[Editor: The following texts reflects the personal opinion of the authors.]
Prefatory note: Ever since the SSPX announced the forthcoming illicit consecrations of bishops, many aspects have been discussed. One aspect, however, which lies at the core of the SSPX’s argumentation—namely, their concept of the origin of episcopal power of governance and its theological consequences—has not yet received the attention it deserves. The subject is sensitive because it concerns the First Vatican Council. I personally consider this essay, which was first published at https://einsprueche.substack.com/, to be truly fundamental: the author’s central intention is to defend the priesthood, the sacrifice, and the rite, and he does so with great consistency. The second part will follow soon, which returns to the question of the papacy and then draws conclusions on the Society of St. Pius X. We must begin to discuss these issues with intellectual honesty and without glossing over existing contradictions. —PAK
The Kingship of Christ and the Aporias of the Roman Church
Vigilius
The argumentation of the Society of St. Pius X
In a noteworthy text from February 4, 2026, the SSPX rejected the Roman statement that the announced, unauthorized episcopal consecrations constitute a schismatic act.[1] The Superior General of the Society, Davide Pagliarani, attached this rejection to his recent letter to Prefect Fernández.
Pagliarani justifies the non-schismatic character of the unauthorized episcopal consecrations by arguing, with reference to the pre-conciliar provisions on episcopal jurisdiction, that the SSPX bishops are merely auxiliary bishops and do not arrogate any power of jurisdiction. Such an arrogation would indeed, according to Pagliarani’s assessment, be a schismatic act.
This argument depends constitutively on the view that episcopal jurisdiction is not conferred by the act of consecration itself but only by an act of papal conferral. According to this view, only the pope possesses power of jurisdiction, which he grants to the bishops. In this conception, the bishops relate to the pope in a way analogous to that in which priests relate to bishops or auxiliary bishops relate to the diocesan bishop. Consequently, consecration as such merely confers on the bishop the competence to ordain priests and administer confirmation. This conferral of competence, even if not permitted by the pope, cannot yet produce a schism—because no bishops are established here who would be, so to speak, ontological revolutionaries against the sovereign. So the fact that even the SSPX does not doubt that consecrations would produce a schism if the power of jurisdiction were already imparted by consecration itself is therefore due to the fact that the SSPX accepts the primacy of the pope’s jurisdiction as formulated by Pius IX, precisely in his own understanding.
It may seem puzzling at first that Rome declares the unauthorized episcopal consecrations to be a challenge to papal primacy while the SSPX argues that it is precisely they who defend the pope’s “divine right” to confer episcopal jurisdiction, and therefore reject the accusation that they are threatening the pope’s power of jurisdiction through the episcopal consecrations. However, these statements operate on different levels; they are formulated from incompatible systematics. One must consider the frame of reference in which each one is arguing.
Pointing toward the different frames of reference now leads directly to the decisive systematic issue. For the position claimed by the Society contradicts the teaching of Vatican II and the current canon law, which was promulgated by Pope John Paul II under the influence of the last council. In the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium, the Council teaches that power of jurisdiction is not conferred by an act of the pope’s will distinct from consecration, but fundamentally already by the sacramental act itself. From the perspective of the Council, therefore, unauthorized episcopal consecrations must be judged as schismatic acts in themselves. This means nothing less than that there is a caesura in Church doctrine on the question of jurisdiction and consecration.[2]
While the SSPX sees this caesura as directed against divine law itself, I consider this theological connection of the power of jurisdiction to the sacrament to be indispensible. Moreover, I consider it only a necessary first step on the much longer path to a complete restoration of the sacramental principle and the ordained ministry. The Council has by no means followed this path to its conclusion.
In a way, Vatican II, through its lack of consistency, even exacerbated the aporias in which the Church has become entangled. This is so because it placed the well-justified reintegration of the power of jurisdiction into the sacrament abruptly alongside the doctrine of the universal papal primacy of jurisdiction, which was still kept completely untouched. Here, the SSPX, with its old view, is at least partially more consistent. And it recognizes that the last Council’s conception is inconsistent. For the question is undeniable: what is the meaning of a sacramentally-based jurisdictional power of the bishop if, at the same time, the pope is the sole ruler of the Church, with immediate authority in all matters, and able to command every bishop in an unquestionable manner? How can one reconcile a grant of jurisdiction from Christ through episcopal ordination with a concentration of all jurisdiction in the hands of the pope—when the papacy is not even a sacrament?
For the sake of upholding Vatican I, the current canon law chose the provision of the necessity of a further papal intervention, which in a sense actualizes the power of jurisdiction that already exists in substance and makes it a concretely exercised power in the first place. The SSPX correctly sees that, assuming that consecration already confers power of jurisdiction in the proper sense, this provision is “contrived.” With this distinction, the logical inconsistency between an episcopal jurisdiction coming from the ordination itself and the papal potestas iurisdictionis which is still untouched is only covered up.
The systemic differentiation of the offices of Christ
However, this logical inconsistency is heuristically productive. For it indicates the difficulty of integrating the papacy, as it took formal shape in Vatican I, into the sacramental cosmos of the Catholic Church. This crucial problem reflects, in concentrated form, all the unresolved questions of the discourse on Holy Orders.
The root of all these issues consists in the systemic differentiation of the three offices of Christ—namely as high priest, king, and teacher—which the Church has long practiced at the level of ecclesial offices. These offices of Christ must be reflected in the theological definition of ecclesial office, but in my opinion they are not reflected there in the correct ordering logic. This is highly consequential.
In order to realize this nexus of problems, it is helpful to start again with the position taken by the SSPX. In the context of its criticism of Vatican II, the SSPX raises questions that reveal this nexus of problems: “Indeed, if the power of jurisdiction is conferred by consecration, how is it that an elected Sovereign Pontiff who has not yet been consecrated bishop still possesses by divine right the fullness of jurisdiction, as well as infallibility, from the moment he accepts his election?”
The SSPX refers here to the legal provision, which is still valid in principle, that three conditions suffice for the assumption of the papal office: it must be a legitimate election, the election must be freely accepted by the person elected, and the candidate must be a baptized Catholic male—not even needing to be a priest or a deacon. Certainly, the current canon law adds in Canon 332 § 1 the provision that a man who has not yet been ordained a bishop, and who has been elected pope and has accepted the election, must be ordained a bishop immediately. This provision is a reference to Vatican II.
However, the canon is unclear in its wording and is the subject of controversy among canon lawyers. Yet this lack of clarity only indicates—analogous to the dilemma of the two jurisdictions—the dilemma that two provisions are to be linked that do not fit together organically: the papacy is not, in itself, a sacramental office; it consists in a universally extending potestas absoluta. This potestas absoluta differs in essence from the power of jurisdiction of the ordained office, which always relates to a specific diocese or parish. The attempt to sacramentally contain this papal office through the new canon law only obscures this essential difference, or, respectively, the fact that, in the still dominant conception of the papacy, a man who has not yet been ordained would already be pope from the moment he accepts his election and would possess plenitudo potestatis. Strictly speaking, this man elected pope could strike the aforementioned ordination provision from canon law with immediate effect.
In this context, the Society of St. Pius X also refers to the structurally identical case concerning the appointment, to diocesan ordinary, of a man who may also not yet belong to the clerical state. It asks: “By the same logic, if it is the consecration that confers jurisdiction, then residential bishops who have been appointed but not yet consecrated, although already established at the head of their diocese as true pastors, would have no power of jurisdiction and no right to sit in council, whereas in reality they clearly possess both prerogatives before their episcopal consecration.”
