There is no such thing as a 'sede vacantist'.

The historical evidence is compelling that Gregory XVII( true deciple of Rampolla, Pius X, Card Del Val, and Pius XII-- who named him as his preferred successor) was legally elected Pope in 1958 and was just that until he died in 1989.

IF there is a state of sede vacante, it has only been since then.

Nishant,

I suppose the first thing that needs to be established is which Vatican II "pope" we are discussing.  I believe a very strong case could be made that John Paul II and Benedict certainly lacked a peaceful acceptance.  There has been nothing but turmoil in the Church from the time that they were elected, and a very significant portion of Catholics have during their entire "pontificate" ever submitted to them.

I think a key point here is that when one accepts the pope, then one obeys the pope and learns from the pope.  I would argue that the SSPX has never accepted the papal claims of these men, as they have not treated them as popes.  They have ignored their teachings and laws and have acted in practice as though they do not exist.  This is not a peaceful acceptance of a pope.

Now, with Paul VI, I also believe that despite Catholics referring to him as "pope," Catholics were actively resisting him in matters of Faith.  If Catholics had peacefully accepted his claim, then there would have been no turmoil about settled doctrine at Vatican II.  As in the case of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Catholics were clearly treating Paul VI with skepticism about his papal claim while calling him "pope."

On the point of John XXIII, I will not try to argue that one.  

I think this really comes down to this:  Do you believe peaceful acceptance of the Pope is accepting him as a figurehead who can be ignored, with no power to rule over Catholics, or is acceptance of the Pope actually accepting him as the head of the Church, the Supreme Teacher and Lawgiver, St. Peter's successor?

Ambrose, I think Nishant's quotations do not have anything to do with 'peaceful' acceptance, non-turmoil in a papacy, willingness of Catholics to adhere to a pope's teaching etc. It simply speaks of [/b]mere acceptance. That is, Catholics universally accept a person to be the Pope.  

This from John Daly, posted on the Bellarmine Forums May 26, 2006.  This is directly relevant to the current discussion:

Hello and welcome Matt! You have asked several interesting questions and I should like to tackle just one of them, when you say “Cardinal Billot and other theologians speak about the fact that universal adherence to a certain man as pope results in an infallible fact that the the man is indeed, pope. Firstly, does such a teaching contradict cuм ex Apostolatus or are we dealing with apples and oranges? Secondly and more importantly, how can one deny that the world has acknowledged the papacy in Benedict XVI and his four predecessors?”

It happens that I had a correspondence a short time ago with an enquirer on the same topic and I am pasting in below the exchange to speak for itself. I am “JD” and my enquirer is “MM”.

JD Yes, if the universal Church with moral unanimity peacefully accept a man as legitimate pope, he must indeed be a legitimate pope. The reason for this is that the pope is the proximate rule of faith. The faithful accept the pope's doctrinal teaching and if the whole Church accepted a false rule of faith, Christ would be exposing His Church to error, which cannot happen.

Thus far I think we are agreed. But notice that, so far are we from peaceful unanimity that in fact practically no-one accepted/accepts Paul VI, John-Paul II or Benedict XVI as his rule of faith! Millions of "fans" went to JP2 rallies where they shrieked ecstatically at his utterances, but as for actually accepting that contraception is necessarily a deadly sin, for instance, hardly anyone did! If JP2 was your rule of faith you had to be against contraception, for religious liberty, against women priests (as theologically impossible) but for the doctrine that Christ is irrevocably united with all men. How many people considered him as pope in that sense? Not the Modernists - they thought him conservative. Not the traditionalists. Anyone?

On the other hand the whole principle on which Billot, St Alphonsus and John of St Thomas base this doctrine is in flat contradiction with the SSPX position. The theologians say that the unanimous recognition of a man as pope proves that he is pope because otherwise the Church would have accepted a false living rule of faith and would be led into error against faith and morals, which is impossible. But the SSPX position actually denies the premise! They cheerfully hold that the pope is not necessarily the proximate rule of faith and that the Church can be and has been led into error by the Vicars of Christ. They are very badly placed to invoke this doctrine against sedevacantists!

