On the 2nd of May, a Statement was issued, signed by twelve public Catholic figures, calling for the immediate resignation of Pope Francis, and presenting the wide-ranging grounds for this measure. Among the signatories was Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, a Catholic philosopher and liturgist, and a regular writer for The European Conservative. What follows is Dr. Kwasniewski’s apologia for the Statement and his reasons for signing it.
Recently, a comprehensive Statement was published on the Rorate Caeli website, calling for the resignation of Pope Francis, the grounds for which are developed at length throughout the document. You are one of the signatories, and you were also involved in drafting the Statement. Why did you and the others involved feel that now was the right time for this call for Francis’ resignation?
Before answering this question, I should make it clear that I can speak only for myself, although I believe, based on extensive correspondence, that most, if not all, of the signatories would agree with much or all of what I will say.
Our Statement does not emerge from left field, so to speak. There has been an escalating sequence of efforts to document the evils wrought by and under this pontificate, including, to take only the most important initiatives:
- the Dubia of the Four Cardinals (2016), addressed to the pope;
- the Theological Censures of Amoris Laetitia (2016), addressed to the College of Cardinals;
- the Filial Correction Concerning the Propagation of Heresies (2017), addressed to the pope;
- the Appeal to the Cardinals on the Death Penalty (2018), addressed to the College of Cardinals;
- the Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church (2019), addressed to all the bishops;
- the Protest against Pope Francis’s Sacrilegious Acts (2019), an open letter
All of these documents were signed by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of prominent individuals: scholars, professors, theologians, pastors—many more in number, indeed, than the rather small list of the 2nd of May Statement, for reasons I will go into. All of them were ignored by the pope, the cardinals, and the bishops, except for private communications that indicated agreement. The definitive texts of the foregoing documents, together with commentary, can be found in the book Defending the Faith Against Present Heresies, edited by John Lamont and Claudio Pierantoni (Arouca Press, 2021), a book I consider a must-read on the present situation.
What you can see is a patient effort, step by step, to urge the correction of the course on which Pope Francis has been set, and to do so ‘through the proper channels’ before eventually speaking openly to the Church. I have signed all but one of these statements. I signed them for the simple reason that I believe them to be true: Bergoglio has acted flagitiously and taught erroneously, not in esoteric fine points but in matters as basic as the Ten Commandments. Without denying that the roots of the offenses in Bergoglio’s behavior and teaching go back many decades and implicate many other senior figures in the Church, including his immediate predecessors, I recognize, with the other signatories, that we are witnessing a particularly violent and vicious exhibition of the heretical and iconoclastic ‘spirit of Vatican II,’ and it deserves to be condemned, regardless of the clothing or title worn by its proponents.
The triple-back-flip gymnastic attempts that have been made to interpret Francis’s controversial teachings in something approaching an orthodox manner fail when one studies carefully the numerous mutually reinforcing texts as well as the actions that effectively back them up by putting the heterodox into key positions of power. For instance, with Amoris Laetitia, as the Lamont/Pierantoni book shows, there is no possible way to reconcile the views expressed in chapter 8 (alongside subsequent interpretive documents) with the unbroken testimony of Catholic teaching, reiterated as recently as the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI; and the favorites of Francis have not been slow to show where they stand, as they fearlessly implement the Buenos Aires policy. The same can be said of the death penalty change and Fiducia Supplicans. We are not looking at ‘development of doctrine’ here, but at a rupture where X is replaced by non-X. For a religion that is founded on immutable dominical-apostolic teaching and that also claims to respect reason, this is not merely a nuisance to be put up with, like mosquitoes; it is a catastrophe—an earthquake or tsunami.
The Statement offers a surprising number of examples regarding Pope Francis’s proclivity for surrounding himself with morally compromised individuals—especially those who are gravely compromised on account of sexual misbehaviour—whom he appears actively to protect and promote to high-ranking positions in the Church. What are some of the more heinous crimes that these men have committed? Why do you think Pope Francis protects and even promotes such men?
