Quo vadis, Pontifice?

 

A friend sent me this article earlier this week, indulging in rife speculation about Pope Francis’ potential resignation, largely based on his health issues and upcoming visit to a shrine visited by past Pontiffs who have resigned.

To be clear, what is most important is not idle speculation about the Pope’s resignation but genuine prayers for him as he gets nearer the end of his life and prayers for a holy successor, whoever that might be. 

And while the office of Roman Pontiff demands our filial obedience and respect, inward and outward, it also demands our honesty. 

Pope Francis is an indisputably bad Pope. He is a bad Pope whether you wanted reform of the Roman Curia to serve the Gospel instead of institutional self preservation and careerism. He is certainly a bad pope if you wanted a serious attempt to address the sexual abuse crisis by bringing the perpetrators and those who covered up for them to justice. He is a bad pope if you are a Catholic in the mold of JPII hoping to renew the Church with theology of the body and the new evangelization. He is a bad pope if you are a Vatican careerist looking for a stable work environment and competent boss. He is a bad pope if you are American and Catholic and have dealt with insults from your spiritual father for years. And he’s quite obviously a bad pope if you’re a traditionalist, being treated with disdain and ignorance for years before being attacked in ways that would be unthinkable if directed at Catholics who really do hate and work against the Church’s teachings. 

The reason is that he consistently puts himself and his personal preferences above the needs of his job. He prefers speaking off the cuff, he prefers working with a small group of loyalists rather than through a transparent, merit-based bureaucracy, he freezes people out when they call out his mistakes, and so on. While one can complain about the media twisting his words, the Pope has had decades in which to understand how the media operates and to learn how to avoid giving the media opportunities to do so, and to fight back and clarify when they do it anyway. He has not done so. One should not improvise when one is responsible for the salvation of billions. 

Living under a bad pope, and one who seems to attack her core moral teachings and traditions, is one of the bigger crosses one can bear. Yet bear it we must. He who endures to the end will be saved. It is not enough to assert that there were prior ages in which saints disagreed on who the valid pope was. There are no such issues at present: there is one incompetent Pope accepted almost universally within the Church and among the people of Rome, with a handful casting doubts about his legitimacy to free themselves from the cross God has given us all. 

And why shouldn’t it be our cross to bear? In Christ’s day, the Jewish high priests were appointed by Rome and openly apostatized to maintain Roman protection and comforts. Men like saints Simeon and Joseph were called to accept this for decades, and yet wait upon the Lord nonetheless. Saints like Peter Damian and Rita of Cascia lived under truly dreadful popes. 

They will be judged for their sins, and we will be judged for ours. Those include gratuitously insulting the pope and his actions when it is not necessary to do and in inappropriate ways. They also include not praying for the Pope as we ought. They even include shunning attempts to build strong relationships with our pastors, bishops, and seminarians. 

So pray for the Pope, and do not write off hope for him. To do so would be to lack faith in God’s grace, the power of prayer, and to ignore the historical examples ranging from Thomas Beckett to Paul III to Pius IX of men who started one way but ultimately did great things. 

O God, the shepherd and ruler of all the faithful, look down favourably upon Thy servant Francis., whom Thou hast been pleased to appoint past- or over Thy Church ; grant, we beseech Thee, that he may benefit both by word and example those over whom he is set, and thus attain unto life eternal, together with the flock committed to his care. Through our Lord…

Dominica Sanctissimae Trinitatis

 

Benedicta sit sancta Trinitas atque indivisa Unitas: confitebimur ei, quia fecit nobiscum msericordiam suam. Domine, Dominus noster, quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra!

Blessed be the holy Trinity and undivided unity, we will confess Him because He has granted us his mercy. Lord, our Lord, how wondrous is thy name o’er all the earth. 

Introit for the traditional Mass of Trinity Sunday

On Trinity Sunday in 2019, I nearly walked out of Mass at my local parish after a retired or almost-retired priest declared in his homily that the Holy Trinity was something that only mattered for philosophers and theologians. So much for loving God with all one’s mind and staying far away from anything that could be considered blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. In happier days, people used to talk about these matters in the streets the way today’s people do about the Johnny Depp defamation trial. 

In the end, I decided not to bother. There seemed no point in making a scene or saying anything to the priest afterward or writing a letter. The priest wasn’t going to change his stripes. Anything I could say, whether marshaling the sacrifices of Saint Athanasius, the writings of Augustine, Boethius, or Aquinas or the like would have made me seem like a radical and turned off my audience. 

While we had our child baptized at that parish a few months later, we almost left and went to the Latin Mass parish that we were already attending twice a month. And we would have too, if we had not become good friends with a family at the local parish and if the Latin Mass parish had not been struggling with a pastor fighting terminal cancer. 

