Recently, this blog published the now widely-discussed essay titled “The Kingship of Christ and the Aporias of the Roman Church.” Now the author applies the analysis of the “total Pope” and the corresponding concept of obedience to the Society of St. Pius X. Needless to say, the following text reflects the personal opinion of its author and is not a Rorate editorial position; rather, it may be seen as part of our ongoing coverage of the SSPX dilemma. - PAK
The Performative Contradiction of the Society of St. Pius X
by Vigilius
“The Papacy Is Not an Absolutist Monarchy”
In 2024, the district superior of the Society of St. Pius X in Germany, Stefan Pfluger, explained in an interview with the Catholic weekly newspaper Die Tagespost conducted by Sebastian Ostritsch that the Society sees itself “as placed under the Pope.”[1] When Ostritsch, following up on the question of the unauthorized episcopal ordinations, addressed “the selective rejection of certain doctrinal documents of the Second Vatican Council,” Pfluger replied:
These are points where we say: Here, the Second Vatican Council is not in continuity with the entire past of the Church. Archbishop Lefebvre said something to this effect: What if the Pope says something different from all his predecessors? Then I must decide, and I decide in favor of the predecessors.
In response to Ostritsch’s question as to whether this “persistent disobedience” did not indicate “that one does not truly recognize the Pope,” Pfluger replied:
No, because we are not disobedient out of principle or as a matter of course. I can only refer to what Archbishop Lefebvre repeatedly emphasized: Obedience is in the service of the truth. The Petrine office is not an absolutist monarchy, but a service to the truth, a service to Christ, a service to the Church. We have the right to violate obedience to the Pope only when it is necessary to avoid violating the service to Christ and the Church.
These statements by Pfluger reflect the standard line of reasoning of the Society of St. Pius X. Peter Kwasniewski has succinctly formulated the concept of obedience that guides this view in his important text True Obedience in the Church.[2] At its core, the point is that obedience is not an end in itself, but must always be related to the truth and only under this consideration does it become a virtuous attitude.
The SSPX applies this concept of obedience to the current situation in the Church, which, in the Society’s judgment, is characterized by an almost unique doctrinal, moral, and liturgical “state of necessity.” It is precisely this state of necessity that, in the Society’s view, makes it imperative, for the sake of the salvation of souls as the highest of all ecclesiastical goods, to consecrate bishops once again—even if illicitly—who, in turn, can ordain priests, without whom the salvation of souls is impossible. This assessment has recently been reaffirmed by the Superior General of the Society of St. Pius X, Davide Pagliarani.[3]
First of all, I largely agree with Pagliarani’s assessment of the situation in the Church and, moreover, am also convinced that the Society should definitely consecrate bishops. Nevertheless, the SSPX finds itself in a performative contradiction with the argumentation it puts forward. For the Society accepts the papal construct that emerged over the course of the second millennium and took formal shape at the First Vatican Council with the document Pastor Aeternus: the concept of a potestas absoluta that is in itself non-sacramental. As I have explained elsewhere, I consider this concept a calamity that compromises the sacramental corpus Christi mysticum.[4] In the following, my concern is solely with the performative contradiction that arises when one accepts the potestas absoluta and yet, like Stefan Pfluger, invokes the distinction between legality and legitimacy—which the construction of the “total pope” precisely causes to vanish—to justify one’s own disobedience toward popes recognized as such.
To substantiate this claim, I will refer primarily to Pastor Aeternus, but first I will take a brief look at the modern context of Pastor Aeternus. The concept of the total pope has, of course, been around for a long time, dating back to the 11th century. Above all, the High Medieval monk Augustinus Triumphus, with his Summa de potestate ecclesiastica, significantly shaped the history of the development of the understanding of the papacy. Triumphus already uses a phrase one might expect from modern hyperpapalists or, during the Bergoglio era, from Cardinal Maradiaga: “In the Pope we live, and move, and have our being.”
It is no coincidence, however, that the Church did not consistently develop and formally define papal primacy conceptually until the 19th century. The definition corresponded to a growing need within the Church. One must understand this to grasp why the triumph of the idea of the “total Pope”—an idea that pre-modern popes could only dream of—was possible at all, and why many Catholics, especially conservative ones, to this day remain devoted to this idea, and so deeply that, when it comes to the history of papal failure, they show a peculiar willingness to repress it—or even, seemingly paradoxically, become sedevacantists.