The catalogue is truly gross and disturbing. Just to take a few:
- former Cardinal McCarrick, whom Francis rehabilitated and employed for trips to China even after his evildoing was a byword;
- Cardinal Danneels, who offered long-term protection to a pedophile bishop yet stood on the balcony beside Bergoglio on March 13, 2013;
- Cardinal Wuerl, who resigned as archbishop of Washington, DC, after many instances of his failure to respond to abuse were exposed, yet whom Francis kept on as apostolic administrator and as a member of the congregation that assists in choosing future bishops;
- Juan Barros Madrid, whom Francis promoted to the see of Osorno despite massive outcries for his cover-up of abuse, and who later resigned in shame;
- Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta, who sexually harassed and abused seminarians, and whom Francis appointed to the Vatican bank even after photographic evidence of his abuse had been published, and who was eventually sentenced to four and a half years in Argentina (there has never been a canonical trial or sentence, only the civil state pursued him);
- Fr. Mauro Inzoli, whose sentencing to laicization was initially blocked by Francis, even though he was later thrown in jail for five years for his sexual abuse of minors;
- Fr. Marko Rupnik, a popular mosaic artist, who, despite sacrilegious serial group-sex rituals involving many religious sisters, occurring over three decades, and finally being accused by his own order, the Jesuits, was invited to give a Lenten retreat at the Vatican while excommunicated. Later, his excommunication was lifted by the Apostolic See. He then appeared in videos produced by the Vatican, and was even incardinated into a diocese in Slovenia for pastoral work. The outcry over Rupnik has been so loud and sustained that even Francis has had to throttle back his support for him.
The list goes on and on—that is why it occupies almost six full pages of our Statement.
There is a clear pattern here that no honest person can deny. Pope Francis likes to surround himself with compromised people who owe their protection and promotion to his plenipotentiary favor alone, and who are therefore unswervingly loyal to him and his program. The power of blackmail is, moreover, a known motivator and silencer. The arbitrariness of Francis’s grace and wrath, by now well documented, keeps his subordinates (and that means over 5,000 bishops) living in a state of fear, unable and unwilling to take any steps against his errors or crimes. It is the most dramatic example ever seen of papal tyranny and craven subordination, the latter excused (needless to say) with the pious language of respect for the Petrine office.
The mainstream media generally ignores the misdeeds of Francis because they see that he is pushing the Church in the direction of accepting secular values in a way no pope has done before, and certainly in a way no pope can be guaranteed or expected to do in the future. They may hate his occasional remarks against abortion or transgenderism, but, being consummate pragmatists, progressives always know how to capitalize on any advantage. To draw too much attention to Francis’s misdeeds would reflect badly on their own favorite idol, the Sexual Revolution, and risk interfering with the pope’s dismantling of the last institution in the West that is in any way opposed to the Brave New World whose inexorable misery they are ever pushing towards.
You remark that the outcry over Fr. Marko Rupnik S.J. has been loud and sustained, but personally I have been surprised at the lack of outrage expressed over him, a priest whose ‘art’ adorns some of the Catholic Church’s holiest shrines, including those of Lourdes and San Giovanni Rotondo. Rupnik’s own religious order has confirmed that he has repeatedly sexual abused nuns. And as you say, having been automatically excommunicated on account of these crimes, Rupnik was invited to preach a retreat to Vatican employees whilst still in excommunication. Later, when Rupnik’s victims wrote directly to Francis to convey what they had suffered, they received no reply. Rupnik seems to have enjoyed Francis’s constant support, despite the gravity of Rupnik’s sexual abuse of vulnerable persons, and Rupnik has now been incardinated back in his home diocese to continue his ‘ministry.’ Why have the Church’s leaders not spoken out against this ongoing scandalising of the faithful?