[To this I received the following reply with my answers interspersed]

MM In your e-mail you mentioned that JP2's followers who "accepted" him as pope rejected the notion that contraception is a deadly sin. But if that's the case, wouldn't those "Catholics" be outside the Church, therefore making their acceptance of him or not a moot point?

JD Denial of the Church's teaching condemning contraception is not usually considered enough to exclude one from membership of the Church. But supposing it were, you are effectively excluding over 90% of those who constitute the quasi-unanimous consensus recognising the V2 popes. Add those who deny other doctrines - Hell, impossibility of women priests, etc and you reach 95%. Where has your consensus gone? And what kind of a Church is it 95% of whose apparently recognised followers are not even members of her? Certainly not one whose remaining <5% can constitute the peaceful unanimous consensus referred to by John of St Thomas, Billot, St Alphonsus etc. It must after all be extremely uncomfortable giving the "sign of peace" to non-Catholics and elbowing them at the communion-rail (I mean in the cookie-queue) while knowing that they are recognised as Catholics by the Vicar of Christ. Hesitant recognition of a man as a valid though disastrous leader, not to be trusted, during a very grave and manifest crisis of which he is denying the existence...that is not what the theologians mean by peaceful and unanimous recognition.

MM Could it not be said then that those "neo-Catholics" who accept the entire moral teaching of the Church and accept V2 in good faith be the ones who matter as far as universally recognizing a man as pope?

JD To my mind that involves so much adjustment of the Billot doctrine that the result is no more than a private opinion. The neo-Church recognises all the neo-Catholics as her members irrespective of their adhesion to Catholic doctrine. If the consensus is composed by the tiny percentage for whom the teaching of the Catholic Church is the rule of faith and the V2 popes are their proximate rule of faith, it has become invisible and unverifiable.

MM However, does it even matter if in actuality they accept JP2's teachings as long as they recognize in him the papacy (this is only as far as Billot's position is concerned; I'm under the impression that he teaches that what's important is that the man is recognized as pope by Church Universal, and that whether or not they assent to his teachings is irrelevant to this one very particular issue)?

JD No. This is wrong. I tried to make this point clear last time but I probably didn't do a very good job of expressing it. May I ask you to read very attentively the following rather complicated sentence: the reason and the proof of the theologians' teaching that peaceful and unanimous recognition of a man as pope demonstrates him to be truly pope is that the pope is 1. the living rule of faith of the Church's members and 2. infallible, and if the Church adhered unanimously to a non-pope, i.e. a non-infallible rule of faith, she would be liable to be led into error in faith which is impossible. Got that?
Right. Well as you can see, calling a man pope while not recognising him as one's rule of faith simply doesn't have this effect. The teaching of cardinal Billot, John of St Thomas and others on this subject is not a direct teaching of the Church. It is a theological inference made for excellent reasons by theologians and which it would be foolish and rash to disagree with. But this reasoning is based entirely on the fact that Catholics necessarily adhere to the doctrinal teaching of the man they consider to be pope. If the Catholic faith did not in fact require this adherence, the argument would not work and the theologians would never have made the deduction that unanimous recognition is proof of papal legitimacy. It would be a non sequitur.

It would also be a non sequitur if it were possible for the whole Church to err in the faith as a consequence of adhering to the teaching of a true pope. Unanimous adherence to a fallible usurper would not, in that case, be incompatible in itself or in any of its consequences with Catholic doctrine. Claro?

And it would also be a non sequitur for a third reason if the adherence Catholics owe and give to papal teaching were something rare and limited to extraordinary acts like the proclamation of a dogma such as the Assumption. For in that case most popes would not in fact lead the Church to believe anything and if they taught grave and habitual error by their ordinary Magisterium this would not necessarily mean that the Church would follow them.

