At Crisis, misquoting Bellarmine to justify schism.

here 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.

Mr. Hall, who appar­ent­ly sees spir­i­tu­al war­fare every­where he looks, is the author of two books whose titles make ref­er­ence to demons. One of them, Ter­ror of Demons, is about “reclaim­ing tra­di­tion­al Catholic mas­culin­i­ty.” Demons pre­fer “soft and effem­i­nate men,” accord­ing to the descrip­tion at TAN Books.

The oth­er, Lock­down With the Dev­il, is a nov­el about how Satan used the pan­dem­ic to attack the fam­i­ly. If you have $12.99 to burn, you can buy this Screw­tapi­an “part thriller, part doc­u­men­tary[,] and part Catholic cat­e­chism” at Ama­zon.

Mr. Hall also writes for Life Site News, One Peter Five, and Catholic Fam­i­ly News. His arti­cles have titles such as “Pros­e­ly­tiz­ing the Pope­s­plain­ers” and “Is the lat­est UFO talk a gov­ern­ment psy­op to threat­en our free­dom?”

His arti­cle at Cri­sis is titled, some­what less extrav­a­gant­ly, “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. Maybe there will be a schism. What do I know? My prob­lem is the abuse of Bel­larmine to jus­ti­fy it. Here are Bel­larmine’s words, as quot­ed by Mr. Hall, with­out any dis­cus­sion what­ev­er of con­text:

Just as it is lic­it to resist a Pon­tiff who attacks the body, so also is it lic­it to resist him who attacks souls or destroys the civ­il order or above all, tries to destroy the Church. I say that it is lic­it to resist him by not doing what he orders and by imped­ing the exe­cu­tion of his will.

Not only does Mr. Hall fail to give us the con­text of these words, but he is open­ly con­temp­tu­ous of the very idea that con­text mat­ters. “Crit­ics will say,” he writes, “[that] I am using this quote out of con­text; because, of course, the crit­ics are the guardians of what con­sti­tutes con­text and what doesn’t, just ask them.”

Mr. Hall seems to have a knee-jerk fear of elit­ism. If you insist that con­text mat­ters, you’re elit­ist, some­how. I don’t get the sense, from such snark, that the man has read De Romano Pon­tif­ice and could defend, from the text, the sup­po­si­tion that Bel­larmine was rec­om­mend­ing schism. I don’t get the sense that he could tell us what the con­text is. The rea­son I don’t is because Mr. Hall makes no effort to.

But on this blog, dear read­er, I do.

•••

Bel­larmine’s words above are in Book II, chap­ter 29 of De Romano Pon­tif­ice. You can find the text here. (Unlike Mr. Hall, I link to the texts I dis­cuss so you can check me out.) At this point in Book II, Bel­larmine has been argu­ing that “the Supreme Pon­tiff is judged by no one” (cf. Canon 1404) and that no one may depose a pope. In chap­ter 29, Bel­larmine refutes nine argu­ments in favor of the idea that a pope could be deposed. The sev­enth of these goes like this: If a pope were to invade a nation, not only could he be deposed, he could be killed in self-defense. The gist of Bel­larmine’s answer is that, in such a hypo­thet­i­cal, a pope could be resist­ed but not deposed. He treats them as two sep­a­rate ques­tions.

Hav­ing answered thus, he devel­ops the idea some more, and writes the words Mr. Hall quotes. Here they are again, this time from the trans­la­tion I link to. (Though it’s a dif­fer­ent trans­la­tion, the sense is the same.)

There­fore, just as it would be law­ful for to resist a Pon­tiff invad­ing a body [i.e., a sov­er­eign nation], so it is law­ful to resist him invad­ing souls or dis­turb­ing a state, and much more if he should endeav­or to destroy the Church. I say, it is law­ful to resist him, by not doing what he com­mands, and by block­ing him, lest he should car­ry out his will.

What Bel­larmine advis­es us to “resist” is a pope who com­mands some inher­ent wicked­ness, destruc­tive of souls or the Church itself. It would be law­ful for the Swiss Guard to resist the pope if he com­mand­ed them to arrest and water­board Bish­op Strick­land. It would be law­ful to resist the pope if he want­ed to fire­bomb the Vat­i­can Gar­dens, or if he issued a papal bull that he has dis­solved the papa­cy and the Church will hence­forth be gov­erned by a com­mit­tee of five car­di­nals, or the opin­ions of the edi­tors of Amer­i­ca, or ran­dom for­tune cook­ies opened when­ev­er Mark Shea orders Chi­nese take­out.

The stan­dard for “invad­ing souls” and “destroy[ing] the Church” is high. Bel­larmine means for us to under­stand it as the spir­i­tu­al equiv­a­lent of the pope invad­ing a sov­er­eign nation. It would have sur­prised Bel­larmine to learn that you could resist the pope if you did­n’t like his deci­sion about a par­tic­u­lar form of the litur­gy.

I sup­pose it’s pos­si­ble to make a coher­ent argu­ment that Bel­larmine thought you could resist the pope over a litur­gi­cal attach­ment. But Mr. Hall does not make that argu­ment. He does not try.

•••

Mr. Hall also has a defi­cient under­stand­ing of schism. He does not define it as canon law does: “refusal of sub­mis­sion to the Supreme Pon­tiff.” Instead he defines it gener­i­cal­ly, as “divi­sion between Chris­tians,” and some­thing that might actu­al­ly be good. Schism is good, he says, if your bish­op demands that you attend “an inter­re­li­gious ser­vice with snake wor­ship­pers” (as though that’s hap­pen­ing).

I admire Mr. Hal­l’s pow­ers of imag­i­na­tion more than his pow­ers of pre­ci­sion, but it is pre­ci­sion that is called for when you are dis­cussing schism. Schism is “refusal of sub­mis­sion to the Supreme Pon­tiff,” and it is a grave sin against the faith. We must nev­er speak of it inex­act­ly or light­ly. Still less may we treat it as a virtue or sign of supe­ri­or holi­ness.

Mr. Hall even com­pares those who would go into schism over a litur­gi­cal attach­ment to “the faith­ful who would not take part in the Ari­an destruc­tion of the Church.” You’d think Pope Fran­cis was ask­ing Catholics to deny Chris­to­log­i­cal dogmas—or any dog­ma. It’s slop­py, hys­ter­i­cal argu­ment to treat Tra­di­tiones Cus­todes as though an infal­li­ble truth of the faith is at stake and schism is required to defend that truth.

His arti­cle is full of these kind of dubi­ous, exag­ger­at­ed com­par­isons, from which we learn noth­ing.

But what we do learn is why the pope dis­cerned he had to restrict the Tri­den­tine rite. I could sense this was com­ing nine years ago when I wrote that the Latin Mass’s biggest ene­mies were Latin Mass Only­ists. When the TLM’s loud­est defend­ers admit they’re will­ing to go into schism over it (a form of the Mass, not the Mass itself), they only illus­trate why Pope Fran­cis believes that it is a threat to Church uni­ty. They unwit­ting­ly prove the pope cor­rect.