The more vigorously the primacy was displayed, the more the question came up about the extent and and limits of [papal] authority, which of course, as such, had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope’s authority is bound to the Tradition of faith. … The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.
Joseph Ratzinger
in The Spirit of the Liturgy
I am also reminded of what one of young Ratzinger’s mentors wrote on this topic.
Jesuit Fr. Karl Rahner was an immensely influential theological guru of a couple of generations of clerics and theologians. He is the darling, venerated oracle of the catholic left and modernists.
Here is a quote from Karl Rahner. This quote should be picked up and circulated widely. Particularly in view of a potential upcoming special gathering.
From Karl Rahner’s Studies in Modern Theology (Herder, 1965, pp. 394-395) under the subtitle:
A Distinction: Legal and Moral Norms
[…]
Imagine that the Pope, as supreme pastor of the Church, issued a decree today requiring all the uniate churches of the Near East to give up their Oriental liturgy and adopt the Latin rite….The Pope would not exceed the competence of his jurisdictional primacy by such a decree, but the decree would be legally valid.
But we can also pose an entirely different question. Would it be morally licit for the Pope to issue such a decree? Any reasonable man and any true Christian would have to answer “no.” Any confessor of the Pope would have to tell him that in the concrete situation of the Church today such a decree, despite its legal validity, would be subjectively and objectively an extremely grave moral offense against charity, against the unity of the Church rightly understood (which does not demand uniformity), against possible reunion of the Orthodox with the Roman Catholic Church, etc., a mortal sin from which the Pope could be absolved only if he revoked the decree.
From this example one can readily gather the heart of the matter. It can, of course, be worked out more fundamentally and abstractly in a theological demonstration:
1. The exercise of papal jurisdictional primacy remains even when it is legal, subject to moral norms, which are not necessarily satisfied merely because a given act of jurisdiction is legal. Even an act of jurisdiction which legally binds its subjects can offend against moral principles.
2. To point out and protest against the possible infringement against moral norms of an act which must respect these norms is not to deny or question the legal competence of the man possessing the jurisdiction.
[…]
I recall that the late Michael Davies used this argument in one of his books in the wake of the Novus Ordo.
By this approach a Pope could have the raw power, the juridical authority, to suppress the TLM (pace fans of Quo primum), but he clearly would not have the moral authority to do such a thing. It would be a…
“grave moral offense against charity”.
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Go! Father Z!
I absolutely reject the idea that a pope would have the juridical authority to rescind or prohibit a traditional rite of the Church.
For the argumentation:
SHORT FORM
HERE
LONG FORM
HERE
Further considerations:
HERE
A scary thought.
I wonder whether Rahner is going too far in terms of maintaining the possibility of something lacking moral rectitude but still being legally valid. Lack of moral rectitude can invalidate a law, in the sense that the law does not bind the subjects of the one who issued it. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae IaIIae 96) discusses the circumstances in which one is and is not obligated to obey an unjust law. He says that if a law is contrary to “human good” (not sneer quotes, just using Thomas’ terminology) one might still have to obey it for the sake of avoiding greater evil (the first example that comes to my mind is paying taxes at an excessively high rate), but if a law is contrary to “divine good” one should not obey it, and the example which Thomas gives actually pertains to worship. If the Pope were to require people to give up the Traditional Latin Mass, would that be contrary to “divine good”? But if it is contrary to “divine good” then it would be both immoral and, in the sense that people could rightfully ignore it, invalid.
a mortal sin from which the Pope could be absolved only if he revoked the decree.
Would this argument imply that Pope Paul VI was in a state of mortal sin (since, of course, he did something fundamentally similar with the Novus Ordo), and hence that his canonisation was invalid?
I think that the terminology being used by Rahner is confusing and might need to be refined in order to be fully correct. (This is not at all surprising, as he is hardly reliable on many other matters, though he was – broadly – a highly respected technician of theology.)
I think his initial citation of the jurisdictional scope of the pope’s authority is fine: the subject matters over which he can issue laws includes the use of the rites. From that standpoint, he can regulate and modify the usage of Eastern Uniate rites if necessary for the Church. This is different from a mere bishop, who can’t lay claim to that jurisdiction.
But there are other kinds of limits than those of subject matter. The pope can issue orders over the roles of bishops, he can depose a bishop, and he can dissolve a diocese, so “bishopric” is a subject matter within his jurisdiction, but he cannot abolish the bishopric altogether in its entirety, THAT act is not within his authority. And the basis of that limit is the Tradition by which the constitution of the Church is expressed. It’s not on the basis of a lack of jurisdiction over the subject matter, it’s a limit of a different nature – but one hard to name. If you think of jurisdiction (in terms of territory) as given by extension, there could instead be a limit that is more like an “intensional” (i.e. a command “too intense”), or a limit on another axis, “Traditional”.
Well, it is not at all clear that the pope’s authority over the Eastern rites extends to an act which is so contrary to Tradition as to abolish them all. I also happen to to think that the current “law” demanding bishops submit their resignations at age 75 at least brushes up against the limits of the papacy over the bishops: they don’t get their authority from the pope, they get it from God, they are not the pope’s delegates doing his bidding, and it is unclear how a “law” – formulated after 1950 years of the Church’s customs – could create a term limit on bishops. I shudder to think what will happen if / when a bishop simply declines to submit his resignation, as to the mess that could create, but it could be something like a constitutional crisis.
I am not historian enough to back this up with solidity, but it seems to me that part of the result from the history of early and medieval papacies and their sometimes ineffectual attempts to exert control over some Church issue, is that the end result seems to be something like the rest of the Church de facto saying “you don’t have that authority”, a kind of sensus fidelium combined with tradition stating a limit. This would be a very hard thing to prove, by the very nature of the case, so naturally we would have disputes about it.
Interesting.
@the original mr x
That would not render the canonization invalid.
Mr. X:
There is some dispute over whether Pope Paul VI actually abrogated the traditional liturgy. In Summorum Pontificum, Article 1, Pope BXVI writes; “It is therefore permitted to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal, which was promulgated by Blessed John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Church’s Liturgy.”
Ofc the usual suspects claim it was abrogated.