Vinicius returns to the theme of High Church Modernism (see previous articles here and here) – that incoherent ideology found among many influential ‘traditionalist’ commentators but which is in fact a blend of occult mysticism, Vatican II ecclesiology and the rejection of the decrees of the dogmatic First Vatican Council.
by Vinicius
For Gallican “reformers” the Catholic Church has been all wrong for most of the last thousand years. Their unoriginal solution (in view of Lutheranism, Gallicanism, Anglicanism etc) is to go back to the “early Church”.
Writers like Peter Kwasniewski, Sebastian Morello, and Tim Flanders can’t be sure exactly what period has to be dusted off or what this means; the only dogma seems to be anti-papalism and open-ended radical change to the constitution and even doctrine of the Church.
Traditional rite Catholics who endorse the unorthodox novelties and equivocations in Vatican II texts have been thrown completely off-balance by the Society of Saint Pius X’s announcement of episcopal consecrations.
There are two reasons for this. Firstly because of its motive – a crisis in the Church caused by ideas in Conciliar texts and “spirit”. Secondly, because of its invocation of traditional teaching on the constitution of the Church rejecting the novelty of ordinary episcopal jurisdiction underived from the Pope’s. This has changed the traditionalist discourse, forcing all “Trads” to reevaluate their cause in the light of Vatican II as “the problem”.
There is every sign that the SSPX is succeeding here. This has unnerved stalwart defenders of Vatican II ecclesiology like Peter Kwasniewski and Tim Flanders, panicking them into gushing about “reforms” to “complete” the changes of Vatican II in ways that make the German Synodal Way look conservative.
Kwasnewski/Virgilius’ 95 Theses
Kwasniewski’s program for a new Church constitution (after years of heavy hints) has finally seen the light of day as a Manifesto translated from German and heavily inspired by Georg Hegel. This turgid text might only be closely examined by those sympathetic or scandalised enough to be bothered (it’s a pity Luther is not around – he could have helped with the prose), but it leaves one thing clear: Kwasniewski is no traditional Catholic.
The second thing that emerges with this declaration of war, not just against the “Pius papacies”, but the divine constitution of the Church itself, is that the ralliement of traditional Catholicism to the textual novelties of Vatican II is failing the test of doctrinal orthodoxy; in English-speaking countries especially, agitators like Kwasniewski are fomenting a sub-culture of Gallican modernism that is fast becoming less orthodox than the most “average” parish.
It is also for the reader to fathom how Kwasniewski’s declaration of neutrality1 concerning the SSPX consecrations can be reconciled with his total support for a Manifesto centred on condemning these consecrations and ridiculing their justification.
The Kwasniewski/Virgilius manifesto was introduced in prophetic terms by Kwasniewski, alluding to and not apologising for its contradictions of Vatican I:
“The subject is sensitive because it concerns the First Vatican Council. I personally consider this essay… 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”. 2
But the author, “Vigilius”, tries to use the notion of the Church as a “sacrament” which appeared at Vatican II, to justify abolishing papal jurisdiction as understood in Catholic dogma.
For Vigilius, Vatican II’s invention of collegiality and the tying of ordinary jurisdiction to episcopal consecration rather than papal jurisdiction is “a necessary first step on the much longer path… The Council has by no means followed this path to its conclusion”.
He complains that Vatican II did not finish its revolution:
“ … the doctrine of the universal papal primacy of jurisdiction… was still kept completely untouched. Here, the SSPX, with its old view, is at least partially more consistent” (the absurdities mentioned in the Manifesto concerning jurisdiction have been comprehensively refuted by Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize of the SSPX).3
Hegel is “right”, Saint Augustine is “monumentally wrong”
Instead, the article proposes a new ecclesiology founded on a Hegelian interpretation of the Trinity, because Saint Augustine’s understanding of the Trinity was based on a “momentous mistake”.
Hegel is cited several times and praised for “rightly describ[ing]” what the liturgy is. The upshot of the article’s Hegelian waffling and its other inspiration, “the great Protestant theologian Eberhard Jüngel”, is to collapse any distinction between the liturgy/sacrifice, and jurisdiction.
