatives of St. Peter and the divine assistance for him did not end with him personally but are perpetually passed on to each and every one of his lawful successors, until the end of time:

• The ‘Perpetual Successors’ Objection

We must remember that the Papacy is not simply a label; it is a reality. For a Catholic to say that someone is Pope is not merely to recognize a title, it means affirming that the promises of Christ for the Papacy are actually operative in that person. That the promises of Christ are not operative in ‘Pope Francis’ is now obvious to all but the most deluded souls.

So, in short: It is not enough always to have a Pope teaching, it must be a Pope teaching the Apostolic Faith. Were it not so, the Papacy would be of no use and would actually constitute a grave danger to souls.

Thus no one in the recognize-and-resist camp can possibly use the ‘but we must always have a Pope’ argument against Sedevacantism without refuting their own position in the process.

Therefore, while not trying to discount the seriousness of the objection concerning the perpetuity of the Church’s apostolicity, we know the solution to the difficulty must be found somewhere other than in recognize-and-resist traditionalism:

• Apostolic Succession after Pope Pius XII: Where is the Catholic Hierarchy?
• A Church without Popes forever? Response to an Inquiring Writer at One Peter Five

The typical recognize-and-resist apologist will now bring up apparent counterexamples from history to dispute what we have just said. “But what about Pope Honorius I? What about Pope Liberius? John XXII?” etc. While these objections can be answered at length (see here for Honorius I and here for Liberius and here for John XXII), the short answer is: Since these supposed counterexamples did not deter subsequent Popes, such as Pius IX and Pius XII, from teaching what they did concerning the Papacy, they cannot keep us from assenting to the Catholic doctrine on the Papacy.

In other words, neither Pius IX nor Pius XII thought the ‘hard cases’ of history were sufficient to negate their magisterial pronouncements concerning the Papacy. That alone should be enough to settle the matter for us, at least practically speaking. We need not personally be able to answer the objections. It suffices to note that the Popes, who knew much more about Catholic history than most of us do, taught what they taught, and their teaching is authoritative and must be assented to by all Catholics — period.

One final clarification is in order: No, none of the above means or implies that the Pope’s authority is therefore unlimited. Yes, papal authority has limits, but these limits are imposed a priori (applied before any papal action) by divine constitution, they are not applied a posteriori (after the fact) by self-appointed papal correctors (such as Peter Kwasniewski):

• The Limits of Papal Power: Contrasting Traditional Catholic Teaching with Recognize-and-Resist Distortion
• Too Traditional for Tradition? Peter Kwasniewski vs. Pope Saint Pius X
• Rethinking Peter Kwasniewski: A Sedevacantist Critique of his Anti-Papal Traditionalism

Once again we see how easy it is to come to the conclusion that Jorge Bergoglio is surely a lot of things, but Pope of the Catholic Church is certainly not one of them.

Let us pray that more people’s eyes will be opened and that, by the help of divine grace, they will overcome all obstacles that may stand in the way, especially those of human respect and fear of suffering: “And whosoever doth not carry his cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:27).

Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Michael Pitcairn; cropped)
License: public domain