In addition to the points I made earlier—about fear of Francis, threats of blackmail, liberal opportunism, and the like—I sometimes find myself wondering if most Western people are simply so desensitized to lust and violent crime that they can no longer feel indignation at such reports. After all, by the standards of Catholic morality, the vast majority of modern Westerners, including Catholics, are guilty of habitual sins against the sixth and ninth commandments, so adopting a censorious tone toward abusers of sex may sound, and feel, a bit hypocritical (not that a few haven’t exulted in such hypocrisy!). And for those who do feel indignant, the feeling flares up brightly for a moment—then gets buried beneath the endless social media feed and the latest batch of scandals. As you well know, memory, attention, pondering, and follow-through are some of the worst casualties of the internet age. We read a damning article, maybe we share it, and we move on to the next thing. It is very hard to make anything ‘stick,’ let alone to ensure that some appropriate action is carried out.
But I also wonder if there isn’t a deeper cause, namely, the hyperpapalism or neo-ultramontanism that you and I have so often commented upon. It prevents ordinary Catholics from seeing what is right in front of their faces, because they have bought into the myth of the pope as a sort of demigod-shaman-guru who exudes the perfume of righteousness and serves as the humble mouthpiece of the Savior. Whatever he has said, it can’t be false, only (at worst) “misunderstood”; whatever he has done, it can’t be wrong, only (at worst) “misreported.”
This psychological filter is the single biggest factor in the Catholic media’s utter failure to address the evils of the past 11 years. A look at a typical diocesan newspaper might lead the casual reader to assume Francis had already been canonized. The unwillingness of some prelates to challenge the pope when he has gone astray may have its source in that hyperpapalism as well. And, I must add, this false conception of papal authority hurts the Church very much, because people who are looking for the truth will find it … will wonder why it is being swept under the carpet … and may begin, as a result, to question their religion (or more accurately, their usually poor conception of their religion). This leads in turn to disillusionments, apostasies, departures to the Eastern Orthodox, and so forth. All of that could be prevented by honesty and courage, which are in short supply.
Very serious accusations are launched against Pope Francis throughout the Statement, including the worship of false gods in the Vatican, arbitrary removal without due process of bishops to whom the pope has taken a disliking, encouraging of Eucharistic sacrilege, instituting blessings for homosexual couples, collusion with the Communist and anti-Catholic government of China, and the deliberate suppression of the ancient Roman Rite. It seems that such abuses of power, however, have characterised Pope Francis’s reign from the beginning. So, why has it taken so long to address them in a Statement calling for his resignation? Do you get the sense that his abuse of power is escalating?
It’s astonishing to step back and look at the sheer number of Catholic dogmas and attitudes Francis has weakened by his words and example. Our critics like to say ad nauseam that no idolatry occurred in the Vatican Gardens, but as I pointed out in a lecture accompanied by video clips, some of the native people involved believed they were venerating a Pachamama; Francis himself called it “Pachamama”; and the entire event had at very least the appearance of idolatry, since no Catholic bows down in prostration, face to the ground, before a statue of Our Lady, in the gesture of latria.
The agreement with the Communist Party in China is a wholesale betrayal of the underground Chinese Church’s faithful who have suffered so much for so long, always with the unequivocal support of the preceding popes. It alone is a blemish on this pontificate that will never be scoured away by the sands of time.
The pope has said that “faith alone” is needed to receive Communion—contrary to the Council of Trent. He has praised Martin Luther on numerous occasions; the Vatican even released a commemorative stamp with Luther and Melanchthon. His explicit contradiction, in Traditionis Custodes, of the dogmatic fact enunciated by Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum—namely, that what is sacred in the past remains sacred and great, and cannot be forbidden or considered harmful—is well-known.
No need to run through the entire list. In fact, even our 19-page Statement is a selective synopsis. I am aware of a book coming out that will document all of Francis’s theological errors in detail: it will be many hundreds of pages long.