The Modernity of the Modern Church and its Concept of the Papacy
Pius IX was a fervent anti-modernist. Significantly, the famous Syllabus of Errors, appended to the encyclical Quanta cura, is attributable to him, as is the promotion of neo-scholastic theology, whose central tasks included refuting the errors of the “modern age”—primarily from the 17th century onward. Yet it is precisely this modern age that also shaped, from within, the pontificate of Pope Ferretti and modern papal theology in general. Modernity, so far from being merely an external adversary that had to be dealt with, already influenced the very way in which one reacted to it.
As is often the case in individual biographies, traumatic experiences also lie at the cradle of the modern world. I would like to mention two particularly formative experiences. First, the Black Death of the 14th century, which decimated Europe’s population and shattered all previous religious mechanisms for coping with catastrophes. Second, the religious wars of the early modern period, in which the Christian religion proved itself no longer a force for social integration, but rather a force of destruction and fundamental insecurity. Since then, modern consciousness has been characterized essentially by an almost obsessive search for the controllability of the world, which—because religion seemingly failed—must be achieved through the sole power of natural rationality. Reason, in contrast to contentious religiosity, is the authority that all can recognize as common to all human beings from the beginning, relying for the validity of its propositions no longer on an external authority but solely on empirically and conceptually verifiable arguments.
Epistemically, the project of controllability requires a “fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis,” and Cartesian philosophy provides this foundation. According to Descartes, the “absolute, unquestionable foundation of truth” is solely the self, which is absolute even in its error because it is unquestionably given to itself even in its doubts: “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). With its Meditations on First Philosophy, Cartesian philosophy provides the decisive theoretical groundwork for the modern sciences and for rationality emancipated from faith, which are gradually unleashed to make the world a controllable—that is, “safe”—place for humanity.
The great modern philosophers all follow this broad highway. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is significantly guided by the question of how mathematics and natural science are possible, for it is in these disciplines that the uncertain world is made controllable. The “thing-in-itself” recedes into the background, unreachable, while the mind constructs the object by means of its a priori forms of intuition and concepts. As things become ob-jects for man, he himself becomes the subjectum that underlies everything and at the same time stands over against everything. Henceforth, he is is able to comprehensively control the world of objects, because it is a systemic construct of his intellectual positionings and is therefore reliably describable and calculable using scientific methods.
The “will to power” is the central motif defining modernity. More precisely, it is about self-empowerment, about the will to the will to power. Eberhard Jüngel identifies this decisive turning point as a specific adaptation of Protagoras’ famous statement that man is the measure of all things:
That man is the measure of all things is an assertion that is still bold, yet was ventured very early on. One may affirm or deny it. That man makes himself the measure of all things, however, is a statement that characterizes the essence of the modern era. It cannot be denied. For in making himself the measure of all things, he is the modern man.[5]
Thus, the definition of man proposed by Protagoras has undergone a fundamental change. Whereas, in Protagoras’ statement, man finds himself as the measure of all things already by virtue of his being, he now—in the modern era—constitutes this position himself. For self-empowerment means that man no longer understands himself as a being, albeit a distinguished one, within the context of all beings, but rather stands over against them, exclusively and authoritatively. In the ancient sense as expressed in Protagoras’ statement, man was distinguished by his ability to recognize beings in their respective essential constitutions, so that beings find themselves—their truth—solely in him. But by no means was man, in this understanding, the one dictating the measure to beings; rather, he constituted, conversely, the privileged locus where the measure that things carry within themselves can first reveal itself. In this respect, beings were understood as standing in a fundamental a priori relation to man—just as man is referred to the being of beings.
It is precisely this reciprocal relationship that is dissolved in the project of modernity. In the paradigm of human self-empowerment as the measure of all things, the focus is now on a power that no longer receives itself from outside itself and has thus also lost any measure outside itself. The measure of things can therefore only be the power of the subject that relates to itself. The ontological self-being of things vanishes into the power of the subject that empowers itself as the measure of all things, whose will to power now becomes the being of things. Heidegger described this brilliantly in his interpretation of Nietzsche.[6] Power is no longer limited by any pre-existing thing. The boundlessness of a power that establishes itself absolutely becomes the hallmark of the new era.
