TurretinFan & the necessity argument against the papacy.

very now and then, an anti-Catholic apologist—he need not be Protes­tant; he could be an athe­ist, or a Hin­du, or an agnos­tic endocrinologist—will try to dis­cred­it the papa­cy, or the priest­hood, or tra­di­tion, or Mary gar­dens, or some oth­er ele­ment of the Church, by wav­ing his hand and say­ing, “We don’t need it.” Thus the false god of Neces­si­ty is invoked against what very God of very God wants us to have as a pure and unmer­it­ed gift. Tur­ret­inFan (known on this blog as Mr. X) is the lat­est to make this odd claim about the papa­cy. You can read his blog post here. It is short, so you won’t waste hours of your busy day wad­ing through swamps of rhetoric. War is kind.

Now, Mr. X’s claim rests on two obser­va­tions. The first of them is that “For a brief time ear­li­er this year, there was no pope.”

Mr. X unleash­es this shock­er upon us as though it real­ly were news. You would think this was the first time such a sad state of affairs had ever beset a wail­ing Church. Unless 1 Cor. 9:24 has no dis­cernible mean­ing, the papa­cy is sup­posed to be a relay race with the fish­er­man’s ring. Sic tran­sit glo­ria mun­di, there was no pope for two long weeks! The gap­ing wound in the heart of the Church has been hor­rif­i­cal­ly exposed by the Amaz­ing Mr. X of Some­where, Some­where!

But let us read on.

Dur­ing the inter­reg­num, Mr. X point­less­ly tells us—when there was no pope, and you could have heard an anx­ious pin drop, for noth­ing like it had ever been—camerlengo Tar­ci­sio Bertone, who is also the sec­re­tary of state, was in charge of run­ning the Vat­i­can gov­ern­ment.

Yes. This is how it works, right? Now, tech­ni­cal­ly, dur­ing a sede vacante the camer­len­go is the act­ing head of state of Vat­i­can City; the gov­er­nance of the Catholic Church, per the norms of Uni­ver­si Domini­ci Greg­is, is entrust­ed to the Col­lege of Cardinals—“solely for the dis­patch of ordi­nary busi­ness and of mat­ters which can­not be post­poned, and for the prepa­ra­tion of every­thing nec­es­sary for the elec­tion of the new Pope” [UDG 2]. Some­one must keep things going dur­ing a sede vacante and pre­pare for a suc­ces­sor. That’s the kind of thing Con­sti­tu­tions spell out. Where’s the shock in this? How is this dif­fer­ent from, well, any­thing in mat­ters of lead­er­ship and gov­er­nance? Heads of orga­ni­za­tions, of states, of church­es, of busi­ness­es, of rotary clubs, of schools, of super­mar­kets, of wrestling teams, of fra­ter­ni­ties and soror­i­ties and Fri­day night bowl­ing leagues and bar­ber shops fre­quent­ed by Mr. X, come and go. Often there are vacan­cies at the top. Pro­ce­dures exist for how to keep things run­ning in the mean­time. This is news? This is worth a blog post? This tells us some­thing that will shake us to the core?

Mr. X’s sec­ond obser­va­tion is that, despite this “break” in the “unbro­ken suc­ces­sion” (which he admits was only a break “of sorts”), “life went on.”

Well jeep­ers me, you would think the Catholic teach­ing was that, with­out a pope, even for one sec­ond, all men every­where will die. A thir­teen-day inter­reg­num, dur­ing a papal con­clave, con­sti­tutes a break in suc­ces­sion? The new pope must be in place the sec­ond the last pope dies, or resigns, or is sud­den­ly whisked away in a char­i­ot of fire? If not, it makes Catholics every­where trem­ble for fear of the Rap­ture? (We don’t fare well in the Rap­ture, if you recall.) If not, the papa­cy has been snuffed like an altar can­dle after Mass? If not, the keys of the king­dom have been melt­ed down to liq­ui­date the nation­al debt? Since there was a sede vacante for thir­teen days, Fran­cis did­n’t real­ly suc­ceed Bene­dict after all; he’s the first pope in a rein­vent­ed papa­cy? Where does Mr. X get this idea? Does he make this stuff up as he goes along? The dust storm that clouds this des­per­ate man’s think­ing would make Tom Joad say, “God has blessed us sev­en­fold.”

And if you think all this is banal, dear read­er, you have not read far enough into the post. For look:

Life would have gone on had the car­di­nals not picked a suc­ces­sor. The bish­op of Rome is real­ly not nec­es­sary for any­one. Peo­ple who had ques­tions about the mean­ing of Scrip­ture found answers. … Any argu­ment for the papa­cy … needs to come from some oth­er quar­ter than from neces­si­ty.

Well, what does Mr. X think? That when Catholics have a ques­tion about the mean­ing of Scrip­ture, they call the pope on the phone or send him an e‑mail? That unless there’s a pope around ready to take the call, they can’t go to a Catholic com­men­tary, or ask their priest? That is not what we think a pope is for. That is a car­i­ca­ture.

What lies beneath all this talk on Mr. X’s part is—bear with me while I explain—the bias of sola scrip­tura. For a Protes­tant, the whole point of life as a Chris­t­ian, after you are saved, is the exe­ge­sis of Scrip­ture. Once you are saved, not much else mat­ters but what the Scrip­ture says. So for a Protes­tant, an infal­li­ble pope—if such a thing exists—is point­less unless the pope can give us the defin­i­tive exe­ge­sis of every verse of Scrip­ture. There would be no oth­er point to a papa­cy but that. Mere admin­is­tra­tion can be done by any­one. But Chris­tian­i­ty itself lives or dies by exe­ge­sis. So if, dur­ing a sede vacante, a Catholic can fig­ure out the mean­ing of some dif­fi­cult text in Hebrews, it must mean the papa­cy is unnec­es­sary.

