I was protestant, I then ventured into atheism, and now I am currently at RCIA
accepting the Catholic faith. So I've come across a website
that talks about the sedevacantist-type idea of how the Church might be in the
great apostasy and how we might not be only in the great apostasy,
but that the Catholic Church has ventured from its original
traditions. I know you said in the past that they interpret things
wrong, but they're also very convincing, and so I want to come across this
logically.
Sure. So a first thought I'd have is: is this the right time in your
journey to be trying to process this kind of
information? Because this is a...
I mean, I don't discourage people from looking at information and
arguments, but there are questions of timing,
and while you're going through this education of yourself in learning
about Church teaching and what the
Church says, I don't know that it's the most
prudent time to be reading material that attacks the
Church in this way, because they're going to be distorting.
Anytime someone is attacking somebody else, you
have a big risk that they're distorting things.
And if you're just learning Church teaching for the first time,
you may not want to be exposing yourself to material that has a high risk
of distorting things or presenting it in an imbalanced way.
So that's a first thought, but I'll have more on the other side of the break.
The term "great apostasy" does appear in scripture,
but it's used in more than one context.
And some of the uses refer to events that are already in our past,
but—or actually, "great tribulation" is the term i'm thinking of there.
The term "great apostasy" is really a theological term that's
based on some passages that indicate there will be a
great falling-away from the faith towards the end of the world. And
that's something the Catholic Church accepts and recognizes,
and it's mentioned in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But
what I find problematic with a lot of these sedevacantist claims
is they don't understand what an apostasy is.
Apostasy is defined as—and you can read this in the Code of Canon Law, including
the 1917 Code of Canon Law, if I recall correctly,
it's certainly in the 83 Code and it's in the Catechism—
apostasy is defined as the total repudiation of the Christian faith.
So in order to be an apostate, you have to say "I was a Christian and
I'm not anymore." So if you're a schismatic that has
left full communion with the Church, you're not an apostate. You have not
committed apostasy. If you're a heretic that has denied some
dogma of the faith, you're not an apostate.
In order to be an apostate, you have to say
"I am not a Christian any more." And that is not what's happening
in terms of the claims sedevacantists are making with regard to the
bishops of the Church. Have there been individual people who
are apostates in our age? Sure. There are people in
every age who apostatize. And have there been a large number of
them in certain parts of the world today? Sure.
You look in Europe, there are a bunch of apostates in Europe.
There are also apostates here in America. But
those situations are not representative of the Church as a whole. The Church as a
whole is growing, and it's one-sixth of mankind.
So it's really hard—the Church is bigger today than it has ever been in the past,
and so it has more members now than it
has ever had in the past. So it's hard to say
"we're in a great apostasy" or "THE Great Apostasy"
when the Church is bigger than ever. What we would need to have The Great
Apostasy is the Church, on a global scale,
shrinking, dramatically shrinking. That's how the
Catechism envisions it. It talks about how the Church will
almost pass out of existence, but Christ will return to save it at the
last moment. Similarly, Jesus asks "Will the son of man
find faith when he comes back?" So all this and
various other indicators suggest that by the end of the world
we're gonna have dramatically diminished in size. We're not gonna be a sixth of
mankind and be bigger than we've ever been in history.
So we just don't see the conditions necessary
for The Great Apostasy. And you do not have bishops, you don't
have the the pope and the body of bishop saying "Guess what, you know, we
used to be Christian, but we're not anymore." Therefore,
whatever criticisms you have of the pope and the bishops, they have not
apostatized. So the people who are making these
arguments simply do not understand what an apostasy
is. Now there was another component to your question which
is: has the Church abandoned its traditions? Well, one of the things you discover
when you read the Church's documents and when you study the course of history
is although tradition has elements of continuity that
are the same all the way down through Church history and have been since the
first century, there are other elements of tradition
that adapt and that develop with the course of time. So originally,
presumably, Jesus said the liturgy for the first
time in Aramaic, at the last supper. Aramaic was the most
common language spoken in Palestine at the time,
we have indications from the gospels that Jesus regularly spoke Aramaic so
the first Mass was probably Aramaic. But very quickly, certainly by Saint
Paul's time, they started saying Mass in Greek. So
that aspect of the tradition adapted. It developed. And soon,
within a couple of centuries, mass was being said in Latin.