The contemporary church is likewise deeply affected by the modern quest for security and certainty, as well as by the principle of the will to power. This is not without irony, because the Church’s insecurity—which demanded new measures of security and control—was in fact due to the quest for absolute security of modern subjectivity. This quest was caused by insecurity—an insecurity in the arising of which religion itself had played a decisive role. The so-called “modernism,” with its liberal-autonomist, Enlightenment-inspired, partly rationalist, partly empiricist ideas, put massive cultural and political pressure on the Church.
In this challenging situation, the Church, too, set out in search of a “fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis.” And this infallible foundation of truth and certainty of faith becomes—the Pope. He becomes, analogous to the Cartesian self, that subjectum which underlies the Church at all levels of religious and moral life and is meant to provide guidance like a lighthouse in the darkness of the new age of the world. And just as the Cartesian subject stands in relation to the world, so the Pope stands in relation to the Church: he no longer requires the Church’s consent for his juridical and doctrinal decrees—that is to say, he becomes ab-solute. In this way, the modern Church sought to assert the Petrine “rock” more forcefully than ever and, relying on this power, to build the Church into a heavily armed, impregnable fortress.
As mentioned, this Pope—not least thanks to skillful propaganda efforts on the part of Pius IX and his entourage—became an object of devout veneration.[7] It would hardly have occurred to medieval believers to speak of the Pope in the way we find in the papal hymn by Don Luigi Orione, who died in 1940 and was canonized by Pope Wojtyła:
Our creed is the Pope, our morality is the Pope, our life is the Pope, our love, our heart, our purpose in life is the Pope; for us, the Pope is Jesus Christ; to love the Pope and to love Jesus is one and the same; to listen to the Pope and follow him means to listen to Jesus Christ and follow him; to serve the Pope means to serve Jesus Christ; to give one’s life for the Pope means to give one’s life for Jesus Christ.[8]
This brings me to Pastor Aeternus, the document in which the double papal primacy—that is, the Pope’s independence from the Church’s consent in both jurisdictional and doctrinal matters—is defined. The document, however, does not consist merely of the technical formulation of these two definitions of primacy, but is richer in that it paints an impressive spiritual portrait of the Pope. It is crucial for the “total Pope” of modern times that he is not merely a machine for producing occasional “ex cathedra pronouncements” and a cold Leviathan with absolute jurisdictional power, but is conceived, in a much deeper sense, as the Vicarius Christi par excellence, to whom, as such, the double primacy belongs. Pastor Aeternus presents the Pope as the Good Shepherd par excellence, to whom, as we read in the text, the “gracious privilege of truth and of an unfailing faith has been bestowed.”
In Pastor Aeternus and modern papal theology, the Pope is regarded as that authority singularly privileged by God, who unceasingly reliably keeps “the whole flock of Christ away from the poisonous food of error” and nourishes the faithful “in the pasture of heavenly doctrine.” This light-crowned Pater universalis ecclesiae can never be touched by even the shadow of the slightest doubt or uncertainty regarding the faith; the Church is in the best of hands with him. Accordingly, Pastor Aeternus asserts that “in the Apostolic See the Catholic religion has been preserved unblemished at all times (!), and sacred doctrine been held in honor.”
This comprehensive spiritual theology of the papacy is precisely reflected in Louis Veuillot’s work on Pius IX:
God is bound to him by an eternal oath and assists him in a special way. He is the man to whom the Savior said, ‘I am with you.’ In him, mortal flesh contains more immortality than in us. This man is Peter, who never dies…. This man teaches, atones, liberates, dies, and reigns bearing a name that cannot be communicated or transmitted: He is the Pope, the Father.[9]
It is understandable that such a Christ-like figure may, indeed must, demand total obedience for himself. The obedience is willingly offered by a passion that, in the face of the Pope’s epiphany on the loggia, wishes to exclaim: “Behold the incarnate fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis, the Holy Spirit walking on earth in a white cassock with a mozzetta, the Pater universalis, who invariably preserves the faith in its purity! Security, unerring certainty! We love you with all our heart and all our soul, with all our thoughts and all our strength!”
The potestas absoluta iurisdictionis
Now to the two concrete, legally objectified modes in which the absoluteness of the absolute Pope is realized.