A parish that would accept such a homily seemed like a parish that had given up on God. It seemed true when the secretary refused to schedule a baptism for our child without a birth certificate. It seemed true when the pastor, after baptizing our child, declared he had no problem retiring because the Bishops knew about the vocations crisis in the 80s and didn’t do anything about it. It seemed even more true less than a year later when we heard the parish took forever to figure out how to stream Masses and then after reopening began locking people out of Mass if they showed up a minute late and then separating larger families into distant pods of four. 

It was a trying time. The prior year we had returned to our house after flood damage made it uninhabitable for a full year. During our time out of the house, my father-in-law died suddenly. I was struggling with those burdens as well as dealing with two difficult children, with a third on the way who would promise to be even more difficult. In the midst of this, the McCarrick scandal broke in August 2018. 

There was no longer any denying that the Church was just like any other institution. It was clearly run by those who actively enabled serial abusers, and there was no legitimate reason for excusing the recent Popes either. There was simply no pretending that the state of the Church was in any way healthy, or that it was going to change for the better any time soon. 

I was at the end of my rope and the institutional church was doing its best to make my faith life difficult. What was the point of staying loyal to an institution that had given up on God at both the highest and lowest levels? 

On Trinity Sunday in 2020, after visiting a relative out of town I cautiously walked into a church for the first time in three months, masked and distanced. I quickly discarded the mask, and the distancing proved to be a joke as families crowded into the vestibule after running out of room in the nave due to every other pew being roped off. After Mass, my son compulsively hugged the priest. A whole mass of people congregated on the lawn outside, chatting excitedly. 

I will always cherish Trinity Sunday as it was the Sunday we showed that we had not given up on God. After being banned from the sacraments for months by our own bishops, we experienced an outpouring of divine grace and community like we had never before seen. And we weren’t even at our (new) home parish. 

I do not remember the homily, nor do I need to given the propers of the old Mass, the wealth of writing on the Trinity, and accessible footnotes and explainer text on it, from the saints, much of which is freely available online. 

Within a year, our fourth child was baptized in the traditional rite, and shortly thereafter the masks and ropes at Mass disappeared. 

In spite of everything, God has given me the foundation of traditional liturgy to restore my prematurely weary soul, which has led me to a community that continually nudges me forward, a strong pastor who knows his office and does it well, and a rich stock of catechesis for myself and for my children. 

And so, I practice singing the propers for this Sunday’s High Mass and continue dialing back on noise and passive entertainment to create room for my feeble mind to contemplate the Most Holy Trinity. 

Felix Dominica Sanctissimae Trinitatis. 

Thomistic Institute podcast on the Holy Trinity

Summa article on the Trinity (1.27)

Aquinas on Boethius’ De Trinitate

Augustine: De Trinitate

The Athanasian Creed

Whosoever willeth to be saved, * before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith.
Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, * without doubt he shall perish eternally.
Now the Catholic faith is this, * that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.
Neither confounding the Persons, * nor dividing the substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, * and another of the Holy Ghost.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is one, * the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, * and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father Uncreated, the Son Uncreated, * and the Holy Ghost Uncreated.
The Father Infinite, the Son Infinite, * and the Holy Ghost Infinite. * The Father Eternal, the Son Eternal, * and the Holy Ghost Eternal.
And yet they are not three Eternals, * but one Eternal.
As also they are not three Uncreated, nor three Infinites, * but One Uncreated, and One Infinite.
So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, * and the Holy Ghost Almighty.
And yet they are not three Almighties, * but One Almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son God, * and the Holy Ghost God.
And yet they are not three Gods, * but One God.
So the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, * and the Holy Ghost Lord.
And yet they are not three Lords, * but One Lord.
For, like as we are compelled by Christian truth to acknowledge every Person by Himself to be God and Lord, * so are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion to say, there be three Gods or three Lords.
The Father is made of none, * neither created, nor begotten.
The Son is of the Father alone: * not made, nor created, but begotten.
The Holy Ghost is of the Father, and the Son: * not made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
So there is One Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; * one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.
And in this Trinity is nothing afore or after, nothing is greater or less; * but the whole three Persons are Co-Eternal together, and Co-Equal.
So that in all things, as is aforesaid, * the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.
He therefore that willeth to be safe, * let him thus think of the Trinity.
But it is necessary to eternal salvation, * that he also believe faithfully the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The right Faith therefore is, that we believe and confess, * that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.
God, of the Substance of the Father, Begotten before the worlds: * and Man, of the substance of His mother, born in the world.
Perfect God, Perfect Man, * of a reasoning soul and human flesh subsisting.
Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, * inferior to the Father as touching His Manhood.
Who, although He be God and Man, * yet He is not two, but One Christ.
One, however, not by conversion of the Godhead into Flesh, * but by taking of the Manhood into God.
One altogether, not by confusion of Substance, * but by Unity of Person.
For as the reasoning soul and flesh is one man, * so God and man is One Christ.
Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, * rose again the third day from the dead.
He ascended into heaven, He sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty, * from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, * and shall give account for their own works.
And they that have done good shall go into life eternal, * but they that have done evil into eternal fire.
This is the Catholic Faith, * which except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be safe.