Ultramontanists are like the bogeyman: a mythical being used to frighten children. Thus at The Catholic Thing, Fr. Jeffrey Kirby warns his readers about “the rise of the Ultramontanists.” You never know when the bogeyman is going to come and get you; you never know when the Ultramontanist is going to wreck the Church. It’s an always-present danger. I have very frequently been accused of being an Ultramontanist, for no other reason than that I defend the pope and believe the Holy Spirit safeguards the Church from ever teaching error. Thus whenever I see an article like this one, the first thing I do is check whether the author defines what an Ultramontanist is. Not everyone who uses the term does; it’s a disservice to the reader.
I’m glad to report that Ultramontanists do not exist.
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • April 15, 2024 • False Report; papacy
Now that we have seen how the Church defines infallibility at Vatican I, we can turn to what infallibility does not mean. And the first thing it does not mean is that a pope can never sin. Catholics would have to deny their own Church history to believe this claim, typically made by anti-Catholic Protestants. Popes Stephen VI, John XII, Urban VI, Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, and Paul IV (to name only a few) were notorious sinners. Catholics have hidden none of this and don’t need to.
There are two ways to misquote someone, and one of them is to get the words wrong. The other is to get the words right but take them so far out of context that you misrepresent what the author meant. At Crisis, someone named Kennedy Hall is the latest to revive a common misquotation of Bellarmine that falls under the latter species. His article is titled “Pope Francis’s Schism.” He does not mean that Pope Francis is in schism, or could go into schism. He means that the pope would cause a schism if he decides to prohibit bishops from allowing the Tridentine rite without Rome’s permission. The problem I have with all of this is less that Catholics like Mr. Hall are going around prophesying schism. My problem is the abuse of Bellarmine to justify it.
Jason Engwer at Triablogue revives this common argument in a blog post of January 15. Typically a Protestant will claim that it’s incongruous for Jesus to give Peter authority over the whole Church only to turn around five verses later and rebuke him and call him “Satan.” But Alt! the Protestant will say. Am I really supposed to believe Christ gives Peter infallibility, and the very first thing he does with it is to claim that Jesus will never be killed and rise from the dead? My answer is you’re conflating two separate questions.
I wrote on March 23, 2022, on Facebook, that the problem with claiming Benedict XVI was still the pope (as people like Patrick Coffin, formerly of Catholic Answers, claimed) was that, as an attempt to avoid sedevacantism, it led you into an inevitable trap. All that had to happen Mr. Coffin to become a sedevacantist was for Benedict XVI to die. And now he has, by his own confession on Twitter. Told you so.
Critics of Pope Francis claim to love tradition while time and again tradition turns out to be utterly foreign to them. And thus, in just the most recent example, the traddies decide that a Marian title from a Byzantine hymn that dates to before 1000 A.D. — well-known among Eastern Catholics and Orthodox Christians — must be a reference to Pachamama and proof of the heresies of Pope Francis. The irony is that genuine Catholic tradition also teaches that the pope is protected by God from leading the Church into error and that Catholics owe the pope religious submission, not rebellion (or as demon consultant Taylor Marshall puts it, “recognize and resist”).
“I exhort you as your fellow elder,” St. Peter writes, and it’s hard to know who first tried to use this verse as a proof-text against papal primacy. Why, Peter himself says he’s just one among many! So why does the pope lord it over the whole Church? One thing it’s not hard to know is that the Church Fathers are full of assertions that Peter does have primacy, and not one of them ever cites 1 Peter 5:1 to refute the idea. If the text does deny papal primacy, apparently none of the Church Fathers were aware of it. Dear reader, you’re welcome to search an index of Scripture references in the Church Fathers if you think you can find any of them citing 1 Peter 5:1 to deny the primacy of Peter. Surely they were aware of the text — Cyprian refers to it, as do Tertullian and Jerome — but none of them think it means that Peter is no more than the equal of all other bishops.
St. Francis de Sales, among others, disputes the notion that a pope could teach heresy: “In truth, it is necessary that we should follow him simply, not guide him; otherwise the sheep would be shepherds. … Now all this has not only been true of St. Peter, but also of his successors; for the cause remaining the effect remains likewise. The Church has always need of an infallible confirmer, to whom she can appeal; of a foundation which the gates of hell, and principally error, cannot overthrow; and has always need that her pastor should be unable to lead her children into error. The successors, then, of St. Peter all have these same privileges.”
Burke goes amiss when he imagines that a pope could teach error — that it’s possible to begin with — and when he speculates that the pope would have to be corrected in such a circumstance: “Therefore, any expression of doctrine or law or practice that is not in conformity with Divine Revelation, as contained in Sacred Scripture and the Church’s Tradition cannot be an authentic exercise of the Apostolic or Petrine ministry and must be rejected by the faithful. As Saint Paul declared: ‘There are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.’ ”
What if the pope suppressed what-if questions? But this one is easy, or should be: Of course the pope could suppress the Rosary. The question here is not would the he suppress it, or should he suppress it, but only could he. And of course the pope has the power to suppress a devotion. An obvious example of this is when, in 1959, John XXIII suppressed devotion to the Divine Mercy. (John Paul II later lifted the suppression, in 1978.) This kind of thing happens all the time. Now, the Rosary is so beloved, so traditional, so rooted and fixed in Catholic devotional practice that the chances of any such thing happening are all but zero; but there’s no reason the pope couldn’t do it.
Last month on Twitter, someone proposed a weird papal thought experiment in the form of a weirder prognostication. Mike Lewis had a screenshot and thread. Suppose, the unnammed twitster mused, that the next pope is Cardinal Burke, or Cardinal Sarah, or “anyone similarly-minded.” [Okay. And?] “Leftist extreme ultramonatanes [Head. Desk.] would have a hard choice: rally behind the pope without question (as they currently do), rethink their extreme [!] interpretation of ultramontanism, or break in some fashion.” Well, Monty, I’ll take door number one. And it’s not at all a “hard choice.”
Frequently someone who hates Pope Francis will call me a “papalolator,” or a “papal positivist,” or an “Ultramontanist,” or whatever the slur of the week is. Supposedly I think everything a pope says is infallible, or I think everything this pope says is infallible. And now this week, a Protestant apologist has decided that I think the papacy is “useless.” How wildly does Alt change with every new wind that blows! Said apologist is known on this blog as Steve “Purple” Hays. We’ve dueled before. Once upon a time, he imagined that I was trying to promote him to a bishoprick.
