I am one of the “New Papolaters,” according to One Luther Five.

here I was, dear read­er, mind­ing my own busi­ness when I noticed a sud­den spike in traf­fic com­ing from a post at One Luther Five. Some­one named Eric Sam­mons had just accused me of “idol­a­try.” How cute; I had to dou­ble check that I was­n’t read­ing some anti-Catholic, King James Only­ist blog.

I was­n’t alone—the oth­er “new pap­o­laters” (you have to fol­low Mr. Sam­mons’ links to find out who they are, because he does­n’t name us in the text) are Austen Iver­eigh, Dawn Eden Gold­stein, Rich Raho (first I’d heard of him), Mas­si­mo Fag­gi­oli, and Mike Lewis.

So I’m in good com­pa­ny, though for some rea­son Mark Shea did­n’t make the cut. Mr. Sam­mons alone will have to explain that to us.

•••

Any­way, I decid­ed I would take Mr. Sam­mons just seri­ous­ly enough to check out what, in his view, the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a “new pap­o­later” actu­al­ly are. How for­tu­nate I was to dis­cov­er that he list­ed three. The “new papolaters”—not to be con­fused with the old pap­o­laters, i.e., sedevacantists—“are those who believe that a Catholic should”:

• hang on every word of the cur­rent pon­tiff
• accept his every pub­lic pro­nounce­ment as Gospel truth
• nev­er crit­i­cize him, even slight­ly, in pub­lic

Dear read­er, this is com­i­cal. Mr. Sam­mons’ view of me—and he and I have nev­er, to my knowl­edge, exchanged words on a sin­gle occasion—is by turns car­toon­ish and false.

I am not sure what he thinks it means to “hang on every word” of the pope, but I can guar­an­tee you I have read maybe five per­cent of every­thing the pope has said. What hap­pens is, some ran­dom papal utter­ance comes across my news feed and I dis­cov­er that a small but vocal sub­set of Catholics is hav­ing faint­ing fits over it. So I decide to check it out, con­clude that there is noth­ing amiss, and put up an arti­cle.

A great part of my day, how­ev­er, is spent teach­ing chil­dren to play the piano, prac­tic­ing, and per­form­ing; and the major­i­ty of my men­tal ener­gy goes into that and tak­ing care of my home and my wife. I have far too much going on to sit on the edge of my seat and wait upon the next words the pope speaks. My advice to any­one who actu­al­ly does so sit on the edge of their seat is to find some­thing use­ful to do, because that sounds like a fret­ful way to live.

I’ve lost track of how many times some out­raged soul on Twit­ter has asked me, “Oh yeah, and what about when Pope Fran­cis said x, y, and z?” and I had no idea what they were talk­ing about. This is because I don’t read every­thing the pope says; I trust that the Church will be okay. There are peo­ple on Twit­ter who seem to have read his every utterance—not in a state of pap­o­la­try, but in a state of pan­ic.

•••

And the last two items on Mr. Sam­mons’ list are just sim­ply false, as regards myself. Accept Pope Fran­cis’s “every pub­lic pro­nounce­ment as Gospel truth?” “Nev­er crit­i­cize him, even slight­ly, in pub­lic”?

Dear Mr. Sam­mons, please! May I intro­duce you to a cou­ple of posts where I crit­i­cized the pope, where I said he was wrong about some­thing?

Here’s one. In this arti­cle, I say that Pope Fran­cis is wrong about the use of con­tra­cep­tion in com­bat­ting the Zika virus.

Here’s a sec­ond; and here’s a third. In these, I say that Pope Fran­cis was wrong when he claimed that Mar­tin Luther “did not err” on jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.

And here’s a fourth, in which I say that Pope Fran­cis real­ly ought to answer the dubia.

My view is that the pope can not bind the Church to error, because the Holy Spir­it pro­tects him from doing so. My view is that the pope’s authen­tic Mag­is­teri­um requires our “reli­gious assent,” because the Cat­e­chism tells me so. My view is that the Holy Spir­it pro­tects the pope from con­tra­dict­ing or chang­ing the deposit of faith. My view is that the pope’s teach­ing must be inter­pret­ed through the hermeneu­tic of con­ti­nu­ity.

My view is not that a pope may nev­er be crit­i­cized or that we must sign up for text alerts so we won’t miss a sin­gle word the pope says.

•••

I don’t accuse Mr. Sam­mons of calum­ny so much as I accuse him of igno­rance. As evi­dence that I am one of the “new pap­o­laters,” he linked to a sin­gle arti­cle of mine—a sin­gle arti­cle!—from 2015.

I find this too com­i­cal to real­ly be offend­ed in any way.