When one actually realizes this separation of the offices of governance and teaching on the one hand and the priesthood on the other, as accurately described by the SSPX, one rubs one’s eyes in disbelief. Has Pagliarani sufficiently enlightened himself about the ecclesiological monstrosity of this conception which considers it possible for a layman as pope to be the ecclesial sovereign and thus also the ruler over all bishops and priests? As such, he could infallibly decree Church doctrine and, if he so wishes, he may graciously grant these subjects a share in his absolute power of jurisdiction until revoked. This would also, of course, enable the layman on the papal throne, already on the basis of his plenitudo potestatis, to govern the diocese of Rome and, as the Church has already practiced, to have the sacramental acts performed by auxiliary bishops without jurisdiction. He could also dispense with resident bishops altogether and, for pragmatic reasons, employ only auxiliary bishops.
Perhaps Pagliarani should furthermore reflect on the fact that, with his continued advocacy of the separation of the powers of jurisdiction and ordination—which, remarkably, Pope Bergoglio also strongly supported for the sake of empowering women—he himself is reaching out to the revolutionaries of the Synodal Path. If jurisdiction and teaching are separated from priesthood to such an extent, one could ultimately no longer comprehend why a woman could not become pope. Signora Brambilla, armed with her cardigan, for example. Restricting the papal office to men can only be justified in view of the sacerdos, in whom Christ represents Himself sacramentally. And since the necessity of celibacy can be substantiated theologically only for the sacerdos as imago Christi, the woman pope could perfectly well be married too. She might make her husband and children cardinals, because the cardinalate is also, in its essence, not necessarily bound to Holy Orders in the old view defended by the SSPX.
Analogous to Canon 332, we again encounter the current canon law provision that cardinals “are at least in the order of priesthood” (Canon 351 § 1). The new canon law wants to tie the cardinalate back to the realm of the sacrament. The intention is honorable, but once again, this provision lacks a logically strict justification in the context of the systemic separation of offices culminating in the modern conception of the papacy; in truth, it is only a contingent rule. The point highlighted by the SSPX with regard to appointed but not yet ordained bishops applies structurally here, too. Under Leo XIII, the famous Theodolfo Mertel was a cardinal who never received priestly ordination. Even though he was ordained a deacon two months after his appointment as cardinal, he was already a cardinal before entering the clerical state and could have participated in the election of a new pope. The Church left likes to refer to the Mertel case, as it has altogether recognized the cataclysmic possibilities of the systemic differentiation of offices. The connections are often dialectically convoluted.
There are ideas that end, without anyone ever having thought of it, in catastrophe, perhaps even in the aggressive opposite of their original intention.
Lumen Gentium and the new canon law seek to put a stop to all these possible oddities by referring to the sacrament of Holy Orders. But the Council and canon law cannot consistently justify their well-grounded intention within the horizon of the still prevailing concept of the papacy, which is based on the systemic separation of offices. A consistent justification would become possible only in the context of a radical change in the conception of the papacy and an overhaul of the ordering logic of the offices of Christ that fundamentally underlies this conception.
The high priest is the king—not the other way around
The doctrine of the offices of Christ, that is, of Christ as high priest, king, and prophet, goes back in substance to the New Testament, is found in explicit form for the first time in Justin Martyr, and then runs through the entire history of theology, occasionally in changing terminology (the king is also considered the shepherd, just as the prophet is considered the teacher). As already indicated, it is of central relevance to the Catholic Church, especially with respect to the theology of the sacramental order and the definition of the papal office. In the following, I will focus on the inner connection between Christological and ecclesiological doctrine in regard to the offices, as well as on the link between doctrine and the sacramental nature of the Church.
That the Church is sacramental by nature means that she is the eternal union of Christ with the elect of the Father, which is constituted through the mediation of the Holy Spirit. Precisely this union is the corpus Christi mysticum. This is why the last Council could understand the Church as a fundamental “sacrament,” which, according to Lumen Gentium, is a “sign and instrument of a very closely knit union with God.” But this instrumental aspect is only grounded in the fact that the Church is the reality of salvation itself, insofar as salvation can only consist in being supernaturally united with Christ. This union is called “supernatural” and “mystical” because it transcends all the philosophical categories available to us—as the “theosis” of man given in the gratia sanctificans, it is infinitely more than a mere moral bond, yet it does not form a symbiotic fusion in which the ontological difference of the united ones would be dissolved.
Now it belongs to the precise determination of this union that Christ Himself, in the mediation of the Holy Spirit, makes present on the altars of the Church His sacrifice of Golgotha, which is held in God’s eternity. He does so in such a way that the faithful may freely co-enact His sacrifice, that is, so that they may offer His sacrifice also as their sacrifice of atonement, supplication, and praise to the Father, and thus be integrated into Christ’s act of self-offering to the Father. This process of the Church’s co-offering of Christ’s sacrifice finds its iconic representation in the biblical story that Mary accompanies her Son’s Way of the Cross and, in union with Christ, co-offers His sacrifice to the Father, in order to be given by the Crucified one Himself to the Apostle John as his mother at the foot of the Cross (John 19:25f).
The supernatural kinship of the faithful in the mystical body of Christ, arising from Christ’s sacrifice, is symbolized in this process. In this way, the representation of Christ’s sacrifice and our integration into this sacrifice is the decisive foundation of the being of the Church, indeed, it is even the very being of the Church. “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). Thus we all become “members of that body” (cf. 1 Cor 12:27). The Mass, as the temporal representation of Christ’s one eternal act of sacrifice, is the defining center of the Church.[3]The center of the Church is not an office of administrative authority, nor a chair, nor even a pulpit, but the altar.
The sacrifice of Christ is the principle from which the whole of the Church is to be deduced, because it is the defining center of the incarnate Logos Himself. Christ’s central determination is His being sacerdos. This is of all-decisive relevance. Remarkably, at the very beginning of His public ministry, Christ is identified by John the Baptist as this sacerdos, Whose sacrifice to God is He Himself: “Behold the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The theological meaning of this indication lies in the fact that the “offices of Christ,” of which Church tradition will speak, do not simply exist side by side, so that they could be divided. Christ’s being teacher and shepherd (or, respectively, king) arise from His fundamental ontological character as high priest, that is, the one Who sacrifices Himself to the Father on Golgotha. Logically, Jesus Christ is primarily Who John originally identifies Him as: priest and sacrifice.
The reason for this comes from Trinitarian theology. First, let us consider His being teacher, which corresponds to the category of the Logos. The Eternal Christ is the Logos, the self-expression and self-revelation of the Father, because He is the Son. In my opinion, it was a momentous mistake that Augustine understood the Second Divine Person in his Trinitarian theology primarily intellectually, namely from the inner functional laws of the human spirit, as the necessary self-expression of the one God, Who knows Himself as the one God only by means of this self-objectification in His own Logos.
A better approach is based on the theory of persons, because the Divine Being is the self-realization of Love and not of a self-objectifying reason which, as Hegel was to show (following the Augustinian line to its end), can only reconstruct the religious reference to God as a cipher for the logic of the Spirit knowing itself. Therefore, it must be emphasized that the Son as such is the Logos—and not the other way around. It is the sonship of the Son that both constitutes and reveals the fatherhood of the Father, thus making the Son the Logos of the Father and, as this Logos, in turn, the genuine teacher of the Father’s Truth. The Son says as Son: “Whoever sees Me sees the Father” (John 14:9).
That is to say: As the one Who completely receives Himself from the Father and gives Himself back to the Father, He reveals the Father Whose Being is complete self-giving. The Divine Persons are their relations; they are “relationes subsistentes.” Thus the First Person of the Godhead is Himself as His self-giving to the Son, that is, He is Father. And the Second Divine Person is Himself as the one Who receives Himself from the Father and gives Himself back to Him, that is, He is the Son. The Third Person of the Godhead is the one Who represents the relationship between Father and Son once again as a person and mediates it eternally—and therefore, on the level of salvation, He, in the form of the sacramental Church, integrates us into the relationship between Father and Son.