These crimes and heresies have been protested against year after year; it isn’t as if they have escaped notice on the part of the observant. But they have built up like a deposit of pollutants, eliminating all possibility of a ‘benefit of the doubt.’ In this scenario, asking for a resignation, a fortiori a deposition, is the most serious step that can be taken by laity, and I suppose all those involved in this Statement felt obliged in conscience to take the last step beyond which there is no more that can be done except to pray, with the Psalmist, that God would shatter His enemies and deliver His people from their oppressors … not that we haven’t been praying all along, in the office of Prime: Exsurge, Christe, adjuva nos, et libera nos propter nomen tuum (Arise, O Christ, and help us, and deliver us for Thy Name’s sake).
Do you expect the actions that you are calling for to be taken?
I’m afraid there is little human hope of that happening. Because what we say about Francis is an accurate portrait, it’s obvious he would not relinquish his power; that would be like asking a mafia boss to resign for the common good. And as I said before, bishops and cardinals now seem to be either afraid of retaliation or convinced that the situation is utterly hopeless, humanly speaking, until the pope dies and the next conclave meets. In view of this likelihood, some have asked us, in a manner that sounds to me like a form of despair: “Why do you bother? Not one of your earlier documents has accomplished anything; nor will this one.”
First and foremost, we issued the Statement for the sake of the truth (we are not mere utilitarians or pragmatists), and to create a written record of the truth. In the present, this will console and reassure the many Catholics who feel that something is wrong but who do not have the leisure or knowledge to synthesize the evidence. We have seen an enormous amount of attention paid to the Statement, across multiple languages, with hundreds of thousands of readers and viewers.
Second, who is to say that this Statement, or others documents like it, may not play an important, if hidden, role in the next conclave, or in a future pontificate that orders a complete investigation of Bergoglio and anathematizes him posthumously, as Pope Honorius was anathematized for his role in the heresy of Monothelitism? This will sound far-fetched only to those who are not familiar with the intricacies of Church history. Divine Providence can use weak instruments to accomplish great things.
Third, I do believe that all of these documents have together accomplished one very important thing: they are helping to shift the Overton Window in ecclesiology. Hard questions about the ultramontane exaltation of the papal office, the relationship of pope and bishops, the virtue of obedience and its limits, the value and normativity of liturgical tradition, the need for changes to canon law (in many cases restoring important laws that were discarded in 1917 or 1983), and so forth, are now being asked by a growing number of people—laity, seminarians, clergy, and religious. It is good that such questions be wrestled with.
In the Statement, the pope is accused of both holding and disseminating very serious heresies. If it is true that he holds and teaches such heresies, does it not follow from received Catholic theology that he is already deposed, or more accurately, self-deposed? If so, can we still say that Pope Francis is the pope? If not, what does that mean for the Church’s faithful?
This is obviously a huge question, one that great minds of our time have addressed at length. Even theologians who agreed that a pope had no superior on earth to judge him still defended the view that a pope could fall from his office—could be judged by qualified observers to have fallen from office, and, accordingly, that his empty chair would need to be filled. If you fall out of a window, you don’t need to have someone stronger than you push you out of it; it can simply be your own fault that you leaned out too far and fell out. That is the way a pope could be unseated: he would have to have unseated himself, in the evaluation of the college of bishops and the senate of cardinals.
To me, it seems self-evident that only those who, by divine ordination, stand in the place of the apostles are empowered to evaluate and act upon a situation like this in a way that is ecclesially binding. What you or I happen to think, even if we are entirely right, has no binding force of that nature. No random individual has the right to declare that a pope has fallen from his office. It is the right and duty of the successors of the apostles and, in particular, the college of cardinals, who, according to Cajetan, are empowered to “join” a man to the papal office in the first place by electing him, to declare that this bond no longer exists if it has been sundered.
I realize that not everyone shares Cajetan’s position, but it is a fully legitimate one in theology. In our Statement, we are calling for it to be acted upon. This is entirely in line with orthodox ecclesiology and indeed church history; it is not a group of scholars but the successors of the apostles who must make such formal charges. It is the fundamental error of sedevacantism to think otherwise: to make each man the judge, jury, and executioner of church hierarchs. Again, what Cajetan proposes is not a case of “judging the pope,” who has no earthly superior to answer to, much less a form of Gallicanism or Conciliarism. Rather, it is about judging the relationship between a certain man and an office. In Catholic tradition, there are ways of ascertaining formal heresy that suffice for practical action. If a man is seen to be a formal heretic by these criteria, he no longer retains or can retain ecclesiastical office de jure. No heretic, as such, can rightly hold office in the Church.
