f it happens,” the canon says, “that the Roman Pontiff resigns his office, it is required for validity that the resignation is made freely and properly manifested.” If the pope resigns under the pressure of a public campaign in the media, he does not act freely. Consequently the resignation is not valid. Consequently any one elected by a conclave is an antipope.
Remember when a number of reactionaries claimed that Benedict XVI’s resignation was not valid because of private pressure? I do. Good times. Fake Site News was eager to report such claims. Benedict, Fake Site reported, resigned because of “tremendous pressure.” One Luther Five also theorized in this vein; and Donald R. McClarey at Americanist Catholic even posited that the sulfurous Lavender Mafia was behind it. The gays were at the back of it. But this all took place in private.
So think about that. According to these sources—Fake Site News; One Luther Five; Americanist Catholic—Benedict’s resignation was invalid because of presumed private pressure to resign.
But now reactionary Catholics—inspirited by Archbishop Viganò and his long accusation that Pope Francis knew about McCarrick’s sexual misdoings and covered them up —are pressuring Pope Francis to resign, quite out in the open. And Fake Site News and its reactionary compeers are busily promoting it all. Laura Ingraham calls for the pope to resign on Twitter, and lo, Fake Site is instantly on it.
Fake Site had already posted a whack-job of an article by the wild reactionary Dr. Peter Kwasniewski; in it the serpentine Dr. K. hissed venom at Pope Francis in practically every other sentence. The very balanced Dr. K. bewails the pope’s “depravity” and “mendacity.” The pope is “full of disrespect” for “the limits of his office.” His homilies are “tortuous” and “doctrinally suspect.” He has an “uncatholic mind.” He gives “sloppy interviews.” (Take a long breath. The hypertensive Dr. K. is just getting started.) The pope has “an agenda of seculariation.” The synods were “papally rigged,” and Amoris Laetitia was their “spawn.” The pope “muddied the waters of Humanae Vitae. He is “ambivalent” in condemning homosexuality. He has a “flaccid commitment to justice.” Oh, and he’s “neither holy nor a father.” But Fake Site constantly insists that it is a very neutral and stable publication and its credulous readers bestow accolades upon the “uplifting” Dr. K.
Meanwhile Church Petulant openly calls for Pope Francis to resign. (They also plead for your financial help, since they must “prepare for war.” They take Matt. 10:34 too literally.)
Well, you must be consistent. If you think B16’s resignation was invalid due to mere hypothetical pressure, exerted on upon him in private by the wicked gay cabal, then manifest pressure upon Pope Francis in public would certainly make his invalid. It is at the least hypocritical that the very people who, once upon a time, speculated that B16’s resignation was invalid due to private pressure, would now turn around and promote public pressure for Pope Francis’s resignation.
MORLINO POISONS THE WELL
I don’t know if Viganò’s accusations be true or not. I am skeptical, but I do not know and it is not the point of this post to try his claims. We should know the truth, whatever it is. And for that reason, I have a very low view of Bishop Morlino’s effort to poison the well against the press by denying their “professional maturity.” It is as though he means to say: “Now, the press, pshaw, you can’t believe anything that they’re going to tell you. They’re fake news. You must believe us, we have the ‘canonical procedures’ to investigate these things internally.” And so on. And all at the very time when nothing has been more surely proven than that the Church has tried for decades to sweep this under the rug and has not been handling it properly. Even Viganò is guilty of it, and he wants to deflect attention to Pope Francis? I’m not buying it, Morlino.
If Viganò is not telling the truth, then this is obviously a coup against the pope. He is using the victims—not seeking justice for them, but using them—in an attempt to replace the pope with someone more to his own liking. Possibly himself, or Cardinal Burke, who seems to have requisitioned Liberace’s wardrobe as a suitable get-up for a medieval renaissance. I tell you, we must really be sure we know the facts here. This is dangerous business.
But if Viganò (rhymes with Figaro) is telling the truth, then putting canonically invalid pressure on the pope to resign achieves a schism. It achieves a sede vacante. It solves…what? If you’re going to put pressure on the pope, put pressure on him to finally do something about this crisis. After all, the pope has already forced Cardinal McCarrick to resign. He has already accepted resignations from bishops in Chile. He has shown he is willing to take action; and if pressuring him to go much further is necessary, then do that. But don’t pressure just the pope. There’s a lot of guilt to go around; it’s a big Church. It’s catholic. Pressure all the other many other bishops and cardinals who have covered up this evil, including Viganò himself.
But I can’t see how an invalid resignation—a schism, a sede vacante, the election of an antipope—solves the problem. It only creates a new one on top of the one we already have. Unless, you know, you have reasons to want that.
Discover more from To Give a Defense
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.