First, the primacy of jurisdiction. Through it, the Pope possesses immediate and universal governing authority over the entire Church. According to Pastor Aeternus, the Pope possesses, in an “immediate” manner, “the primacy of ordinary power over all others,” a power to which “the shepherds and faithful of every rite and rank—both individually and collectively—are bound to hierarchical submission and true obedience, not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those pertaining to the discipline and governance of the Church spread throughout the entire world.” It follows from that “supreme authority of the Roman Bishop to govern the entire Church that he has the right, in the exercise of his office, to communicate freely with the shepherds and flocks of the whole Church.” These free decrees “can never be lawfully impeded.” The text continues:
And because the Roman Bishop presides over the entire Church by virtue of the divine right of Apostolic Primacy, We also teach and declare that he is the supreme judge of all the faithful, and that his judgment may be sought in all legal matters subject to ecclesiastical review; but the judgment of the Apostolic See, above whose authority there is none greater, may not be re-examined by anyone, and no one is permitted to judge its judgment.
With these provisions, the Pope advances to become the sovereign par excellence. He becomes an absolute monarch, as was paradigmatically developed for the secular sphere in absolutist modern state metaphysics, for example by Jean Bodin or in the second book of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
The absolute monarch differs from the classical king in that the limitations still characterizing the old king are abolished. The classical king was not only bound by laws and established traditional customs but was also limited in terms of power politics by the nobility and parliaments. The state did not, as it were, belong to him. At the same time, the obedience owed to the king by his subjects was never understood as absolute; obedience derived its very nature from its integration into a normative framework within which the king himself was situated. The king thus found a standard that was likewise imposed on him from the outside and could therefore, at least in principle, be enforced against him. He was, after all, not ab-solute.
In modern state theory—and in reality in some states such as France, Denmark, or Norway—this is precisely what changed. The monarch became the sole holder of sovereign power, standing above the law as the unconditional legislator and often regarded, in theological terms, as the authoritative Vicarius Dei, so that the king’s throne was described as God’s own throne. However, not only does the absolute monarch possess unlimited power over the state, but the state too is reconceived as a whole that precedes its parts and finds in the sovereign its literally decisive self-representation, its head, its self-consciousness. In Thomas Hobbes’s political theory, the state is regarded as the “body” of the monarch; the monarch and the state merge. The famous saying attributed to Louis XIV, “l’État, c’est moi,” is well-known. As the body of the monarch, the state exists only through and in the monarch.
Consequently, the classical concept of obedience becomes blind obedience, the unconditional submission to the will of the sovereign. While the sovereign’s enduring subjection to divine law or natural law continues to be recognized, there is no longer any possibility of operationalizing this principle politically or legally at the institutional level. And so the absolute ruler judges all, yet is himself judged by no one. The sovereign aligns himself with God himself, just as the state—the monarch’s body—assumes an absolute character vis-à-vis individuals. In the fusion of state and monarch, an authoritarianism has emerged in which any autonomy other than that of the sovereign or the state vanishes.
This identity of monarch and state is reproduced in the relationship between the Pope and the Church. While Thomas Aquinas still takes it for granted that the Pope is normatively bound to the Church, the modern Pope becomes ab-solute. He is the head and embodiment of the state-like whole of the Church, which possesses its actualitas only in the Pope. In contrast to the potestas sacra or ordinis of ordinary bishops, which the bishops possess over their respective dioceses, the papal potestas iurisdictionis is a potestas absoluta which, as already cited, can directly regulate all matters of the universal Church without requiring consent and thus, in principle, can dispense with the governing authority of the local bishops in every case.
At the same time, the modern Pope is the sovereign of canon law; he is simultaneously the legislative, judicial, and executive branch. As with the secular monarch, the Pope is, of course, understood to be, in principle, subordinate to the divine will—the ius divinum. However, there is no longer any way to institutionalize and operationalize this subordination. In an absolutist framework, there can be no procedure governed by canon law to assert the ius divinum against the sovereign. Therefore, by its very nature, there can be no legally established procedure for the deposition of a pope. According to Pastor Aeternus, the pope judges all, but is himself judged by no one. The SSPX expressly acknowledges this principle.
It must therefore be objected to Fr. Stefan Pfluger that the Pope of the First Vatican Council is indeed an absolute monarch. He fulfills all the criteria for this legal categorization; the relevant provisions of Pastor Aeternus allow for no other interpretation. Pfluger is not alone in this view, however. Joseph Ratzinger, too, has repeatedly claimed that the Pope is not an absolute ruler. This thesis is constantly repeated by many conservative authors—from Cardinal Müller to Dom Alcuin Reid to Peter Kwasniewski[10].