Yet we must also recognize that a man can choose to hold on to his office by brute force—retaining it de facto, not de jure. If those surrounding him either do not believe him to be a formal heretic (as with the many who still say “Francis is just confused, poor man,” etc.) or do not think there is anything they can do to remove him, then he remains de facto pope, even if he is a heretic. While I respectfully disagree with Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s view that no step can be taken to declare a man severed from the papal office, I do agree with him that a pope who is a heretic can, in some sense, retain office.
One of the most common objections made to us is: How many bishops or cardinals would need to act against a heretic pope in order to certify that he is no longer pope and must be replaced? That is not a question I can answer definitively; it is a question for the hierarchs themselves to work out. But it does not seem that it would require an especially large number. After all, the Arian and Semi-Arian councils in the early Church were much better attended than the orthodox councils, but we consider the former illegitimate and the latter ecumenical.
Yes, it is a disputed question how a pope falls from his office, and how he can be known to have so fallen. But if Francis’s reign is not an occasion for grappling with this question, could there ever be? There is a ‘first time’ for everything in Church history.
Is the behaviour of Pope Francis that you and the other signatories condemn not partly a consequence of the papal office having swelled down the centuries into something it was never meant to become, namely an arbitrary modifier of the Church’s tradition rather than its foremost protector? It is hard to imagine such an exercise of papal power being possible in an arrangement like, for example, the Justinian Pentarchy of the 6th century, in which the Bishop of Rome, whilst considered first among equals, had his power checked by other independent patriarchs of other apostolic sees. Is it time to rethink Latin ecclesiology, even radically so, in the light of the current papacy?
Yes. All of my replies thus far should indicate that I agree with your proposition. Your own essays on this topic (here and here) have offered excellent overviews of what this might look like, and a few of the books I’ve referred to begin the hard work of laying out what this ‘rethinking’ will involve. It is crucial to point out that what is being ‘rethought’ is not the papal office, or the dogmas associated with it, but their interpretation, application, extension, and, at times, transmogrification.
There is an inherent tension in the papal office between its supremacy, which no one can deny—it is evident even in the records of the first millennium and found a carefully delimited dogmatic expression at Vatican I—and its obligations as set within the body of the Church, under the eternal headship of Christ, bound by divine law, natural law, apostolic tradition, the status ecclesiae, and even canon law, which the pope can change but must observe while it is in force. Thus, it seems to me and to many others that it will take a future series of orthodox, traditional popes (… stranger things have happened in church history!) to make use of their primatial authority to put into place certain curbs on arbitrary papal governance and further to clarify the nature and scope of papal authority.
For example, a pope could define that the papacy’s role as custos traditionis means every historic liturgical rite is to be revered, retained, and defended and be freely available to the faithful to whom it pertains; he could, moreover, dogmatize the judgment of Pius V in Quo Primum. He could anathematize the error that the death penalty is contrary to human dignity and the Gospel. He could draw up a Syllabus of Errors of the Second Vatican Council, as Bishop Schneider proposed all the way back in 2010, that would place under perpetual ban the many erroneous interpretations and would also repudiate certain formulas that are ambiguous, proximate to heresy, offensive to pious ears, etc., such as that Christians and Muslims “adore the same God,” and that “the office of Prime is to be abolished,” that the free choice of religion is a natural right belonging to all men, that coercion is entirely foreign to religion (see the extensive work of Thomas Pink), and so forth. This pope could reinstate the Oath against Modernism, and then get busy deposing hordes of modernist and homosexual bishops. And instead of talking hot air about “zero tolerance” for sexual abusers, he would reinstate for ecclesiastical courts the ancient rites of degradation whereby clerics are publicly humiliated as they are stripped of their insignia and their hands are scraped with shards, as if symbolically to rid them of the sacred chrism.