The Holy Spirit fundamentally enables this integration by letting the Son become Man according to the Father’s will and leading Him to the Cross. It is precisely in this self-giving of the Son to the Father’s will, that is, in His being sacerdos and sacrifice, that the Son, as incarnate, realizes His eternal essence to be the one Who gives Himself completely to the Father. And in this He is the Logos of the Father manifested in the flesh, unveiling to us Who God is. “Many prophets and righteous men have longed to see what you see, and have not seen it, and to hear what you hear, and have not heard it” (Mt 13:17). That statement pertains to the Son’s sacrificial act, which reveals the Father and, at the same time, the essence of the Son Himself, and is therefore the revelation of the Trinitarian structure of the Godhead. In view of the sacrifice, the Roman centurion says, “Truly, this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). Therefore, when Paul says in the immediate context of the reference to the Cross, “We proclaim, as it is written in Scripture, eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man the greatness which God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor 2:9), this greatness is man’s acceptance into the relationship between Father and Son in the Holy Spirit; this acceptance is brought about by the Son through His sacrifice. It is in this very event that the Holy Spirit reveals “the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:1).
This brings me to Christ as Rex. Because Christ, in His divinity and humanity, is the Son Who gives Himself back to the Father, the Gospel of John depicts the Cross of Christ as the Throne of Christ. By having walked the path of self-sacrifice and thereby having established God’s supernatural reign over the creature, Christ is the sovereign of the living and the dead—as confirmed by the Father through the resurrection. Correspondingly, in the Book of Revelation, all other Christological attributes of sovereignty are derived from the principle of sacrifice or high priesthood: it is “the Lamb that was slain” Who is worthy to receive “honor, glory, and praise” (Rev 5:12). And in chapter 17, Revelation announces the great war of the godless powers against the Lamb and at the same time proclaims that “the Lamb will defeat them. For He is the Lord of lords and King of kings. With Him are the called, the chosen, and the faithful” (Rev 17:14). The Lamb is the Rex—not the other way around.
When the Lamb is understood as the Rex, the concept of sovereignty is defined in a particular way. Namely, the rule of the Lamb is not a separate reality alongside the sacrifice, which means that it is also not simply a result that, while being mediated by this sacrifice, then exists in and for itself. Rather, Christ’s sacrifice, as such, is God’s rule over the world; in it, the divinity of God is vindicated vis-à-vis the world, and thus the truth of the world itself is vindicated. This sacrifice is necessary because the truth of the world is negated by sin, in which the finite particular wants to elevate itself, as a particular, to the universal, that is, wants to be God. The negation of truth, which consists in the finite making itself the absolute, is the essence of evil, whose dissolution can take place only in the death of Christ. In view of His sacrifice, in which the world’s turning toward its truth takes place, the Son says to the Father: “I have glorified You on earth and completed the work You gave Me to do” (John 17:4).
The truth of finite being can be realized only in Christ’s sacrifice because it is the sacrifice of the incarnate Second Person of the Godhead, Who offers His human body to the Divine Father. The Father is the creator of the world, which He brings forth already in Christ. In His incarnation, Christ now makes the world brought forth in Him His own reality. That is why Christ is described in tradition, for example by Thomas Aquinas, as the “summa creatura.” Therefore, when the incarnate Son offers Himself in His body, what happens, to use Hegel’s words, is the “transition and passage of the finite altogether into the divine,” the “departure and abandonment of the immediate,” or the “elevation, reflection, transition from the immediate, sensible, individual” into its “ground and source.” According to its concept, the sacrifice of the incarnate Divine Son differs categorically from all other sacrifices. No creaturely person could perform this act of sacrifice. Only the sacrifice of Christ can be the perfect and ultimate sacrifice.
As the transfigurated sacrificial Lamb, Christ will be the center of life of the “new heaven and new earth” according to the Book of Revelation. The heavenly cult, described in Revelation as the state of perfection, is the constitutive principle of the new creature as the cult of the slaughtered Lamb. And it is, as already mentioned above, precisely this heavenly cult, in which the temporal events of Golgotha are eternally preserved, that becomes present in the modest symbolic forms of the Lord’s Supper and then of the liturgy of the Pilgrim Church. Substantially, Golgotha, the Lord’s Supper, the heavenly cult, and the Mass are one and the same self-fulfillment of the self-sacrificing high priest in His undivided corpus mysticum, spanning time and eternity.
The biblical evidence already contradicts the view, unfortunately widespread in theology, that “the priestly office serves the kingly office insofar as it makes its fruits available to it and supports the exercise of the kingly office through its permanently continued activity. Thus, the kingly office ... gives the priestly office ... (its) completion.”[4] Here, kingship becomes the defining guiding principle to which everything is ultimately related, even if the priestly office is considered the most important in mediatorial terms. In contrast, it must be emphasized that the governing and teaching offices of Christ are inner dimensions of His eternal priesthood. The priesthood is the all-determining and unifying principle.
The sacerdos of the Church as shepherd and teacher
The Church is essentially a priestly Church, precisely because it is the sacramental corpus Christi mysticum with the altar as its center. For in the priesthood, Christ acts as the sole high priest Himself in order to let His sacrifice offered to the Father also become ours, that is, our own sacrificial act. Therefore, it is constitutive for the essence of this process that the priest, as the sacramental self-representation of Christ, is not Christ Himself: the priest must also stand on the side of the people as a representative, so that Christ’s sacrifice can become the sacrificial act of the Church (and thus the sacrifice of the priest himself, as a faithful human being also in need of redemption). Thus, the priest is the true “alter Christus,” the actual vicarius Christi; and yet, he acts in the name of the Church as cooperating subject on her own, so that both Christ Himself in the priest and the churchly priest as such, that is, the Church in the priest, call upon the faithful: “Orate fratres, ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem omnipotentem.”
The churchly cooperation with Christ means that Christ’s sacrifice is not a magical process of redemption. It is completely reasonable insofar as it seeks to integrate man as subject of freedom and responsibility. Man must also give himself deliberately to God in a free union with Christ’s sacrifice. What Luther discredited as “works righteousness” is in truth the divine recognition of creaturely freedom, which is never and can never be dispensed with, even on the supernatural level. And that is the sphere of the cult, which Hegel rightly describes in Philosophy of Religion as the inner connection between the dimensions of liturgical rite and the elevation of man’s soul to God. Religion is the “transition and passage” of that which is finite into the divine: initially, what is finite is seemingly the first and immediate; yet in the sacrifice, that which is finite passes over into the divine, which is now comprehended as the truly first and immediate and as the inner truth of the finite beings. This “transition and passage”, realizing itself in the two dimensions mentioned above, is the nature of religion. In other words: Just as religion does not merely mirror the truth of being, but realizes it, so too does it not practice the cult as merely one act among other acts. In its essence, it is nothing other than the sacrificial act itself, namely in its perfect form as offering Christ’s sacrifice and as integration into this sacrifice, in which that precise going-to-the-ground of the finite and the comprehensive reign of God take place.