If you have understood the foregoing you will see that the adherence to the V2 popes of men who did not acknowledge in them their proximate rule of faith has no relevance at all to the principle of recognising papal legitimacy by unanimous peaceful adherence. You will also observe that Billot and the other theologians who use this argument would simply not recognise as the Catholic Church an institution whose members did not have this habitual disposition to recognise papal teaching as their rule of belief.

You will also see that it is the position of non-sedevacantist traditionalists that conflicts with the Billot doctrine, for they consider it possible and even necessary in our days to adhere to a man as pope while not adhering to his doctrinal teaching as their proximate rule of faith - the very point of dogmatic certainty which Billot and the others take as the logical point of departure of their reasoning. For the SSPX to use the Billot argument would involve self-contradiction. They deny the premise (which belongs directly to Catholic doctrine) and cannot therefore reproach sedevacantists with not accepting the conclusion (which doesn't belong directly to Catholic doctrine but which we do accept anyhow).

Ave Maria!

John DALY

A while back, John Lane wrote a series of articles for The Four Marks entitled, "The Church Crucified".  In them, he commented on this precise article from the American Ecclesiastical Review.

   On December 7, 1965 the most controversial of all the docuмents of Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanæ, was promulgated by Paul VI.  In that very same month, an arresting question was raised at the American Ecclesiastical Review.  “What certainty have we that the reigning Pontiff is actually the primate of the universal Church?”   Rev. Francis J. Connell, CSSR, the theologian who responded, gave the standard answer from the theology manuals, as one would expect.  But this was a case in which the answer was not the point of interest—the question was.

   The same question has been popping up, with greater and greater frequency and with increasing insistence, ever since.

   We must understand why this is so.  To explain the phenomenon of persistent and spontaneous sedevacantism since the Council, it will not suffice to accuse Paul VI of being a heretic or even of teaching heresy and error as pope, both on his own and as president of a General Council.  The cause was not that direct.  The problem was bigger that Paul VI.  It was larger in scope and it was deeper in its implications, and it was sending shockwaves through the Church, precisely because it was an ecclesiological  problem.  Frank Sheed, prolific author and principal of one of the world’s largest Catholic publishing houses, Sheed & Ward, gave expression to the general consternation of the Faithful in the title of a book he wrote immediately after the close of the Council.  It was entitled, Is It the Same Church?

   From the beginning of the crisis the “ecclesiological problem” has been alive in the minds of thinking traditionalists, and it has never disappeared.  As Joseph Ratzinger observed in Chile in 1988, “All this leads a great number of people to ask themselves if the Church of today is really the same as that of yesterday, or if they have changed it for something else without telling people.”   Thus he echoed Frank Sheed, whose book appeared in 1968, and of course, Archbishop Lefebvre, who in 1976 famously declared, “We are suspended a divinis by the Conciliar Church and for the Conciliar Church, to which we have no wish to belong.  That Conciliar Church is a schismatic Church, because it breaks with the Catholic Church that has always been.  It has its new dogmas, its new priesthood, its new institu-tions, its new worship, all already condemned by the Church in many a docuмent, official and definitive….  The Church that affirms such errors is at once schismatic and heretical.  This Conciliar Church is, therefore, not Catholic.  To whatever extent Pope, Bishops, priests, or faithful adhere to this new Church, they separate them-selves from the Catholic Church….”

Indeed, the fact that the sedevacantist question won't go away is not simply an irrelevancy nor is it simply because people are just too stupid to understand the modern situation.  

Additionally, through the 1960s there were numerous articles in secular American periodicals (e.g., Life, Look, Time, and others) that clearly and unequivocally highlighted dissention in the Church.  The Conciliar popes and the Conciliar changes were most definitely not peacefully accepted throughout the Church at the time.  Anyone who claims that they were is engaging in wishful thinking and nostalgia at best, or revisionist history at worst.