Some years ago, Fr. Aidan Nichols claimed that canon law should include a section on the duties of the pope and on the process to be followed when he goes astray. This may seem fantastical since a wicked pope could nullify that part of canon law with a wave of his hand, and yet, if it had been incorporated into canon law by a predecessor of his, it would offer a secure template for the hierarchs at the time of crisis to work within, rather than our current situation in which no one seems to know what to do while the house burns down or the ship veers off toward the iceberg.
It is not a contradiction to call for a repudiation of hyperpapalism and at the same time to recognize that the solution for many of our ills will come from the rightful exercise of papal authority by future popes. For, as already Plato and Aristotle saw so clearly, monarchy is the best form of government when exercised by a just ruler, and the worst when exercised by a tyrant. If a bad pope can flex his pontifical muscles to tear down centuries of tradition and lead souls to perdition, obviously a good pope could use his power to confirm or clarify doctrines, form stable structures, and institute better laws.
Even if a future pope did nothing else than to vet candidates for the episcopacy carefully and appoint only the most orthodox, zealous, and devout, as some of the great papal reformers of the past have done, the Church on earth could begin its transformation from prostitute-chaplain of the new world order to the spiritual force behind the rise of a new Christendom.
I was invited to sign the Statement, but I declined chiefly on the grounds that I could not support the practical implication the document seeks to realise—that is, Pope Francis’s resignation. It seems to me that calling for the resignation of Francis undermines the office he holds, albeit unworthily. Were Francis to resign—of which there is very little hope—that might be sufficient to make papal resignation a new tradition, reducing the papal office to that of a mere chairman who simply holds it for a term and then disappears after he’s done enough damage. It seems to me that we must wait for Francis to pass away, and then hope—if he is indeed guilty of all of which he is accused in the Statement—that a condemnation of Francis is issued by one of his successors. In any case, I can’t help but feel that the papal office has already been so stripped of the sacrality which properly belongs to it, that we should not want to see it further undermined by successive resignations. Why am I wrong?
I will admit that yours is one of the only serious objections I’ve heard to this Statement, and I am grateful to you for making it.
I agree that resignation—the more correct term, philosophically if not canonically, would be abdication—is irregular and should never become the norm (and would that Benedict had not given in to his weaknesses by doing so). But all the same, abdication in a moment of constitutional crisis is something history shows us both in Christian monarchies and in the papacy, all of these having sacral status in their different ways. It is always regrettable and always disruptive to have a leader step down from his throne, but it is sometimes the right thing. Two resignations in a row would be bizarre, but can anyone deny we are living in bizarre times? Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, as the saying goes.
Recall that the evils of the ‘saeculum obscurum,’ the 10th century papal pornocracy or ‘Rule of the Harlots,’ required the intervention of an emperor for their resolution, nor was that the only time the Christian world benefited from external pressure exerted upon Rome. Minor or major renaissances often follow the darkest periods; seemingly, good times follow on bad times.
It seems to me that if we get a thoroughly Catholic pope someday, as I hope and pray we shall, he will precisely not be the ‘retiring type,’ but rather one who will see his way to the appropriately iconic re-sacralization of the office. He will know that it is not about him or his political pet projects, but about showing forth the glory of Christ the King through the splendor of pontifical ceremonies, a well-ordered papal court, and the recovery of symbols of martyrdom (=public witness), one of which is remaining in office until death.
Perhaps this is another example of the paradox I mentioned above: it may redound to the strengthening of the papacy for a bad pope to leave it behind, so that the institution may have a chance to heal from the damage he inflicted. I cannot stress this point enough: the signatories object to Pope Francis not for abstract reasons but because we believe he is actively damaging the Church on earth and bringing harm to souls every day that he remains in office. To propose that it is somehow better for such a one to remain in office for the reputation of the office seems to me a misplaced priority.