The priest is the central figure in the architecture of the Church, because the sacrifice, which makes itself present on the altars, is performed by the priest. Already in the sacrifice of the Mass, the priest does not simply act “in persona Christ,” but “in persona Christi capitis.” It is essentially connected with this competence that he must also be the ruler and teacher of the Church, which has its existence only through this sacrifice. These functions pertain to the priest, because he is sacerdos and because Christ represents His own order of offices in the sacerdos of the Church. The concepts of ruling and teaching must therefore also be determined by the altar and thus by the liturgical rite. Within the Body of Christ, ruling is primarily not a political dimension but a religious one, namely, it is essentially the mystagogical act of leading the faithful into the mystery of the sacrifice that makes itself present and of the effective capacity to defend this mystery against its contestation. And teaching, as Christ’s self-proclamation, pertains at its core to the explication of the mystery of the Crucified one; this mystery essentially implies that the sacrifice makes itself present on the altars of the Church. The statement in the Epistle to the Corinthians is authoritative for the theological concept of the teaching of the Church: “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come to proclaim brilliant speeches or learned wisdom, but to proclaim the testimony of God. For I had decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1f).
So this is the conclusion: because Christ is the eternal sacerdos and, as such, the Lord of the graced creation, there can only exist a churchly power of governance and a teaching authority that are grounded in being sacerdos. For this reason, Joseph Ratzinger’s early statement that the separation of the power of orders and the power of governance is “strictly impermissible” is absolutely worthy of assent. For in this separation of powers, “one (power) is pushed into the realm of the magical, the other into the realm of the profane: the sacrament is then understood only as a ritual und not as a mandate to lead the Church through word and liturgy; governing, conversely, is seen as a purely political-administrative matter.”[5] The theological sociology of the Church therefore recognizes, precisely for Christological reasons, only two original groups of persons that cannot be derived from one another—namely, priests and those who belong to the λαός, the faithful people.
Consequences
On the one hand, this insight means that there is a systemic problem in the relation between priest and bishop. The concept of the two degrees of Holy Orders is quite difficult to justify theologically; a priest who is not eo ipso authorized to govern and teach is a contradiction in terms. In other words, the priest is, by definition, also the bishop, in whom the three offices of Christ are realized in inner union. This, indeed, is why the terms presbyteros and episkopos were not initially so sharply distinguished from one another as they later became.
While the fact that the priesthood became separated from the power of government and teaching authority, which produced the so-called “simple priests” as distinct from the bishop, is a grave theological problem, it also has unfavorable effects on bishops on the social-psychological and spiritual level. The focus of bishops has effectively shifted to administrative government and, relatively even to a lesser extent, to teaching authority. Bishops have become power-holders and bureaucrats like politicians and corporate executives, and they share their arrogance and conceit. On my parents’ wedding anniversary, the local bishop sent them a gift, not an icon or something similar, but a large photo of himself. I remember attending a Mass, celebrated by the local bishop, with my grandmother when I was a child. Afterwards, my grandmother and her sisters eagerly discussed whether the bishop was even allowed to celebrate Mass, since, in their eyes, this authority ultimately lay with the priest.
I find these things highly significant. In a substantively sharpened version, this happens again with the pope in an analogous way: when the newly elected pope steps out on to the loggia, the crowds are not cheering for the new bishop of Rome, but rather, in vague spiritual hope, for a divine oracle and an absolutist monarch. Whether this man is a holder of the sacramental office of ordination or a layman plays a completely minor role. In contrast to the bishop anecdote, however, this papal idolatry reflects the concept developed by the Church herself.
On the other hand, it follows from the preceding considerations that the pope cannot possess any non-sacramental potestas absoluta. Because the only power that can exist in the Church is a potestas sacra that is intrinsically oriented toward the sacrificial cult, it must be possible to relate the privileges of Peter’s successor organically to priesthood. And this relation is only possible if Peter is understood as he was understood in the early Church. The primacy of Peter, as attested in the New Testament, can by no means be formulated solely in terms of that highly politicized, actively legislative, and doctrinally dictatorial paradigm that developed in the course of the second millennium under the decisive influence of the high medieval papal theorist Augustinus Triumphus and manifested itself in Vatican I by virtue of having been further reinforced by the metaphysics of the modern absolutist state. For that matter, Augustinus Triumphus already teaches, quite consistently, that even a layman can possess papal potestas.
However, if there can be no autonomy vis-à-vis the sacerdos, the specific potestas of the Roman bishop as the successor of Peter must be understood in its basic character as reactive and structurally as a contractual delegation by the priests. Through the Roman bishop, the priests are able to achieve for the order of the entire Church what they cannot achieve each on his own. The Roman bishop would then be an institution of priestly self-organization, elected by the community of priests or delegated priests and, as bishop of Rome, could also be deposed if he himself did not meet the requirements of the Petrine office. As in the early Church, the duties of the Roman bishop would include final adjudication in controversial doctrinal questions, as well as the oversight of whether the sacerdotes are fulfilling their office and respecting the doctrinal decrees of the councils. In his very essence, such a pope would be the guardian of the cult. If the papacy were understood as a mode of priestly self-governance, the fundamental possibility of cardinals being laymen—which is indeed consistent within the current paradigm—would no longer exist, and for intrinsic theological reasons.
In my perception, many conservatives—especially in traditionalist circles—still suffer to this day from a trauma caused by the French Revolution. The fascination with the absolutist idea of a pope-emperor—borne aloft on the sedia gestatoria above all heads and crowned with the tiara, the prince of all princes—is a restorative fantasy. It renders this group of people almost blind to the theological truth that the center of the Church is not the papal throne but the altar, and that the true vicarius Christi is the sacerdos offering the sacrifice of Christ. After all, the Lord of all lords is the sacrificial Lamb as such.
Some time ago, Caminante-Wanderer called upon his traditionalist readers to adopt a more flexible way of thinking.[6] And for many years, his blog has commendably addressed the problematic nature of the papacy as it has developed in the second millennium. “Eck,” one of the authors on Caminante’s blog, critically observes that the modern pope is no longer, as bishop of Rome, the “final adjudicator in ecclesial disputes over faith and law, the supreme arbiter in conflicts.” Instead, he has become “an absolute monarch who views the bishops as his viceroys; a sovereign whose will is law and who can, at his pleasure, abolish or create out of nothing offices, local churches, liturgies, rights, or whatever else he pleases, until he views the Church as his private property, of which he is the owner and lord over its use, fruit, and abuse.”[7]
The theological root of this construction, which is fundamentally directed against the sacramental nature of the Church, is the disregard for the theological concept of sovereignty, that is, the true kingship of Christ. This disregard stems from the reflections of what Hegel called “abstract understanding.” The entire Latin Church suffers from this disregard on many levels—to the point that the mystagogical dimension plays a far smaller role in the reality of the ecclesial offices than, for instance, legal categorizations.[8]
This understanding is unable to grasp the fundamental Pauline thought that divine kingship is realized as kingship in the mode of self-offering, that is, in the powerlessness of the Cross, and thus, we must add, also in the sacramental cult. Or, to put it in the words of the great Protestant theologian Eberhard Jüngel: The hard core of omnipotence is love. I would like to repeat the decisive point: The sacrifice is not a mere means of attaining or confirming a sovereignty that is understood as independent of the sacrifice in principle; rather, the sacrifice is in itself the reign of God, who integrates His creation into Himself in Christ’s sacrifice and therein ultimately brings to bear His divinity—His being as the all-encompassing universal.