What is so vexing about these statements is that, though they are, in my view, correct in systematic-theological terms, they avoid with painstaking care any mention of the fact that, according to the formulations of Pastor Aeternus, the Pope is of course an absolute ruler. In doing so, these theologians create the false impression that the relevant discourse on the Pope is merely a figment of the imagination of those who invoke it—whether with affirmative or critical intent. Therefore, if one rejects the absolutist characterization of the Pope, one must, with intellectual honesty, address the resulting conflict with the First Vatican Council.
The potestas absoluta doctrinae
As in the jurisdictional sphere, the Pope also possesses potestas absoluta doctrinae. This provision is of particular relevance to the narrative of the Christ-like universal shepherd whose faith never wavers and on whom all believers can rely without fail. The doctrinal absoluteness of the Pope is expressed most clearly in Pastor Aeternus by the text’s assertion that the dogmatic propositions defined by the popes are “ex sese”—“of themselves”—infallible.
In Pius IX’s understanding, this phrase “of themselves” does not refer to truth, which is by its very nature “infallible.” Rather, it refers to the Pope, whose doctrinal propositions can claim infallible truthfulness for themselves without the consent of the Church—that is, absolutely. Pius IX inserted the “ex sese” into the dogmatization text as a deliberate countermeasure to the intervention of Bishop Vinzenz Gasser of Brixen. Gasser wanted to keep the planned declaration of infallibility as moderate as possible by arguing that a definitive papal decision would be required only if the bishops were hopelessly divided and the papal proclamation corresponded to the view of the Church as a whole. Essentially, Gasser was invoking the early Church’s interpretation of papal primacy as the final arbiter in theological disputes affecting the entire Church. The famous maxim “Roma locuta, causa finita est” stems from this early Church understanding of the specific role of the successors of Peter.
Now, particularly from the conservative side, in the wake of the Wojtyła and Bergoglio trauma, something akin to a treatise “On the Limitations and Fallibility of the Pope” is being formulated. One not only acknowledges that popes, too, are merely human and, as such, have moral and intellectual limitations—which may also include fluctuations in personal faith life and theological misunderstandings, but it is also emphasized that a genuine theological problem would arise only if a pope were to recognize an objectively heretical position as such and consciously seek to manipulate the depositum fidei. In any case, only formal dogmatizations are ecclesiologically relevant in the case of popes, and all other pronouncements and texts—such as sermons, statements, or encyclicals—are only part of the binding ordinary magisterium if they are in accordance with the Church’s doctrinal tradition. According to this recent conservative interpretation, it therefore appears that the Pope, at least on the doctrinal level, cannot act as autocratically as he does on the administrative level.
This strategy of limiting the scope of binding papal pronouncements, however, is incompatible both with the overall spiritual conception of the papal office and with the actual definition of infallibility formulated in Pastor Aeternus. The fact that the Pope’s doctrinal authority cannot be particularized at all within the Pastor Aeternus system is already succinctly expressed in an exclamation by Pius IX that was previously not considered authentic, but whose authenticity has since been proven.[11] During a dispute between the Pope and Cardinal Guidi—who sought to invoke the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and Robert Bellarmine in opposition to the primacy provisions planned by Pius IX—Pius IX exclaimed, “I, I am Tradition!”
Even if this statement was made in the heat of a verbal exchange, the matter it refers to is not contingent, for Pius IX, unlike many of his followers, knew exactly what his concept of the papacy actually meant. This is indeed a “monstrosity”[12] that amounts to identifying the Church with the Pope. In essence, Pope Ferretti could just as well have said: “I, I am the Church.” In view of this expansion of the papal magisterium, Caminante-Wanderer has spoken of an “engulfment of Tradition” by the Pope[13], which, according to Caminante, means that an identification has occurred between the “quod”—the content of the faith of Tradition—and the “quo,” the authority articulating this faith—so that the Magisterium does not say something because it is true, but it is true because the Magisterium says it.