Concrete prescriptions for a new Reformation soon appear: “the priest is, by definition, also the bishop… [Separation of the priesthood from governing] is a grave theological problem”.
He provides an anecdote from his upbringing to support his worrying:
“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”.
This newspeak is just bizarre. The Manifesto claims that crowds saluting a new Pope are welcoming “an absolute monarch” and “this papal idolatry reflects the concept developed by the Church herself” in “the second millennium”. Truly, “Virgilius” is not comfortable in the Catholic Church.
But the Manifesto has the solution – Luther’s return to an imaginary “early Church” and the abolition of jurisdiction:
“the only power that can exist in the Church is a potestas sacra that is intrinsically oriented toward the sacrificial cult [because even “divine kingship” is not to be distinguished from “sacrifice”]… this relation is only possible if Peter is understood as he was understood in the early Church”.
Like Luther, we look to the Bible, not the Church, to invent a new ecclesiology: “The primacy of Peter, as attested in the New Testament” is opposed to “that highly politicized, actively legislative, and doctrinally dictatorial paradigm that developed in the course of the second millennium”. One thousand years of the Church’s life is again thrown under the bus in the new Reformation.
The Papacy becomes a democratic contract
This “Reformation” is much more radical than the German Synodal Way:
“the specific potestas of the Roman bishop as the successor of Peter must be understood… as a contractual delegation by the priests… The Roman bishop would then be an institution of priestly self-organization, elected by the community of priests or delegated priests… [who can sack him] As in the early Church, the duties of the Roman bishop would be [doctrinal adjudication and oversight of priests’ conduct]… In his very essence, such a pope would be the guardian of the cult.”
Priests, instead, would be “the true vicars of Christ” because they offer Mass. The Pope becomes the moderator of a folk religion and ritualism emerging out of democratic consensus.
This Manifesto rejects the Papacy as defined at Vatican I:
“If anyone says that the Roman pontiff has merely an office of supervision and guidance, and not the full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals, but also in those which concern the discipline and government of the church… let him be anathema”; “[the Roman pontiff is the] true vicar of Christ, head of the whole church”.
The Manifesto concludes with Kwasniewski’s favourite theme, questioning whether “the “Pius popes” represent the ultimate ideal of the papacy and that the modern papacy is the “salvation of the Church”. But like Kwasniewski and Sebastian Morello (its cited sources) however, it is openly directed against the Church of the last thousand years, and implicitly to its very origins.
Return of the Conciliarist heresy
The Manifesto’s reduction of the papacy to chairmanship of a flattened, parliamentary Church is desperately important to Peter Kwasniewski’s ecclesiology, as is clear from his own assertions:
“the pope… as a member of the Church, takes up an office of the Church and for the Church – the pope gets his jurisdiction from the Church”. 4
By teaching that the Pope receives his jurisdiction (immediately) from the Church rather than Christ, Kwasniewski reduces the Church’s divine constitution to that of a civil society, deriving papal authority from God indirectly, through the society.
This is a regurgitation of the Conciliarist heresy which plagued the Councils of Constance and Basel in the fifteenth century. To this day, several sessions of these Councils are not recognised by the Church because of the serious errors they contain, which were not recognised by the Popes of the time, of course.
Conciliarism maintained that the church, as the congregation of the faithful, is the source of its own law, and that the pope and the hierarchy are its organs or representatives. Conciliarism only became powerful in these assemblies because of the violence used by secular authorities trying to expand their power.
Conciliarism was not traditional. It was the first crisis of modernity affecting the Church. Its inspirations were heterodox figures like the semi-Protestant Marsilio of Padua, Dante Alighieri, whose secularist De monarchia was burnt in the public square in Bologna by the Dominicans, and William of Occam, the propagator of nominalism and precursor of so many evils of modern philosophy.