For the Church, this means that her self-politicization into a state-like entity and the corresponding absolutist stylization of the pope, who is simultaneously proclaimed Prince of all Princes, in truth represents a self-secularization that weakens her. In this, to speak with Paul, she falls prey to the “schemata of this world” (Rom 12:2). I am convinced that her decisive spiritual task for the future is to rediscover the altar as the center of the Church, indeed of the world as a whole, and the liturgical rite as her true power. It is, indeed, no coincidence that Bergoglio, obsessed as he was with power in the political sense, had no sensibility whatsoever for the divine dimension of the sovereignty of rite and priesthood. Therefore, I must also disagree with Roberto de Mattei, who, referring to Bergoglio’s wheelchair staging shortly before his death, in which Jorge Bergoglio appeared without a cassock in a poncho, critically remarked that Francis had disregarded the dignity of the papacy. No, Francis was only doing in a pronounced way what he had been doing throughout his entire pontificate, namely disregarding the dignity of the priesthood. The absolutist monarch that the Church so insistently wanted no longer needs sacred insignia to secure his rule; he only needs a pen to sign capricious laws and execution orders for unsubmissive priests. It is precisely as Eck describes it: “The Church loudly begged God for a Francis, and God granted him to us for our punishment and chastisement, just as Samuel warned the people when they demanded a king. No one mocks God, and the Almighty laughs from on high. God laughs at ultramontanism and modernism. The result of this laughter is Francis—a dose of castor oil, God’s great purge.”[9]
Like Caminante, I am therefore of the opinion that it is imperative to put established patterns of judgment to the test and to critically analyze the narrative that the “Pius popes” represent the ultimate ideal of the papacy and that the modern papacy is the salvation of the Church. With his power claim pushed to the extreme—with which, among other things, he vigorously promoted lay empowerment and secularism within the Church—it was precisely Pope Francis who showed us what a papacy that has detached itself from the sacramental cosmos can lead to. We must never forget Jorge Bergoglio.
And just as the narrative of the Church’s salvation through the absolute pope of Vatican I was pulverized by Bergoglio—as a gift of Providence—it is now necessary to be consistent and likewise overcome the long-practiced narrative that questioning the systemic separation of offices, which finds its ultimate form in the modern papacy, is eo ipso a left-wing revolutionary project hostile to the Church. I believe that precisely the opposite can be true.
NOTES
The root of all these issues consists in the systemic differentiation of the three offices of Christ—namely as high priest, king, and teacher—which the Church has long practiced at the level of ecclesial offices. These offices of Christ must be reflected in the theological definition of ecclesial office, but in my opinion they are not reflected there in the correct ordering logic. This is highly consequential.
In order to realize this nexus of problems, it is helpful to start again with the position taken by the SSPX. In the context of its criticism of Vatican II, the SSPX raises questions that reveal this nexus of problems: “Indeed, if the power of jurisdiction is conferred by consecration, how is it that an elected Sovereign Pontiff who has not yet been consecrated bishop still possesses by divine right the fullness of jurisdiction, as well as infallibility, from the moment he accepts his election?”
The SSPX refers here to the legal provision, which is still valid in principle, that three conditions suffice for the assumption of the papal office: it must be a legitimate election, the election must be freely accepted by the person elected, and the candidate must be a baptized Catholic male—not even needing to be a priest or a deacon. Certainly, the current canon law adds in Canon 332 § 1 the provision that a man who has not yet been ordained a bishop, and who has been elected pope and has accepted the election, must be ordained a bishop immediately. This provision is a reference to Vatican II.
However, the canon is unclear in its wording and is the subject of controversy among canon lawyers. Yet this lack of clarity only indicates—analogous to the dilemma of the two jurisdictions—the dilemma that two provisions are to be linked that do not fit together organically: the papacy is not, in itself, a sacramental office; it consists in a universally extending potestas absoluta. This potestas absoluta differs in essence from the power of jurisdiction of the ordained office, which always relates to a specific diocese or parish. The attempt to sacramentally contain this papal office through the new canon law only obscures this essential difference, or, respectively, the fact that, in the still dominant conception of the papacy, a man who has not yet been ordained would already be pope from the moment he accepts his election and would possess plenitudo potestatis. Strictly speaking, this man elected pope could strike the aforementioned ordination provision from canon law with immediate effect.
In this context, the Society of St. Pius X also refers to the structurally identical case concerning the appointment, to diocesan ordinary, of a man who may also not yet belong to the clerical state. It asks: “By the same logic, if it is the consecration that confers jurisdiction, then residential bishops who have been appointed but not yet consecrated, although already established at the head of their diocese as true pastors, would have no power of jurisdiction and no right to sit in council, whereas in reality they clearly possess both prerogatives before their episcopal consecration.”
When one actually realizes this separation of the offices of governance and teaching on the one hand and the priesthood on the other, as accurately described by the SSPX, one rubs one’s eyes in disbelief. Has Pagliarani sufficiently enlightened himself about the ecclesiological monstrosity of this conception which considers it possible for a layman as pope to be the ecclesial sovereign and thus also the ruler over all bishops and priests? As such, he could infallibly decree Church doctrine and, if he so wishes, he may graciously grant these subjects a share in his absolute power of jurisdiction until revoked. This would also, of course, enable the layman on the papal throne, already on the basis of his plenitudo potestatis, to govern the diocese of Rome and, as the Church has already practiced, to have the sacramental acts performed by auxiliary bishops without jurisdiction. He could also dispense with resident bishops altogether and, for pragmatic reasons, employ only auxiliary bishops.
Perhaps Pagliarani should furthermore reflect on the fact that, with his continued advocacy of the separation of the powers of jurisdiction and ordination—which, remarkably, Pope Bergoglio also strongly supported for the sake of empowering women—he himself is reaching out to the revolutionaries of the Synodal Path. If jurisdiction and teaching are separated from priesthood to such an extent, one could ultimately no longer comprehend why a woman could not become pope. Signora Brambilla, armed with her cardigan, for example. Restricting the papal office to men can only be justified in view of the sacerdos, in whom Christ represents Himself sacramentally. And since the necessity of celibacy can be substantiated theologically only for the sacerdos as imago Christi, the woman pope could perfectly well be married too. She might make her husband and children cardinals, because the cardinalate is also, in its essence, not necessarily bound to Holy Orders in the old view defended by the SSPX.
Analogous to Canon 332, we again encounter the current canon law provision that cardinals “are at least in the order of priesthood” (Canon 351 § 1). The new canon law wants to tie the cardinalate back to the realm of the sacrament. The intention is honorable, but once again, this provision lacks a logically strict justification in the context of the systemic separation of offices culminating in the modern conception of the papacy; in truth, it is only a contingent rule. The point highlighted by the SSPX with regard to appointed but not yet ordained bishops applies structurally here, too. Under Leo XIII, the famous Theodolfo Mertel was a cardinal who never received priestly ordination. Even though he was ordained a deacon two months after his appointment as cardinal, he was already a cardinal before entering the clerical state and could have participated in the election of a new pope. The Church left likes to refer to the Mertel case, as it has altogether recognized the cataclysmic possibilities of the systemic differentiation of offices. The connections are often dialectically convoluted.
There are ideas that end, without anyone ever having thought of it, in catastrophe, perhaps even in the aggressive opposite of their original intention.
Lumen Gentium and the new canon law seek to put a stop to all these possible oddities by referring to the sacrament of Holy Orders. But the Council and canon law cannot consistently justify their well-grounded intention within the horizon of the still prevailing concept of the papacy, which is based on the systemic separation of offices. A consistent justification would become possible only in the context of a radical change in the conception of the papacy and an overhaul of the ordering logic of the offices of Christ that fundamentally underlies this conception.
The high priest is the king—not the other way around
The doctrine of the offices of Christ, that is, of Christ as high priest, king, and prophet, goes back in substance to the New Testament, is found in explicit form for the first time in Justin Martyr, and then runs through the entire history of theology, occasionally in changing terminology (the king is also considered the shepherd, just as the prophet is considered the teacher). As already indicated, it is of central relevance to the Catholic Church, especially with respect to the theology of the sacramental order and the definition of the papal office. In the following, I will focus on the inner connection between Christological and ecclesiological doctrine in regard to the offices, as well as on the link between doctrine and the sacramental nature of the Church.