Even if it comes down to this, one must concede that Pius IX by no means intended to claim that the Pope stands above tradition and has the authority to produce the “quod.” Pastor Aeternus explicitly states that the Pope is not given the power to invent new doctrines. This aspect is indeed central to the correct understanding of the primacy of teaching. The identification of the Pope with Tradition means, namely, that the Pope is identified in an absolutely unique way with the Holy Spirit—who is the divine principle of knowledge of Christ’s truth and the spiritus rector of Tradition—in the sense that the depositum fidei, i.e., Tradition, which is in principle conceived as independent of the Pope, is authentically articulated and interpreted only in the Pope. The identification of “quod” and “quo” is thus a hermeneutical principle. In this sense, according to Pastor Aeternus, on the popes has been “conferred the gracious privilege of truth and of an unfailing faith.” As the normative interpretive authority of Tradition, empowered by the Holy Spirit, it is itself an intrinsic element of the doctrine it reliably interprets and becomes the object of a dogmatic definition by the Pope himself.
The two decisive consequences are, first, that alongside this subject of articulation and interpretation of tradition, there can be no other subjects of truth in the Church that could still normatively assert interpretations of tradition within the Church that diverge from the Pope’s. And second, all theological statements by the Pope, insofar as the Pope regards them as magisterial, must be considered binding. Apart from the Pope, there are only private theological opinions. Whether, for example, St. Robert Bellarmine held any particular theological conviction is irrelevant, even though he was Archbishop of Capua. The opinions of the bishops are significant only “cum et sub Petro,” which means nothing other than that they are in themselves not significant at all, whereas the Pope’s opinion is significant in and of itself. Pius IX made this point unmistakably clear to Cardinal Guidi.
Consequently, the popes have increasingly come to cite themselves primarily, as a perusal of recent papal documents (especially those of Francis) will demonstrate. And what theology has to accomplish par excellence in light of the tradition identified with the Pope is the retrospective provision of arguments for the propositions of the papal magisterium, which, whether extraordinary or ordinary, always possess irresistible truth-validity “ex sese.”
This connection can be illustrated by the very definition that ex cathedra decisions are infallible in and of themselves. For since the Pope is not limited by any other authority in his will to formulate such “extraordinary” propositions, he could, in fact, immediately elevate any of his theological convictions to the status of a formal dogma. The fact that the popes have not done so thus far is merely a contingent, subjectively determined circumstance. For the sake of clarifying the matter, the question of what the popes de facto do or do not do for whatever personal reasons is irrelevant. Only the question of what they can do is logically relevant. And because, in principle, they can irresistibly mark any number of their theological propositions with the sign of infallibility, their other statements effectively open up a playground for debate among other church actors until they may declare the discussion closed and state that their judgment henceforth has unquestionable validity. “Extraordinary” and “ordinary” magisterium are no longer validly distinguishable in light of the Pope’s illimitable power of definition in theological-dogmatic matters.
Let us clarify the context in practical terms: Suppose a pope, within the framework of his ordinary teaching—for example, in encyclicals and other circular letters—interprets the body of Tradition in a way that the bishops unanimously reject. Then all the bishops come together and unanimously oppose the papal teaching, formulating counter-texts intended to correct the papal interpretation. These texts have no normative value in and of themselves. By virtue of his absolute authority over the Church, the Pope could declare the bishops to be heretics, depose them with a stroke of the pen, and excommunicate them. And this judgment of the Pope, as Pastor Aeternus teaches us, would be unchallengeable; the Pope judges all, but is himself judged by no one. There is no longer any extra-papal theological reason that could give effect, in any binding forum, to interpretations of the body of Tradition diverging from the Pope’s.
One must realize that this means nothing less than the elimination of the Council as a normative, that is, decision-making institution. If the Pope alone can decide on the interpretation of Tradition, the Council can no longer speak authoritatively on its own; it has thus consented to its own demotion to a mere debating and advisory body to the Pope. This is already evident in the text of Pastor Aeternus itself, insofar as Pope Ferretti clearly appears here as the decision-maker and speaks only of the bishops’ assent to his definition. In the literature, the question of whether the Pope would have defined even without the assent of the Council Fathers is controversially debated. However, this is now merely a question of historical or psychological interest, no longer of logical interest. For even if Pius IX had defined it against the will of all the bishops, his action would still correspond precisely to the content of the dogma.
