Try as hard as you might to understand him, still Pope Leo leaves us befuddled. Even giving the benefit of the doubt to his recent statements, Catholics are still left short of clarity. Faithful Catholics fully understand the bounds of papal teaching. Assent of mind and will is only reserved to the highest reaches of magisterial intention. All other pronouncements obligate Catholics to show respectful attention, nothing more. Even with that, certain of Pope Leo’s statements strain the Catholic conscience.
Tucked precariously between assent and respectful consideration lies a critical distinction lost upon many simple Catholic souls. Some assume every syllable that falls from the lips of the Roman Pontiff bear the same status as the Nicene Creed. Little do these well-meaning Catholics know that they have fallen prey to the perils of papal absolutism (cf. ultramontanism), a parlous and faulty interpretation of papal prerogatives. This very tendency is what caused St. John Henry Newman such concern at the promulgation of Vatican I’s Pastor Aeternus. Pity, for this error leaves them marooned in the regions of doubtful conscience at best and an erroneous conscience at worst.
Thus, we are left on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, there are those who relegate papal teaching to only opinion and live an à la carte Catholicism. On the other hand, there are those Catholics who embrace the equally erroneous position that every word uttered by the Roman Pontiff binds in conscience. We have here a theological Scylla and Charybdis which must be avoided at all costs.
A distinguished theologian was recently disinvited from an interview by a papal absolutist who claimed the theologian was an unfaithful Catholic! Why? Because he did not give absolute assent to every line of Amoris Laetitia and Fiducia Supplicans. Here is ultramontanism writ large. Imagine, a credentialed, orthodox theologian having sentence passed upon him by a layman who runs a grocery store. O, deliver us from the perils of papal absolutism and the preening dilettantes it creates.
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