That the Church is sacramental by nature means that she is the eternal union of Christ with the elect of the Father, which is constituted through the mediation of the Holy Spirit. Precisely this union is the corpus Christi mysticum. This is why the last Council could understand the Church as a fundamental “sacrament,” which, according to Lumen Gentium, is a “sign and instrument of a very closely knit union with God.” But this instrumental aspect is only grounded in the fact that the Church is the reality of salvation itself, insofar as salvation can only consist in being supernaturally united with Christ. This union is called “supernatural” and “mystical” because it transcends all the philosophical categories available to us—as the “theosis” of man given in the gratia sanctificans, it is infinitely more than a mere moral bond, yet it does not form a symbiotic fusion in which the ontological difference of the united ones would be dissolved.
Now it belongs to the precise determination of this union that Christ Himself, in the mediation of the Holy Spirit, makes present on the altars of the Church His sacrifice of Golgotha, which is held in God’s eternity. He does so in such a way that the faithful may freely co-enact His sacrifice, that is, so that they may offer His sacrifice also as their sacrifice of atonement, supplication, and praise to the Father, and thus be integrated into Christ’s act of self-offering to the Father. This process of the Church’s co-offering of Christ’s sacrifice finds its iconic representation in the biblical story that Mary accompanies her Son’s Way of the Cross and, in union with Christ, co-offers His sacrifice to the Father, in order to be given by the Crucified one Himself to the Apostle John as his mother at the foot of the Cross (John 19:25f).
The supernatural kinship of the faithful in the mystical body of Christ, arising from Christ’s sacrifice, is symbolized in this process. In this way, the representation of Christ’s sacrifice and our integration into this sacrifice is the decisive foundation of the being of the Church, indeed, it is even the very being of the Church. “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). Thus we all become “members of that body” (cf. 1 Cor 12:27). The Mass, as the temporal representation of Christ’s one eternal act of sacrifice, is the defining center of the Church.[3]The center of the Church is not an office of administrative authority, nor a chair, nor even a pulpit, but the altar.
The sacrifice of Christ is the principle from which the whole of the Church is to be deduced, because it is the defining center of the incarnate Logos Himself. Christ’s central determination is His being sacerdos. This is of all-decisive relevance. Remarkably, at the very beginning of His public ministry, Christ is identified by John the Baptist as this sacerdos, Whose sacrifice to God is He Himself: “Behold the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The theological meaning of this indication lies in the fact that the “offices of Christ,” of which Church tradition will speak, do not simply exist side by side, so that they could be divided. Christ’s being teacher and shepherd (or, respectively, king) arise from His fundamental ontological character as high priest, that is, the one Who sacrifices Himself to the Father on Golgotha. Logically, Jesus Christ is primarily Who John originally identifies Him as: priest and sacrifice.
The reason for this comes from Trinitarian theology. First, let us consider His being teacher, which corresponds to the category of the Logos. The Eternal Christ is the Logos, the self-expression and self-revelation of the Father, because He is the Son. In my opinion, it was a momentous mistake that Augustine understood the Second Divine Person in his Trinitarian theology primarily intellectually, namely from the inner functional laws of the human spirit, as the necessary self-expression of the one God, Who knows Himself as the one God only by means of this self-objectification in His own Logos.
A better approach is based on the theory of persons, because the Divine Being is the self-realization of Love and not of a self-objectifying reason which, as Hegel was to show (following the Augustinian line to its end), can only reconstruct the religious reference to God as a cipher for the logic of the Spirit knowing itself. Therefore, it must be emphasized that the Son as such is the Logos—and not the other way around. It is the sonship of the Son that both constitutes and reveals the fatherhood of the Father, thus making the Son the Logos of the Father and, as this Logos, in turn, the genuine teacher of the Father’s Truth. The Son says as Son: “Whoever sees Me sees the Father” (John 14:9).
That is to say: As the one Who completely receives Himself from the Father and gives Himself back to the Father, He reveals the Father Whose Being is complete self-giving. The Divine Persons are their relations; they are “relationes subsistentes.” Thus the First Person of the Godhead is Himself as His self-giving to the Son, that is, He is Father. And the Second Divine Person is Himself as the one Who receives Himself from the Father and gives Himself back to Him, that is, He is the Son. The Third Person of the Godhead is the one Who represents the relationship between Father and Son once again as a person and mediates it eternally—and therefore, on the level of salvation, He, in the form of the sacramental Church, integrates us into the relationship between Father and Son.
The Holy Spirit fundamentally enables this integration by letting the Son become Man according to the Father’s will and leading Him to the Cross. It is precisely in this self-giving of the Son to the Father’s will, that is, in His being sacerdos and sacrifice, that the Son, as incarnate, realizes His eternal essence to be the one Who gives Himself completely to the Father. And in this He is the Logos of the Father manifested in the flesh, unveiling to us Who God is. “Many prophets and righteous men have longed to see what you see, and have not seen it, and to hear what you hear, and have not heard it” (Mt 13:17). That statement pertains to the Son’s sacrificial act, which reveals the Father and, at the same time, the essence of the Son Himself, and is therefore the revelation of the Trinitarian structure of the Godhead. In view of the sacrifice, the Roman centurion says, “Truly, this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). Therefore, when Paul says in the immediate context of the reference to the Cross, “We proclaim, as it is written in Scripture, eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man the greatness which God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor 2:9), this greatness is man’s acceptance into the relationship between Father and Son in the Holy Spirit; this acceptance is brought about by the Son through His sacrifice. It is in this very event that the Holy Spirit reveals “the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:1).
This brings me to Christ as Rex. Because Christ, in His divinity and humanity, is the Son Who gives Himself back to the Father, the Gospel of John depicts the Cross of Christ as the Throne of Christ. By having walked the path of self-sacrifice and thereby having established God’s supernatural reign over the creature, Christ is the sovereign of the living and the dead—as confirmed by the Father through the resurrection. Correspondingly, in the Book of Revelation, all other Christological attributes of sovereignty are derived from the principle of sacrifice or high priesthood: it is “the Lamb that was slain” Who is worthy to receive “honor, glory, and praise” (Rev 5:12). And in chapter 17, Revelation announces the great war of the godless powers against the Lamb and at the same time proclaims that “the Lamb will defeat them. For He is the Lord of lords and King of kings. With Him are the called, the chosen, and the faithful” (Rev 17:14). The Lamb is the Rex—not the other way around.
When the Lamb is understood as the Rex, the concept of sovereignty is defined in a particular way. Namely, the rule of the Lamb is not a separate reality alongside the sacrifice, which means that it is also not simply a result that, while being mediated by this sacrifice, then exists in and for itself. Rather, Christ’s sacrifice, as such, is God’s rule over the world; in it, the divinity of God is vindicated vis-à-vis the world, and thus the truth of the world itself is vindicated. This sacrifice is necessary because the truth of the world is negated by sin, in which the finite particular wants to elevate itself, as a particular, to the universal, that is, wants to be God. The negation of truth, which consists in the finite making itself the absolute, is the essence of evil, whose dissolution can take place only in the death of Christ. In view of His sacrifice, in which the world’s turning toward its truth takes place, the Son says to the Father: “I have glorified You on earth and completed the work You gave Me to do” (John 17:4).
The truth of finite being can be realized only in Christ’s sacrifice because it is the sacrifice of the incarnate Second Person of the Godhead, Who offers His human body to the Divine Father. The Father is the creator of the world, which He brings forth already in Christ. In His incarnation, Christ now makes the world brought forth in Him His own reality. That is why Christ is described in tradition, for example by Thomas Aquinas, as the “summa creatura.” Therefore, when the incarnate Son offers Himself in His body, what happens, to use Hegel’s words, is the “transition and passage of the finite altogether into the divine,” the “departure and abandonment of the immediate,” or the “elevation, reflection, transition from the immediate, sensible, individual” into its “ground and source.” According to its concept, the sacrifice of the incarnate Divine Son differs categorically from all other sacrifices. No creaturely person could perform this act of sacrifice. Only the sacrifice of Christ can be the perfect and ultimate sacrifice.