Peter Kwasniewski goes against the Catholic Church’s rejection of the tainted sessions of Constance by claiming papal ratification for them, thus legitimising a heresy:
“ … the fifteenth-century Council of Constance (1414–1418), in the 39th session, which was ratified by Pope Martin V and Pope Eugene IV”.5
But Pope Martin rejected this session. Pope Eugene recognised Constance “apart” from those elements which compromised his authority, which the thirty-ninth session did, especially the decree Frequens. Pope Pius II condemned Conciliarism as heretical in the Bull Execrabilis (1460). The Church specifically rejects the inclusion of Constance sessions 3-5 and 39 as part of the Ecumenical Council. Vatican I condemns the errors expressed in those sessions.
Saint Thomas Aquinas and Church tradition were to be found supporting the papacy, which soon triumphed again, for the conciliarists were totally incapable of running the Church.
For Aquinas “the Vicar of Christ has universal jurisdiction over the entire Church of Christ”; “to the aforesaid Pontiff belongs the right of deciding what pertains to faith”. 6
Saint Thomas wrote long before political absolutism. It was Conciliarism that broke with the past by attempting the assimilation of Church life to that of civil society. At Constance, for the first time, bishops were grouped according to “nations”, foreshadowing the Protestant Reformation’s invention of national Churches.
The Church disappears into civil society in Gallican high church modernism
Paradoxically, despite the Hegelian waffle in the Kwasniewski/Virgilius Manifesto about the Church as a sacrament and reducing everything to ritual, neo-Gallican writers agitate for the end of the Church as a divinely-founded society by collapsing it into civil society.
As was seen in High Church Modernism Part II, Peter Kwasniewski argues for “co-responsibility between lay leadership and clerical leadership” … “kings and emperors, aristocrats, religious orders… [were] points of authority spread throughout the Church”.
Sebastian Morello expressed the same doctrine:
“Since the late medieval period, every form of check and balance in the Church has incrementally diminished. The influence of the temporal power of the Church, namely the laity, on ecclesiastical matters has so ebbed”.7
But subsidiarity is an aspect of civil society, not the Church. As Saint Thomas explained, the Pope is subject to divine and natural law, which allows Catholics to know if he is ever to be disobeyed or even rebuked. But Saint Paul’s correction of Saint Peter was not a “constitutional check and balance”. It certainly was not a secular “point of authority” within the Church.
New/old heresies to add to the crisis in the Church
There has been another crisis which threatens to upset the Gallican project. Trump’s recent attacks on the papacy, rejecting the Pope’s duty to speak on moral questions and their concrete application in society, have suddenly brought back to everyone’s attention the fact that the Church is divine society beyond civil society.
It annoys liberals to hear the Popes explain universal principles to them. But it hurts the Gallicans even more. The papacy has come out of this with more respect and credibility.
Tim Flanders, who works in lockstep with Kwasniewski, is outraged. His solution is that of Henry VIII:
“The phrase “Church and State” is a Liberal dichotomy and should be abandoned by Catholics. The phrase should be changed to ‘clerics and lay people’ or ‘spiritual and temporal powers.’ Why? Because… the State is the Church and the clergy is the Church.” 8
Flanders abolishes the sacred distinction between Church and civil society, merging the two into one society, as the Protestants did. But the Church, unlike civil societies, is a ‘divinely founded society’ (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas). The two societies should work in alliance and the state should profess the Christian faith, but this does not make it “the Church”. Saint Thomas Aquinas makes this clear in De regimine principum, as does the whole Magisterium of the Church.
Flanders claims that Donald Trump is “restoring” the “Two Swords doctrine”, the “traditional dogma non-definitum” 9, by refusing the accountability of civil society to higher principles as defined by the Church.
Flanders refers to Pope Gelasius I (r. 492-496) letter to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, in which he stated to the Church and civil society are ruled by “Two Swords” respectively. But this was an assertion of the liberty of the Church as a distinct society, not the Protestant/Gallican error that civil society and the Church are one society with different functions.
Rubbishing traditional Catholicism
Flanders’ agenda does not attempt to rely upon traditional Church teaching:
“Contrary to the Trad myth… the Second Vatican Council actually did a great deal to restore a traditional ecclesiology [by] urg[ing] the laity to reclaim their rights as rulers in the Church”.
