The Ecclesiological Significance of Bad Popes

Extract

In my last article, “Priestly Ministry or Hierarchy: The Sacrament of Order”, I surveyed the history of the second plank of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism; namely hierarchical clericalism. Now we must examine the roots of the chief item of this distorted ecclesial ideology, the concentration of all authority in the papal institution. For this purpose Church history divides fairly neatly into two halves, the first millennium and the second millennium of our era.

The first millennium, we could say, saw the gradual development of the doctrine of the universal primacy of the Roman Church and its bishop in the Catholica, such as it was eventually defined, together with the doctrine of papal infallibility, in 1870. The dogmatic constitution Pastor Aetemus of Vatican I, could have been promulgated (with some modifications to language and style which would chiefly have been improvements) by any pope from Leo the Great (ob. 461) to Gregory the Great (ob. 603), without anyone in Rome or the West thinking it very unusual, though there would no doubt have been demurrers from the East. But the practice of Eastern bishops, throughout the Arian and then the christological controversies that raged in the 4th and 5th centuries, shows that in fact they accepted the unique position of the Roman Church as the touchstone of orthodox faith. Rome was never heretical.