'Hovel in the valley' – The conclusion to 'Zero Marks'
Rounding up the argument made in 'Zero Marks' – and comparing it to that of the late Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais.
Rounding up the argument made in ‘Zero Marks’ – and comparing it to that of the late Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais.
Author’s Notes
This is the Conclusion and Appendix of my “book”, ‘Zero Marks’ – Why the Conciliar/Synodal Church is not the Catholic Church – summarising the text, and giving an overview of the late Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais’ different approach to the same question.
Zero Marks is Part II of my response to Fr Thomas Crean OP’s article “A City Set on a Hill Cannot Be Hidden: The Perpetual Visibility of the Catholic Church Under the Pope.” Peter Kwasniewski described Fr Crean’s article as “a definitive rebuttal of sedevacantism, at the level of first principles.”
As Zero Marks is very long and detailed (over 30,000 words), we first published it in full for WM+ members, and have been releasing each of the five chapters (and now the conclusion) separately for all readers.
Other resources
I discussed this chapter with Stephen Kokx over at Integrity Magazine:
Other parts in the Zero Marks series:
‘Radically insufficient’ – Reply to Fr Crean on the Church’s visibility, Part I
‘Zero Marks’ – Why the Conciliar/Synodal Church is not the Catholic Church (Reply to Fr Thomas Crean) (All chapters and conclusion)
Thesis Statement
As usual, I once again restate my definition of the Conciliar/Synodal Church, my thesis, and a necessary clarification:
Definition: By “Conciliar/Synodal Church,” I mean the body of men who recognise Leo XIV as their Pope and spiritual leader, claim to be subject to him, and whom he (and his officers) recognise as being in good standing with him.
Thesis: The Conciliar/Synodal Church, considered as such, is not the Roman Catholic Church.
Clarification: By “not the Roman Catholic Church”, I mean that this body of men, considered as such, is not identical with the Roman Catholic Church. Taken as defined, it is a body composed of both Catholics and non-Catholics and lacks certain essential properties of the Roman Catholic Church; for this reason, it cannot be identified with that Church. The thesis therefore concerns the identity and nature of the body itself, considered as a social reality or accidental aggregation, rather than the status of the individuals within it. It does not deny the continued visibility of the Catholic Church; rather, it denies that this visibility, and membership of the Church, are determined by the boundaries of the Conciliar/Synodal Church as defined. Accordingly, it does not imply a) that this body constitutes a false sect (since it is an accidental aggregation of Catholics and non-Catholics, rather than a true society); b) that no Catholics exist within it; or c) that a man ceases to be a Catholic simply by being included in this body. Some of these points are clarified in Zero Marks, or will be clarified further elsewhere.
Conclusion to ‘Zero Marks’
With reference to the properties and notes of unity, holiness, sanctity and apostolicity, we have demonstrated that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is both not distinctly visible as the Catholic Church, and that it is visibly not the Catholic Church.
Unity: The Conciliar/Synodal Church is visibly divided in faith, teaching, worship, and discipline; open rejection of divinely revealed doctrine is treated as compatible with membership. This is incompatible with the Church’s necessary unity.
Holiness: Unholy doctrines and practices are tolerated or promoted. This goes beyond obscuration to a failure of the property itself.
Catholicity: Though widely diffused, the Conciliar/Synodal Church has renounced catholicity of right by a programme towards certain sects which repudiates the need for conversion, implying that whole classes of men need not enter the Church for salvation. A society that abandons this mandate may be diffused, but this diffusion does not manifest the property of catholicity.
Apostolicity: The current crisis and the state of the question mean that material succession to the Papacy cannot resolve the question as it might at other times. Apostolicity exists for apostolic authority and doctrinal continuity; yet authority is habitually set aside, and apostolic doctrine teaching has been contradicted, also entailing rupture with apostolic identity. Under these circumstances, material succession cannot manifest the property of apostolicity.
How did this happen? John Lane explained the period following Vatican II as follows:
“Effectively, Paul VI refused to govern in a manner that would permit Catholics to obey him. We could obey him and cease being practicing Catholics; or we could continue practicing the divinely revealed religion and in those very acts disobey. But he did this. The traditionalists didn’t.
