Were There Really Revolutionary Popes? By Caminante Wanderer
I sincerely thank all those who have taken the time to read, think and write on the blog, beyond personal opinions and sympathies.
There are two ideas. The first is that the popes of the last century and a half, beginning with Pius IX, were revolutionary because they adopted "the outlines of the modern revolutionary state on the governance of the Church and the conception of papal power as absolute, sovereign, unrestricted and the foundation of the Church itself". To deepen this position, I invite you to read Eck's text itself and his comments, as well as this post I published exactly two years ago today, "The Tradition Engulfed by the Magisterium".
The other idea is that the truly revolutionary popes were Paul VI and subsequent popes up to Francis, while the previous popes were not revolutionary because they never committed "revolutionary errors in their magisterial function". Whatever errors they may have committed on the level of government or prudence - even if some of them were very serious - none of them failed to exercise their magisterial office in a manner faithful to revelation. In none of the accused popes is there to be found any teaching contrary to Catholic faith or morals."
This position could be summarised by saying that the ultramontane popes, and I use this term for the sake of simplicity and without any restrictive intention, were not revolutionaries because in the exercise of their munus docendi they taught the Catholic faith in its integrity and consequently did not advocate revolutionary doctrines, even if they occasionally made governmental decisions of a prudential nature that could be considered revolutionary.
It seems to me that the two positions do not apply to exactly the same subject of discussion, at least not in the same depth.
While the latter focuses its argument on the magisterial dimension of the Roman pontificate, the former looks at this institution from a broader and deeper point of view.
But apart from the more or less exact agreement on the subject matter, what is at stake is a really important element in the life of the Church today and especially in the perspective of the future: what should a restored Church look like? What role should the Pope play?
Let us briefly look at some cases to understand this question. When Pius IX proclaimed two dogmas during his pontificate - the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility - which had never been done before, he did so for a revolutionary reason, because there was no theological need for such proclamations.
The need was rather to reassert papal authority at a time when it was threatened by anti-clerical nations and powerful Freemasonry. And when the pontiff himself drafts the Syllabus, he goes into specific discussion of the issues raised by the liberals, in the terms used by the liberals.
When Pius X decided to write a code of canon law, he broke with what traditional societies had done up to the French Revolution and embraced the revolutionary legislative forms of Napoleonic codification, as opposed to the tried and tested traditional law of compiling canons, rescripts and formularies. All canon law appeared as an act of the will of a single pope, whereas in the traditional way the whole Church was involved with the pope as the final arbiter.
And it was foreseeable that sixty years later a new code would be promulgated with John Paul II and that Francis had already amended it several times, most recently a few days ago.
Canon law became an instrument of papal whims or preferences thanks to Pius X, which would be absolutely unthinkable in a traditional society. This is what Eck calls a "revolution". The other view, however, regards them as correct and indisputable acts of the papal magisterium, since none of these facts teaches a revolutionary doctrine.
If one were to resurrect St. Thomas Aquinas on the occasion of his Jubilee and ask him for his opinion, he would probably say without hesitation that he agrees with Eck. And he would probably do so with a sentence he borrowed from Aristotle and repeated in various places in his work: Eadem est scientia oppositorum (e.g. S.Th, I, 75, 6c) and which can be translated as: "The knowledge of opposites is the same", or: "The knowledge of opposites is the same knowledge".
In other words, every contradiction reveals a prior commonality. For in order to contradict each other, the opposing parties must agree on what they disagree about. What one claims must be exactly the same as what the other denies, otherwise there is no contradiction at all.
John's "A" and Peter's "not A" must be based on the same "A". Therefore, any conflict necessarily takes place in a common context. Put it this way: in order to fight a battle, the disputants must have a common ground on which to stand and fight over. Consequently, every disagreement builds on a deeper prior agreement. Eadem est scientia oppositorum.
The ultramontane popes decided to oppose the revolution and defend Catholic truth by entering the battlefield chosen by the revolution and using the same weapons of revolution.
When liberals or Marxists said "A" and they replied "No A", in reality both agreed on the existence, meaning and necessity of "A".
The teaching Church became an apologetic Church. It used all its forces to defend itself against the enemy on the enemy's ground and with the enemy's weapons. Undoubtedly she would be defeated. For strife is like a mirror. If we allow the enemy to fight us on his terms, we allow him to simply turn us into his inverted image, which will be just as distorted as the original. Eadem est scientia oppositorum.
This is why the temptation of apologetics to turn Christian faith and "militancy" into pure apologetics is so risky. No one doubts that apologetics is sometimes necessary, especially when it comes to bringing those who are furthest from the truth out of their errors, but the life and formation of the Christian must not be reduced to it alone, for in doing so we would be falling into a well-disguised trap.
We cannot discuss whether the tree grows more or less crooked; the problem is that the tree is planted in the wrong place.
We cannot, for example, argue with pro-abortionists by talking about the "rights" of women and the "rights" of the unborn child. To speak of "rights" is already to enter the battlefield of revolution and use their own weapons.
The realistic and traditional position will simply speak of mother and child; and mothers always protect and nurture their children; they do not kill them. The tree is planted in the wrong place.
We cannot oppose homosexual "rights" because the division of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals is an invention of the revolution. The term "homosexual" was coined in 1869 by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a forerunner of the gay movement. Before that, it did not exist, that is, there was no noun "homosexual" to describe a person. There were men and women, some of whom were tempted - and succumbed to temptation like every child of Eve - to enjoy themselves with persons of the same sex. But they were not a "category" distinct from "heterosexuals"; they were not a "collective"; they were not a homosexual "substance" distinct from heterosexual "substance".
If you accept and argue with the categories of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" from the outset, we run out of arguments to prevent the addition of other categories: trans, non-binary and all the + you want to add to the LGBT+ acronym.
Certainly sodomy was a sin that "cries out to heaven" because of its particular gravity, as the Catechism teaches, as was murder, oppression of the poor and payment of unjust wages. However, it has never occurred to anyone, except perhaps a Marxist, to divide and classify people into "meek" and "murderers" or into "generous" and "exploiters".
The murderer and the exploiter are definitely sinners who commit such grave sins as sodomy, but they are not a "collective" with whom one could argue about their more or less extensive rights. So to argue about the place of homosexuals in the Church is to enter the territory of the enemy and to become entangled in categories created by him for his purposes. The tree is planted in the wrong place.
Eck's "revolutionary popes" wanted to defeat the world that was coming at them by entering into a discussion that had already been manipulated in favour of the world, and this is the only kind of discussion that can be had if we uncritically use the same distorted concepts and categories of the world.
We Catholics do not share the worldview of our colleagues sufficiently to take their resolutions for granted, so we cannot simply adopt a pro or con stance. Instead, we must rise above the conflicts we see around us to see above them the truth they conceal.
This is precisely why I justify the traditional character of the papacy of Benedict XVI. Long before he was elected to the throne of Peter, he spoke to us of that Church which, far from and outside the world plunged into barbarism, "finds refuge in a spirit of penance and religion in the inhuman solitude of an inaccessible hiding place; there it becomes mountainous, tiny, nourished by grass and earth, and becomes an organic heritage in which man dwells".