Quote from: Laval

Ambrose, I think Nishant's quotations do not have anything to do with 'peaceful' acceptance, non-turmoil in a papacy, willingness of Catholics to adhere to a pope's teaching etc. It simply speaks of [/b]mere acceptance. That is, Catholics universally accept a person to be the Pope.  

No, they don't, and haven't, otherwise these discussions would not be taking place.

Well said, Tele.  Well said!

There is an "elephant in the parlour" in this discussion.  We have the dangerous falsehood of (to quote the Maritainist heretic Charles Journet) "the peaceful acceptance of the universal Church" of V2 and the Novus Ordo apostasy.  That is false history and something that has never happened.

This claim of a peaceful consensus in support of the Novus Ordo is something that never occurred in any real time Catholic history.  It took two world wars and the massive violent intervention of Khruschev's K.G.B. (with collaboration by the C.I.A and M-16 Secret Police forces) to brutally bludgeon the Catholics into submission to the Novus Ordo apostasy and that does not fit any description of an alleged "peaceful acceptance" of anything by the Catholics.

There were savage persecutions of Catholics (such as Padre Pio) under John XXIII while Paul VI persecuted the Catholic bishops mercilessly.  Again, that does not in any way fit the Neo-Liberal's fantasy world of a "peaceful acceptance" among Catholics of V2 and the Novus Ordo or its General Apostasy against the faith.  

This Modernist false version of history also presumes that our present time is one of a general peaceful acceptance by Catholics of the status quo.  Again, false!  For example, at present there is a most violent Reign of Terror throughout Europe and South America against the Catholics.  In the U.S the small Catholic minority is much too terrified and intimidated to present the existing Marxist authorities with much need to conduct a Reign of Terror, but even here the savage persecution of non-Zionist dissenters is not far to seek.  (For example, not even a famous Jєω dissenter like Norman Finkelstein can stay in a rental apartment in New York to keep a roof over his head.  That indicates persecution on the grand scale.)

There is no "peaceful acceptance" of the Novus Ordo!!  None whatsoever.  Brothers Roscoe and Diego are at least on the right path concerning this.  Cardinal Siri and the Patriarch of Venice fought tooth and nail against the apostasy of Anti-pope Paul VI and finally defeated Paul VI when the Patriarch of Venice became Pope John Paul I in 1978.  The fact that the Modernists had to murder Pope John Paul I so quickly to prevent the Restoration of the Church from happening then is an indication of how strong the Resistance against the Modernists of V2 was among Catholics throughout the 60s and 70s.

The reason so few publicly opposed V2 was the use of terror methods like assassinations, widespread house-arrests, economic ostracism, bribery, blackmail and other such violent techniques on a massive scale to prevent Catholics from going public against V2 and Paul VI.  Men like Cardinal Siri and Pope John Paul I were not cowards but fought against the Modernists as much as the vicious persecutions of those days would let them.  

Today Catholics are being subjected to savage persecutions throughout the Western World, especially in Europe and South America.  Most actual non-apostate American Catholics are frightened to death of the Jєωιѕн psychopaths and their Modernist underlings.  This is emphatically not "the peaceful acceptance of the universal Church" that only exists in some Catholic's (or perhaps Neo-Catholic's) lively imaginations.

For the timid souls among us the relevant quote must be:

"If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our temple and our nation."  (John 11:48)

But, as we know, the Romans always come anyway!  The hypocrites and cowards are wrong because God is not mocked and in the end the "angels" of His vengeance always "come and destroy" His enemies, usually with devastating effect.  We can not hide from God and it is always best not even to try such a foolish thing.

In truth it is always much safer to be with Him than against Him.  We should forget about the Novus Ordo.  It is not long for this world.

 

Brother,

How was JPI possibly going to restore the Church? He was a liberal just like Paul VI and JPII.