But the very same line of rea­son­ing could be used as an argu­ment against the pres­i­den­cy. There was a break, of sorts, in the “unbro­ken suc­ces­sion” of the pres­i­den­cy after Pres­i­dent Kennedy died but before Vice Pres­i­dent John­son could be sworn in. And life went on. The race did not become extinct at 2:00 EST on Novem­ber 22, 1963. Wal­ter Cronkite lived. Life would have gone on if a spe­cial elec­tion need­ed to be called. (Assum­ing such was the method pro­vid­ed by the Con­sti­tu­tion).

Strict­ly speak­ing, of course, the pres­i­den­cy isn’t “nec­es­sary,” if you under­stand the con­cept of neces­si­ty in the strictest, most lim­it­ed pos­si­ble sense (with­out this, we will all stop breath­ing). The Founders could have set up any form of gov­ern­ment they wished. They could have cho­sen rule by a King, or a com­mit­tee of Bap­tist elders, or eleven pipers pip­ing. But the point isn’t what we think we “need,” for strict­ly speak­ing there isn’t any sin­gle form of gov­ern­ment, Church or State, that we “need.” The point, rather, is what the Founders intend­ed to give us.

And strict­ly speak­ing, Mr. X is right: The papa­cy isn’t “nec­es­sary”; but the point isn’t what is “nec­es­sary,” but what Christ intend­ed for His Church. Whether some of us feel we need that or not is beside the point. Strict­ly speak­ing, the Incar­na­tion, the Cru­ci­fix­ion, and the Res­ur­rec­tion weren’t nec­es­sary. God could have cho­sen to redeem us by dif­fer­ent means; He could have cho­sen to redeem us with a sim­ple wave of his hand, and no bloody sac­ri­fice on Cal­vary. But that’s not what He did choose. The point is what He choos­es, not what human beings feel they need.

But if Mr. X real­ly believes that a tem­po­rary sede vacante dur­ing a papal con­clave is an argu­ment against the Catholic claim of an “unbro­ken suc­ces­sion,” then I sub­mit to you that he is engag­ing in the kind of sopho­moric “clev­er­ness” that might be con­vinc­ing to—well, sophomores—but which ought to be beneath him.

The pope is the teacher of the whole Church; that much is true. But that does­n’t mean that Catholics must ring him up for every ques­tion that pops into their head. The Church does­n’t aban­don them to con­fu­sion if their ques­tions occur dur­ing a sede vacante. Com­men­taries, cat­e­chisms, the hom­i­lies of priests: These all flow from what the Church has already taught for 2000 years. These are avail­able to any Catholic at any time. Does Mr. X real­ly mean for us to believe that when there’s a sede vacante the slate is wiped clean and the Church has to start over again as if it were 33 A.D.? Bible com­men­taries are all null and void until there’s a new pope to speak? The Church is lost on the mean­ing of Luke 22:19? No. It is a weird fal­la­cy to think that, though the pope teach­es the whole Church, one must con­sult with him per­son­al­ly every time he is con­fused about a text of Scrip­ture. Popes are not meant to func­tion that way.

So then Mr. X makes the oppo­site fal­la­cy and sug­gests that, if the pope is not need­ed to answer Joe Catholic’s ques­tion about Psalm 105, the papa­cy is no more than a tem­po­ral, polit­i­cal office. He says:

The Roman Catholic Church could­n’t exist as such with­out the pope in the long run, because of var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tive tasks that fall to the pope. … But those tasks are not tasks that are real­ly nec­es­sary for the bish­op of Rome to be doing.

Of course—again—one could say the same thing about any office with­in the Church. Strict­ly speak­ing, any­one can per­form its admin­is­tra­tive tasks. Why do we need a bish­op of Rome? Why do we need an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Bap­tist Church? What Mr. X would say about elders in the Reformed Church, he over­looks about the pope: It is not mere­ly a tem­po­ral office, with par­tic­u­lar admin­is­tra­tive tasks to be car­ried out, but a spir­i­tu­al office that has as its end the care of souls.

The pope’s neces­si­ty tran­scends these two reduc­tive fal­lac­i­es: sole source for every ques­tion of bib­li­cal exe­ge­sis that comes up, or mere admin­is­tra­tive func­tionary. Christ gives Peter the keys to the king­dom of Heav­en. There are his­tor­i­cal rea­sons why the pope also acquired the keys to Vat­i­can City. And, of course, the han­dling of such things as appoint­ments with­in the Church is nec­es­sary to its being able to func­tion, in the same way that it falls to the pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States to appoint cab­i­net offi­cers and Supreme Court jus­tices. But none of these things are what the papa­cy is about, which is the care of souls. The pope’s role is to be the supreme teacher of the faith and the supreme shep­herd of souls. No one else can ful­fill that spir­i­tu­al mis­sion because the pope alone is who Christ appoint­ed. Christ could have cho­sen to teach and care for the peo­ple of God anoth­er way. But he did­n’t.

Real­ly, those on the Reformed side need to come up with bet­ter argu­ments. Any argu­ment against the papa­cy must be made on the basis of what Christ did or did not intend, not on any sub­jec­tive, earth-bound idea about what’s “nec­es­sary.”