In essence, this act of definition involves a self-empowerment of the Pope as causa sui, which realizes itself in that which it claims of itself: The Pope says “ex sese” that it is “ex sese” true that what he says of himself is true. Such circularity is completely unthinkable in pre-modern times; in this circularity, the modern spirit of the self-empowerment of subjectivity as the measure of all things is reflected in its purest form. Although several bishops left before the definition of primacy, the majority nevertheless approved the papal self-empowerment. For they believed that only in this way could the Pope be that fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis which the beleaguered modern Church needed him to be.
Only within this context does it become understandable that Pius IX was already able to explain in his letter Tuas libenter to the Bishop of Munich and Freising in 1863 that the theologians’ obligation of obedience by no means referred solely to formally defined dogmatic propositions. Not only the extraordinary, but also the ordinary magisterium of the popes—for example, in the pronouncements of the Roman congregations—is part of the binding teaching of the Church. This is a consistent deduction. If the Pope is this Cartesian subjectum by virtue of his privileged, divinely-guided and guarded interpretive access to Tradition, his authority can no longer be described as limited only to so-called “ex cathedra decisions.”
I would like to repeat once more: Of course, no pope would ever deny that his statements must be in accordance with the “quod.” Pius IX states this explicitly in Tuas libenter: Even the propositions of his ordinary magisterium must be “in general and constant agreement” with the teaching of Tradition. Therefore, when Roberto de Mattei insightfully emphasizes that “the authority of the Pope ends where it turns against the truth,”[14] one can only react to this statement by noting that it is a truism. No pope and no papalist in his right mind has ever doubted this. The crux of the matter, however, is that the normative assessment of the conformity of papal statements with Tradition or the truth lies, in turn, within the hermeneutical sovereignty of the Pope himself. That is, there is no separate measure or source of evaluation to assess the harmony of the Pope’s teaching with Tradition; rather, the accomplished fact of the Pope’s teaching is the guarantee of its harmony with Tradition. One sees this repeatedly and boldly stated by proponets of (hyper)papalism.
With that, a final remark on sedevacantism. One must first give the sedevacantists credit for clearly recognizing that the conservative reductionism described above—which, in light of the disastrous popes of recent decades, seeks to salvage a supposedly isolatable core of the modern concept of the papacy—is incompatible with the comprehensive claim of the papal construct set forth in Pastor Aeternus. If one truly wishes to operate within the framework of the First Vatican Council, one must accept the entire framework.
However—and this is a crucial point—if one accepts the Ferretti system, one can no longer assert that popes have forfeited their office through heresy. Within the framework of the total papacy, which the sedevacantists seek to uphold, a rejection of papal teachings is no longer possible. This is the performative contradiction of sedevacantism. That the papal office is forfeited through heresy is the sedevacantists’ own rational judgment—one that they now assert against the judgment of a pope.
In most sedevacantist narratives, the sedevacancy began either with Roncalli or Montini. One of these popes, who must initially have been a pope, naturally considered his own theological interpretations of tradition—which the sedevacantists now condemn—to be correct. Rejecting them would fall solely within the jurisdiction of a subsequent pope—insofar as such a figure can even exist from the sedevacantist perspective.
Saint Pius X and the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X
I would like to remind the Society of an address by its namesake, in which Pius X, in a congenial echo of Pius IX’s self-stylization of the papacy, intones a hymn to the total Pope. I am referring to Pius X’s address of November 18, 1912, to the priests’ association Unio Apostolica. This address even made it into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Here, Pius X expresses the view that “love for the Pope contributes in a wonderful way to the sanctification of priests.” The reason for this is that, in the Pope’s view, the Pope
is the head under whom no one feels tyrannized, because he represents God himself; he is the Father par excellence, who unites in himself all that is loving, tender, and divine. And how should one love the Pope? Non verbo neque lingua, sed opere et veritate. When one loves a person, one tries, in everything … to carry out his wishes…. And if our Lord Jesus Christ said of himself: ‘si quis diligit me, sermonem meum servabit,’ then, to show our love for the Pope, it is necessary to obey him. So if one loves the Pope, one does not argue about what he commands or demands, or how far obedience should go, or in which matters one should obey; if one loves the Pope…one does not question his orders…; one does not limit the sphere in which he can and must exercise his authority; one does not place the authority of other persons before that of the Pope, however learned they may be…
Finally, according to Pius X: “He who is holy cannot deviate from the Pope.”[15]
Just as with Christ himself, according to Pius X, the distinction between legitimacy and legality no longer applies to the luminous figure of the Pope; illegal acts are, by their very nature, also illegitimate. The justification of illegal acts—such as episcopal consecrations not authorized by the Pope—by invoking an ecclesiastical state of necessity collapses on its own, because the Pope himself does not regard this alleged state of necessity as a state of necessity. And his judgment is the sole normative one, not only because of his jurisdictional authority, but also, for the epistemic reasons outlined above, in a material sense.