As the transfigurated sacrificial Lamb, Christ will be the center of life of the “new heaven and new earth” according to the Book of Revelation. The heavenly cult, described in Revelation as the state of perfection, is the constitutive principle of the new creature as the cult of the slaughtered Lamb. And it is, as already mentioned above, precisely this heavenly cult, in which the temporal events of Golgotha are eternally preserved, that becomes present in the modest symbolic forms of the Lord’s Supper and then of the liturgy of the Pilgrim Church. Substantially, Golgotha, the Lord’s Supper, the heavenly cult, and the Mass are one and the same self-fulfillment of the self-sacrificing high priest in His undivided corpus mysticum, spanning time and eternity.
The biblical evidence already contradicts the view, unfortunately widespread in theology, that “the priestly office serves the kingly office insofar as it makes its fruits available to it and supports the exercise of the kingly office through its permanently continued activity. Thus, the kingly office ... gives the priestly office ... (its) completion.”[4] Here, kingship becomes the defining guiding principle to which everything is ultimately related, even if the priestly office is considered the most important in mediatorial terms. In contrast, it must be emphasized that the governing and teaching offices of Christ are inner dimensions of His eternal priesthood. The priesthood is the all-determining and unifying principle.
The sacerdos of the Church as shepherd and teacher
The Church is essentially a priestly Church, precisely because it is the sacramental corpus Christi mysticum with the altar as its center. For in the priesthood, Christ acts as the sole high priest Himself in order to let His sacrifice offered to the Father also become ours, that is, our own sacrificial act. Therefore, it is constitutive for the essence of this process that the priest, as the sacramental self-representation of Christ, is not Christ Himself: the priest must also stand on the side of the people as a representative, so that Christ’s sacrifice can become the sacrificial act of the Church (and thus the sacrifice of the priest himself, as a faithful human being also in need of redemption). Thus, the priest is the true “alter Christus,” the actual vicarius Christi; and yet, he acts in the name of the Church as cooperating subject on her own, so that both Christ Himself in the priest and the churchly priest as such, that is, the Church in the priest, call upon the faithful: “Orate fratres, ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem omnipotentem.”
The churchly cooperation with Christ means that Christ’s sacrifice is not a magical process of redemption. It is completely reasonable insofar as it seeks to integrate man as subject of freedom and responsibility. Man must also give himself deliberately to God in a free union with Christ’s sacrifice. What Luther discredited as “works righteousness” is in truth the divine recognition of creaturely freedom, which is never and can never be dispensed with, even on the supernatural level. And that is the sphere of the cult, which Hegel rightly describes in Philosophy of Religion as the inner connection between the dimensions of liturgical rite and the elevation of man’s soul to God. Religion is the “transition and passage” of that which is finite into the divine: initially, what is finite is seemingly the first and immediate; yet in the sacrifice, that which is finite passes over into the divine, which is now comprehended as the truly first and immediate and as the inner truth of the finite beings. This “transition and passage”, realizing itself in the two dimensions mentioned above, is the nature of religion. In other words: Just as religion does not merely mirror the truth of being, but realizes it, so too does it not practice the cult as merely one act among other acts. In its essence, it is nothing other than the sacrificial act itself, namely in its perfect form as offering Christ’s sacrifice and as integration into this sacrifice, in which that precise going-to-the-ground of the finite and the comprehensive reign of God take place.
The priest is the central figure in the architecture of the Church, because the sacrifice, which makes itself present on the altars, is performed by the priest. Already in the sacrifice of the Mass, the priest does not simply act “in persona Christ,” but “in persona Christi capitis.” It is essentially connected with this competence that he must also be the ruler and teacher of the Church, which has its existence only through this sacrifice. These functions pertain to the priest, because he is sacerdos and because Christ represents His own order of offices in the sacerdos of the Church. The concepts of ruling and teaching must therefore also be determined by the altar and thus by the liturgical rite. Within the Body of Christ, ruling is primarily not a political dimension but a religious one, namely, it is essentially the mystagogical act of leading the faithful into the mystery of the sacrifice that makes itself present and of the effective capacity to defend this mystery against its contestation. And teaching, as Christ’s self-proclamation, pertains at its core to the explication of the mystery of the Crucified one; this mystery essentially implies that the sacrifice makes itself present on the altars of the Church. The statement in the Epistle to the Corinthians is authoritative for the theological concept of the teaching of the Church: “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come to proclaim brilliant speeches or learned wisdom, but to proclaim the testimony of God. For I had decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:1f).
So this is the conclusion: because Christ is the eternal sacerdos and, as such, the Lord of the graced creation, there can only exist a churchly power of governance and a teaching authority that are grounded in being sacerdos. For this reason, Joseph Ratzinger’s early statement that the separation of the power of orders and the power of governance is “strictly impermissible” is absolutely worthy of assent. For in this separation of powers, “one (power) is pushed into the realm of the magical, the other into the realm of the profane: the sacrament is then understood only as a ritual und not as a mandate to lead the Church through word and liturgy; governing, conversely, is seen as a purely political-administrative matter.”[5] The theological sociology of the Church therefore recognizes, precisely for Christological reasons, only two original groups of persons that cannot be derived from one another—namely, priests and those who belong to the λαός, the faithful people.
Consequences
On the one hand, this insight means that there is a systemic problem in the relation between priest and bishop. The concept of the two degrees of Holy Orders is quite difficult to justify theologically; a priest who is not eo ipso authorized to govern and teach is a contradiction in terms. In other words, the priest is, by definition, also the bishop, in whom the three offices of Christ are realized in inner union. This, indeed, is why the terms presbyteros and episkopos were not initially so sharply distinguished from one another as they later became.
While the fact that the priesthood became separated from the power of government and teaching authority, which produced the so-called “simple priests” as distinct from the bishop, is a grave theological problem, it also has unfavorable effects on bishops on the social-psychological and spiritual level. The focus of bishops has effectively shifted to administrative government and, relatively even to a lesser extent, to teaching authority. Bishops have become power-holders and bureaucrats like politicians and corporate executives, and they share their arrogance and conceit. On my parents’ wedding anniversary, the local bishop sent them a gift, not an icon or something similar, but a large photo of himself. I remember attending a Mass, celebrated by the local bishop, with my grandmother when I was a child. Afterwards, my grandmother and her sisters eagerly discussed whether the bishop was even allowed to celebrate Mass, since, in their eyes, this authority ultimately lay with the priest.
I find these things highly significant. In a substantively sharpened version, this happens again with the pope in an analogous way: when the newly elected pope steps out on to the loggia, the crowds are not cheering for the new bishop of Rome, but rather, in vague spiritual hope, for a divine oracle and an absolutist monarch. Whether this man is a holder of the sacramental office of ordination or a layman plays a completely minor role. In contrast to the bishop anecdote, however, this papal idolatry reflects the concept developed by the Church herself.
On the other hand, it follows from the preceding considerations that the pope cannot possess any non-sacramental potestas absoluta. Because the only power that can exist in the Church is a potestas sacra that is intrinsically oriented toward the sacrificial cult, it must be possible to relate the privileges of Peter’s successor organically to priesthood. And this relation is only possible if Peter is understood as he was understood in the early Church. The primacy of Peter, as attested in the New Testament, can by no means be formulated solely in terms of that highly politicized, actively legislative, and doctrinally dictatorial paradigm that developed in the course of the second millennium under the decisive influence of the high medieval papal theorist Augustinus Triumphus and manifested itself in Vatican I by virtue of having been further reinforced by the metaphysics of the modern absolutist state. For that matter, Augustinus Triumphus already teaches, quite consistently, that even a layman can possess papal potestas.