Originally, even in Rome, it was said in Greek; but over the course of time,
Latin was added, and so were other languages.
And in the 300s, the divinity of Christ was in was infallibly defined, and so
even though that had been part of the tradition up to now, now it
was an infallibly defined tradition. And in 381, the divinity of the Holy
Spirit was infallibly defined. It had already been a tradition, but now
it was an infallibly defined one. And so you have elements of tradition
that are in continuity with the past, but you also have developments that
occur within that tradition. And so part of the
problem with sedevacantists is they don't
recognize the degree to which development can happen. They
insist frequently—and frankly—on an
uncharitable reading of every development, and portray it
as if it was an unacceptable development, and they have essentially fossilized
a certain stage of development in the history of the Church and said "Any
departure from that is an apostasy." And that's
just a misrepresentation, both of the concept of apostasy
and of the way tradition works. Because it has not only
the element of continuity, but it also has the
element of development that occurs, and you can't arbitrarily fossilize
a certain stage in the Church's history and say "There can
be no departures from this. Anything else is a betrayal." All right,
how's all that, Brent? Does that give you some help?
Yeah, it definitely helps. And I totally understand when you
said that since I'm going through the education of
the Catholic Church, and even besides going through RCIA I've been doing a lot
of my own research on the Catholic Church, which is again
why I want to join the Catholic Church, I definitely found the truth in it. So
in your opinion, Jimmy, you would say that there are—this is just a
clarification for me personally— you would say that there definitely are
not any anti-popes, and all of the bishops still
have their full succession from the original
Church from the beginning, correct? Well, there are anti-popes. I mean, there's a
guy in Kansas who calls himself Pope Michael,
and he's not the real pope, so that makes him an anti-pope.
In fact, I had two anti-popes on Facebook try to become my Facebook
friends a while back, but I concluded that they just wanted to
be Facebook friends so they could promote their anti-papacies,
and I didn't friend them. In terms of Pope Francis,
he's the pope. He's the one that the college of cardinals elected,
and I have no doubt about that. I have no doubt that the bishops are, as
a college, successors of the apostles. One of the
things that Christ promised is that he would be with his
church till the end of time. He also promised the gates of hell would not
prevail against it. Well, whatever else that means, it means
there's not going to be a sudden apostasy
of the bishops who were guided by the Holy Spirit, according to Jesus,
and by Jesus himself. There's not going to be a sudden apostasy with nobody
noticing. So what happens with these
sedevacantists is they will typically say things like "Vatican II
was the point of the rupture," and maybe even a little earlier than that, with
Pope John XXIII, "He was not a valid pope for...
reasons," which are really hard to specify. And then Vatican II said all kinds of
horrible things, in their mind, that contradicted the historic faith.
Well, here's the thing: the bishops of the world,
who are guided by the Holy Spirit and are successors of the apostles—they were
there at Vatican II! And if Vatican II had done something
that fundamentally betrayed the faith,
then number one, the gates of hell would have prevailed against the Church,
which Jesus said wouldn't happen, and number two,
there would have been an outcry from the bishops! I mean, how do you get—maybe you
get some of the bishops to have a wrong-headed notion about
something, maybe even got a significant number of
them to have a wrong-headed notion about something—
but some of them are gonna be guided enough
by the Holy Spirit that they say "Wait a minute! This is really wrong here!"
And that didn't happen. You didn't have a protest of bishops denouncing the
Vatican II documents at the time of Vatican II.
You had a little bit of buyer's remorse afterwards by one bishop—I'm thinking of
of Marcel Lefevbre— but at the time of
the Council, he didn't you know, shout from the rooftops, "This is
all wrong." He signed the Vatican II documents.
So um there just would have been, at the Council, some kind of massive
protest if it did anything fundamentally wrong.
So even if you want to say, "Well, I think they could have done better, or think
they could have phrased this differently," fine. But if there was some horrendous
theological error that struck at the foundation of the Church,
some group of the episcopate would have protested.
And they didn't. And that tells us that Christ is maintaining his Church in the
truth fundamentally, just like he said he would. As Saint Paul
says, it's the pillar and foundation of truth in the world,
Christ said the gates of hell are not going to prevail against it,
and so consequently, this— and I hate to say this, because I
don't like to say things in general that are negative about
people—but the ideas that are being proposed by
sedevacantists are just paranoid and delusional that
are not in conformity with the promises of
Christ.