In other words: The total Pope demands the renunciation of one’s own judgment, which the soldier from Loyola took to its ultimate extreme in his Regulae ad sentiendum cum Ecclesia: “What I see as white, I consider black if the hierarchical Church defines it as such.” While this is objectively insane, it is consistent within an absolutist system. If one therefore accepts the Ferretti system and thus all popes up to the present day as such, one cannot help but apply Pius X’s address to Jorge Bergoglio as well, and to believe, for example, that Bergoglio’s position on the question of interreligious dialogue aligns with that of the Pius popes, simply because Pope Bergoglio, as the singular normative interpreter of tradition, may assert this continuity and this assertion is not rejected by his successor. However, within the Ferretti system, one must believe it for the sole reason that Catholic doctrine is, after all, invariably held in high esteem by the Pope.
The SSPX likes to work with the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola. Therefore, in connection with Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto’s address, I would like to recall a statement by Loyola on obedience, which can be found in the Order’s Constitutions and which, in turn, perfectly reflects modern absolutism. According to Ignatius, everyone who lives in obedience must “allow oneself to be led and guided by the superior as if he were a dead body that can be taken wherever and treated however, or like an old man’s staff that serves wherever and for whatever purpose the man wishes to use it.” Within the framework of papal theology as set forth in Pastor Aeternus, the Pope is the supreme ecclesiastical superior. One must obey this unique interpreter of Tradition and “Father par excellence, who unites in himself all that is divine,” unconditionally; logically, it cannot be otherwise. And to obey him, according to Pius X, means to love him, and such love is to contribute in a wonderful way to the sanctification of priests.
Now, it does not appear as though the valiant District Superior from Stuttgart, who certainly strives earnestly for his own sanctification and at the same time sees himself “as placed under the Pope,” is preparing to allow himself to be led and guided by Pope Prevost “as if he were a dead body.” Pfluger explicitly speaks of being obedient to the Pope only on a case-by-case basis, depending on his own theological judgment. Is this consistent in light of the SSPX’s theological presuppositions regarding the papacy?
Fundamentally, I ask myself: What follows from all this for the SSPX? Sua quemque incohaerentia perdit.[16]
[1] https://www.die-tagespost.de/kirche/aktuell/pater-pfluger-rolle-der-piusbruderschaft-in-der-kirche-heute-art-257835
[2] Peter Kwasniewski, True Obedience in the Church. A Guide to Discernment in Challenging Times, Manchester, NH, 2021.
[3] https://fsspx.news/en/news/who-tearing-tunic-christ-interview-superior-general-society-saint-pius-x-58690
[4] https://einsprueche.substack.com/p/the-kingship-of-christ-and-the-aporias
[5] Eberhard Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, Tübingen 1978, 16.
[6] See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche II, Complete Works (GA), Vol. 6.2, Die Metaphysik Nietzsches, 236ff.
[7] See, regarding this propaganda, Hubert Wolf, Der Unfehlbare, München 2023, esp. 325ff.
[8] Don Luigi Orione, Lettre, Postulazione della Picolla Opera della Divina Providenza, Roma 1929, Bd. II, 44.
[9] Louis Veuillot, Biografía del Papa Pío IX, Madrid, 1865, 3.
[10] https://thecatholicherald.com/article/breaking-the-deadlock-between-rome-and-the-sspx
[11] Klaus Schatz has since demonstrated that it does indeed originate from Pius IX: Klaus Schatz, Vaticanum I, Vol. III, Paderborn 1994, 312–322.
[12] Schatz, 321.
[13] https://caminante-wanderer.blogspot.com/2021/08/la-tradicion-devorada-por-el-magisterio.html
[14] https://katholisches.info/2013/10/03/roberto-de-mattei-die-gefahr-der-papolatrie-vom-rechten-gehorsam-gegenueber-dem-papst/
[15] https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/it/speeches/documents/hf_p-x_spe_19121118_unione-apostolica.html
[16] High Medieval Latin maxim: Everyone is undone by his own inconsistency.