Bizarrely, he correlates this to:
“ … there are many good Catholics trying to work with Mr. Trump to govern these United States according to Catholic social teaching [!]. The Trump Administration has always been asserting its legitimate rights to govern the temporal sphere”.
Refusing to speak of the Church, Flanders says,
“ .. the clergy have no right to dictate to the lay rulers the exact policy that they must take on economics and politics… This also includes waging war… So the Trump administration is re-establishing the rights of lay rulers to govern their own jurisdiction”.
The Church must not only speak of principles, however, but also their application in concrete situations when these contravene natural and divine law, as this war does. Flanders only admits a papal right to express an opinion, not the Church’s final word on moral and divine law. This is the essence of secularism: civil society has no accountability to anything but itself.
Flanders continues: the war on Iran might be
“hard to justify under Catholic just war theory. Nevertheless, our brethren, Hebrew Catholics in Israel, are in favour of regime change in Iran, and no Catholic should disagree with that pious desire”(!).
How on earth could the opinions of “Hebrew Catholics” (all 537 of them) compel Catholics to agree with this war? What of the 150,000 Arabic-speaking Christians living in Israel, or the millions of Christians across the Middle East? It is almost impossible to find an Arabic-speaking Christian, layman or cleric, who will support Tel Aviv.
Flanders’ open espousal of the heretical idea that the Church is not a society in its own right, distinct from civil society, is in line with the Conciliarist heresy that Peter Kwasniewski is unfortunately toying with. This meshes with their flattening of the Church into a parliamentary, “sacramental” folk ritual that supplies jurisdiction to the Vicar of Christ, because of their occultist collapsing of the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders.
For they are in awe of de Lubac and Tomberg, Proclus and his so-called Neo-Platonism (see Peter Kwasniewski, High Church Modernism and Occutism, Part I). Morello’s “world as God’s icon” is in the same vein, as it makes the world an “emanation” of God rather than a creation.
False ideas are not playthings. They have consequences. In the case of high church modernism, it produces people who like Catholic ritual just as much as orthodox Catholics do, yet understand it as the expression of a worldview that is separated from the Catholic Faith by an abyss.
Above all, they do not love the papacy, which Our Lord established as the foundation of the Church.
They believe that a conciliar, neo-Gallican Church will “fix” the shortcomings of the divinely-founded Church. To achieve this, they continue and worsen the novelties of Vatican II, which are uniquely to blame for the Popes of the last two generations.
Lex orandi did not prevent the modern outbreak of conciliarism at Vatican II from overwhelming most. The Rhine of secular ideology and nouvelle theologie flowed into the Tiber because the papacy was weak, not because it was strong. The post-conciliar Popes are problematic because they refer to the absolutism generated by a self-referring conciliar mandate; ours is a conciliarist Church, not a papalist Church. More conciliarism is the last thing it needs.
By Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
FOOTNOTES
- A Survey of the Best Writing on the SSPX Situation – Peter Kwasniewski, Tradition and Sanity ↩︎
- The Kingship of Christ and the Aporias of the Roman Church – “Vigilius”, Rorate Caeli 14/4/26. ↩︎
- Order and Jurisdiction: The Vatican at a Crossroads – Fr. Jean-Michel Gleize, 2/3/26 ↩︎
- Could God permit a heretical pope to remain in office, and why would He? Peter Kwasniewski, Life Site News (9/1/20) ↩︎
- The Primacy of Tradition and Obedience to the Truth – Peter Kwasniewski, lecture in Charlotte, NC 2/9/22. ↩︎
- Contra errores graecorum, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 33, 36. ↩︎
- Can Hermetic Magic Rescue the Church? Part I: Acknowledging the Crisis and Breaking the Spell – Sebastian Morello, The European Conservative 29/7/23 ↩︎
- President Trump against Pope Leo, on Behalf of Catholicism? – Tim Flanders, One Peter Five 13/4/26 ↩︎
- Dogma non-definitum are teachings or doctrines that have not yet been declared as divinely revealed dogmas. ↩︎
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