“The traditional Catholics didn’t step forward and usurp authority and make judgements, they merely continued practicing the Catholic religion. The physical motion was on their side, it is true, in that it was the traditionalists who ceased attending their local parish church, but the moral movement was all on the other side – the side of Paul VI and his bishops. And it is the moral motion that matters, obviously.”1
For these reasons, Fr Crean’s description of those who reject Vatican II’s moral movement away from the Catholic Church, and have grouped themselves around clergy who have remained faithful, applies to the Conciliar/Synodal Church itself:
“… the ruins of a city, from which men had taken bricks and stones to fashion for themselves a hovel in the valley.”
This comment formed part of a rhetorical dilemma which Fr Crean posed at the end of this article, effectively stating that if we are correct about the extended vacancy of the Holy See, then the conclusions which he incorrectly believes flow from this vacancy essentially “falsify” the Church. Thus, Fr Crean claims, either Leo XIV is the Pope and the Conciliar/Synodal Church is the Catholic Church, or there is no Church at all.
In the first part of my response, I noted the following:
“In general, I consider this attempt to create a dilemma extremely dangerous (including for men of our own position). Under ordinary circumstances, arguments like this might be legitimate, but the nature of the present crisis has meant that it has actually led men of both ‘sedevacantist’ and sedeplenist conclusions to abandon the Catholic Church altogether.”
As we reach the end of this lengthy second part, the problems caused by Fr Crean’s rhetorical dilemma should be apparent.
I believe that I have succeeded in demonstrating that the Conciliar/Synodal Church, taken as such, is not the Catholic Church. It is my hope that I have also succeeded in convincing Fr Crean of this fact. But if I have, then I must ask him the following questions:
If the Conciliar/Synodal Church is not the Catholic Church, are you so attached to the idea that it was, that you are now prepared to give up the Catholic faith in its entirety, as your rhetorical dilemma would require?
Are you more attached to the idea that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is the Roman Catholic Church, than you are to the Roman Catholic Church herself?
For my part, I am neither so prepared nor attached. Anyone who would lose the faith over this crisis, and turn either to one of the false Eastern sects, to Protestantism, or to any other false religion (or even atheism) evidently lacks the love of truth proper to a Catholic.
Further, as Fr Crean no doubt is aware, the theological virtue of faith enjoys a supernatural certitude. Vatican I taught the following:
“[T]he situation of those, who by the heavenly gift of faith have embraced the Catholic truth, is by no means the same as that of those who, led by human opinions, follow a false religion; for those who have accepted the faith under the guidance of the Church can never have any just cause for changing this faith or for calling it into question.”
It states this in the form of a canon:
“If anyone says that the condition of the faithful and those who have not yet attained to the only true faith is alike, so that Catholics may have a just cause for calling in doubt, by suspending their assent, the faith which they have already received from the teaching of the Church, until they have completed a scientific demonstration of the credibility and truth of their faith: let him be anathema.”
The faith is of a different order of certainty to the legitimacy of particular papal claimants – at least during periods of such extreme doctrinal turmoil, wherein we do not have recourse to the universal and peaceful adherence of the Church. As Archbishop Lefebvre said in 1976:
“[I]f it appears certain to us that the faith which was taught by the Church for twenty centuries cannot contain error, we have much less of an absolute certitude that the Pope be truly Pope.”2
The very idea that the claims of the Roman Catholic Church could be falsified is simply monstrous. As such, the discovery that the Conciliar/Synodal Church is not the Catholic Church should not give rise to any doubt or disturbance at all, but merely a renewal of the act of the faith, and a proceeding to the next question: Where, then, is the Catholic Church?
In fact, the claims of the Catholic Church cannot be falsified. I explain the problems with this rhetorical argument here:
However, Fr Crean is correct in stating that the Church is indefectible, and must be perpetually visible – even if he does not account for the extent to which she may be obscured. I affirm that this same Roman Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, outside of which there is no salvation, remains in the world with all of her essential properties intact.
In the next part, we will analyse the particular claims of the article, and – with God’s help – explain why we must affirm that this same Roman Catholic Church still exists. This is not so in spite of the extended vacancy of the Holy See: it is so only on the basis of this vacancy.