However, if there can be no autonomy vis-à-vis the sacerdos, the specific potestas of the Roman bishop as the successor of Peter must be understood in its basic character as reactive and structurally as a contractual delegation by the priests. Through the Roman bishop, the priests are able to achieve for the order of the entire Church what they cannot achieve each on his own. The Roman bishop would then be an institution of priestly self-organization, elected by the community of priests or delegated priests and, as bishop of Rome, could also be deposed if he himself did not meet the requirements of the Petrine office. As in the early Church, the duties of the Roman bishop would include final adjudication in controversial doctrinal questions, as well as the oversight of whether the sacerdotes are fulfilling their office and respecting the doctrinal decrees of the councils. In his very essence, such a pope would be the guardian of the cult. If the papacy were understood as a mode of priestly self-governance, the fundamental possibility of cardinals being laymen—which is indeed consistent within the current paradigm—would no longer exist, and for intrinsic theological reasons.
In my perception, many conservatives—especially in traditionalist circles—still suffer to this day from a trauma caused by the French Revolution. The fascination with the absolutist idea of a pope-emperor—borne aloft on the sedia gestatoria above all heads and crowned with the tiara, the prince of all princes—is a restorative fantasy. It renders this group of people almost blind to the theological truth that the center of the Church is not the papal throne but the altar, and that the true vicarius Christi is the sacerdos offering the sacrifice of Christ. After all, the Lord of all lords is the sacrificial Lamb as such.
Some time ago, Caminante-Wanderer called upon his traditionalist readers to adopt a more flexible way of thinking.[6] And for many years, his blog has commendably addressed the problematic nature of the papacy as it has developed in the second millennium. “Eck,” one of the authors on Caminante’s blog, critically observes that the modern pope is no longer, as bishop of Rome, the “final adjudicator in ecclesial disputes over faith and law, the supreme arbiter in conflicts.” Instead, he has become “an absolute monarch who views the bishops as his viceroys; a sovereign whose will is law and who can, at his pleasure, abolish or create out of nothing offices, local churches, liturgies, rights, or whatever else he pleases, until he views the Church as his private property, of which he is the owner and lord over its use, fruit, and abuse.”[7]
The theological root of this construction, which is fundamentally directed against the sacramental nature of the Church, is the disregard for the theological concept of sovereignty, that is, the true kingship of Christ. This disregard stems from the reflections of what Hegel called “abstract understanding.” The entire Latin Church suffers from this disregard on many levels—to the point that the mystagogical dimension plays a far smaller role in the reality of the ecclesial offices than, for instance, legal categorizations.[8]
This understanding is unable to grasp the fundamental Pauline thought that divine kingship is realized as kingship in the mode of self-offering, that is, in the powerlessness of the Cross, and thus, we must add, also in the sacramental cult. Or, to put it in the words of the great Protestant theologian Eberhard Jüngel: The hard core of omnipotence is love. I would like to repeat the decisive point: The sacrifice is not a mere means of attaining or confirming a sovereignty that is understood as independent of the sacrifice in principle; rather, the sacrifice is in itself the reign of God, who integrates His creation into Himself in Christ’s sacrifice and therein ultimately brings to bear His divinity—His being as the all-encompassing universal.
For the Church, this means that her self-politicization into a state-like entity and the corresponding absolutist stylization of the pope, who is simultaneously proclaimed Prince of all Princes, in truth represents a self-secularization that weakens her. In this, to speak with Paul, she falls prey to the “schemata of this world” (Rom 12:2). I am convinced that her decisive spiritual task for the future is to rediscover the altar as the center of the Church, indeed of the world as a whole, and the liturgical rite as her true power. It is, indeed, no coincidence that Bergoglio, obsessed as he was with power in the political sense, had no sensibility whatsoever for the divine dimension of the sovereignty of rite and priesthood. Therefore, I must also disagree with Roberto de Mattei, who, referring to Bergoglio’s wheelchair staging shortly before his death, in which Jorge Bergoglio appeared without a cassock in a poncho, critically remarked that Francis had disregarded the dignity of the papacy. No, Francis was only doing in a pronounced way what he had been doing throughout his entire pontificate, namely disregarding the dignity of the priesthood. The absolutist monarch that the Church so insistently wanted no longer needs sacred insignia to secure his rule; he only needs a pen to sign capricious laws and execution orders for unsubmissive priests. It is precisely as Eck describes it: “The Church loudly begged God for a Francis, and God granted him to us for our punishment and chastisement, just as Samuel warned the people when they demanded a king. No one mocks God, and the Almighty laughs from on high. God laughs at ultramontanism and modernism. The result of this laughter is Francis—a dose of castor oil, God’s great purge.”[9]
Like Caminante, I am therefore of the opinion that it is imperative to put established patterns of judgment to the test and to critically analyze the narrative that the “Pius popes” represent the ultimate ideal of the papacy and that the modern papacy is the salvation of the Church. With his power claim pushed to the extreme—with which, among other things, he vigorously promoted lay empowerment and secularism within the Church—it was precisely Pope Francis who showed us what a papacy that has detached itself from the sacramental cosmos can lead to. We must never forget Jorge Bergoglio.
And just as the narrative of the Church’s salvation through the absolute pope of Vatican I was pulverized by Bergoglio—as a gift of Providence—it is now necessary to be consistent and likewise overcome the long-practiced narrative that questioning the systemic separation of offices, which finds its ultimate form in the modern papacy, is eo ipso a left-wing revolutionary project hostile to the Church. I believe that precisely the opposite can be true.
NOTES
[1] https://fsspx.news/en/news/order-and-jurisdiction-futility-schism-accusation-57305
[2] A detailed analysis of the difference between the old and new teaching will be found in the book Unresolved Tensions in Papal-Episcopal Relations, ed. Peter Kwasniewski (Os Justi Press, 2024).
[3] https://einsprueche.substack.com/p/the-disintegration-of-the-priesthood
[4] Diekamp-Jüssen, Catholic Dogmatics, Mörlenbach 2012, 575.
[5] Joseph Ratzinger, "Demokratisierung in der Kirche?," in: Joseph Ratzinger/Hans Maier, Demokratie in der Kirche, Limburg 1970, 31f.
[6] https://elwanderer.com/2025/05/12/hacia-otra-logica-con-francisco-murio-la-generacion-del-concilio/. The English-speaking world has also seen a profusion of treatments of this question: see, for example, Ultramontanism and Tradition: The Role of Papal Authority in the Catholic Faith, ed. Peter Kwasniewski (Os Justi Press, 2024); Peter Kwasniewski, The Road from Hyperpapalism to Catholicism: Rethinking the Papacy in a Time of Ecclesial Disintegration, 2 vols. (Arouca Press, 2022); Serafino Lanzetta, Super Hanc Petram: The Pope and the Church at a Dramatic Moment in History (Os Justi Press, 2023); and more besides.
[7] https://elwanderer.com/2025/05/26/la-gran-confusion-romana-papado-patriarcado-y-episcopado/
[8] Thus, as Sebastian Morello has pointed out, the entire new Directory for Catechesis (2020), in its over 400 numbers, hardly mentions mystagogy—and when it does so, links it to the Eastern Churches, without any hint of self-criticism that the concept is so lacking in the document’s Western framework.
[9] https://caminante-wanderer.blogspot.com/2023/12/sodoma-supplicans-la-gran-prostituta.html