Appendix
Bishop Tissier de Mallerais and the ‘four causes’ of the Conciliar Church
While we have been considering the question from that of the four properties of the Church, Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais of the SSPX took a different approach in his 2013 essay Is there a conciliar church? – that of the “four causes” of scholastic metaphysics.3
Here is how he delineated the distinctions between the Catholic Church and what he called the Conciliar Church:
Let us try first of all to define the two churches in question, by their four causes according to Aristotle. A society is a moral being, of the [philosophical] category of relation. Relations create the link between its members. We can distinguish:
The material cause: These are the persons united to each other within the society.
We will say that in the case of the Catholic Church, as in the conciliar church, these are the baptised.
The efficient cause is the head of the society:
For the Catholic Church, Our Lord Jesus Christ, it’s founder, and the Popes who are his vicars; and
For the conciliar church, the Popes of the Council, therefore the same Popes; in such a way that the same hierarchy seems to govern the two Churches.
The final cause, which is the cause of causes, the common good sought by its members:
In the case of the Catholic Church, the good sought is eternal salvation
In the case of the conciliar church, it is more or less principally the unity of the human race: “The Church”, says the Council, “is in Christ as the sacrament or, if you will, the sign and the means to attain the intimate union with God and the unity of the human race.”
The formal cause is the union of minds and wills of its members in seeking the common good.
In the Catholic Church, by the profession of the same Catholic faith, the practices of the same Divine worship and the submission to the same pastors and therefore to the laws they make, that is Canon law.
In the conciliar church, it is by acceptation of the teaching of the Council and the magisterium which comes from it, and by the practice of the new liturgy and obedience to the new Canon law.
[Sub-bullet points added for clarity of reading]
From this delineations, he defined the “two churches” as follows:
The Catholic Church is the society of the baptised who want to save their souls in professing the Catholic faith, in practising the same Catholic worship and in following the same pastors, successors of the Apostles.
The conciliar church is the society of the baptised who follow the directives of the current Popes and bishops, in espousing more or less consciously the intention to bring about the unity of the human race, and in practise accepting the decisions of the Council, following the new liturgy and submitting to the new Code of Canon law.
If this be so, we have two churches who have the same heads and most of the same members, but who have different forms and ends diametrically incongruous: on the one hand eternal salvation seconded by the social reign of Christ, King of Nations, on the other hand the unity of the human race by liberal ecumenism, that is to say broadened to all religions, the heir of the conciliar decisions of Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra Aetate, and Dignitatis Humanae, and which is the spirit of Assisi and the antithesis of the social reign of Christ the King.
The Bishop proceeded to expand and defend this thesis in greater detail.
My treatment of the topic has been focused on what the Conciliar/Synodal Church is not, and the Bishop’s treatment provides some possibly valuable insights into what the Conciliar Church is – although these would appear to be less certain than the thesis defended in this article.
That said, I strongly disagree some of the points he raises above, in particular the notion of a legitimate Pope being the head of both the Catholic Church and, given its qualities, a distinct body such as the Conciliar/Synodal Church. To my mind, Archbishop Lefebvre’s account of the matter was more accurate, and its implications adequately accounted for by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais:
“Insofar as the Pope, bishops, priests, and faithful adhere to this new Church, they separate themselves from the Catholic Church.”
While he acknowledges this statement, and the importance of its conditional nature he arbitrarily adds: “And of this measure we are not the judges.” In many cases, this is correct; but in many other cases, the “measure” of this adherence is painfully clear, and by no means a matter of judging internal states.
HELP KEEP THE WM REVIEW ONLINE WITH WM+!
As we expand The WM Review we would like to keep providing free articles for everyone.
Our work takes a lot of time and effort to produce. If you have benefitted from it please do consider supporting us financially.
A subscription gets you access to our exclusive WM+ material, and helps ensure that we can keep writing and sharing free material for all.
You can see what readers are saying over at our Testimonials page.
And you can visit The WM Review Shop for our ‘Lovely Mugs’ and more.
(We make our WM+ material freely available to clergy, priests and seminarians upon request. Please subscribe and reply to the email if this applies to you.)
Subscribe to WM+ now to make sure you always receive our material. Thank you!
Read Next:
Follow on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:
Twitter (The WM Review)
John Lane, ‘Sedevacantism and Theology of the Church’, at AKA Catholic, 11 February 2021. Available at https://akacatholic.com/sedevacantism-and-theology-of-the-church/
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Interview given to Le Figaro, 2 August 1976, published 4 August 1976. Available at https://www.wmreview.org/p/the-suppressed-interview-of-archbishop