Dear Karl,
Since you, Catholic Answers Live radio host, Patrick Coffin, apologists Jimmy Akin and Tim Staples, and staff apologists who take questions via EWTN’s website were unable over the past several weeks to answer the following question, I now ask in front of a larger audience. Included in the email is your friend, Dave Armstrong, who has written about “radical traditionalists” in his book, Reflections on Radical Catholic Reactionaries. Is it because he also doesn’t have an answer that this subject is absent from Armstrong’s book?
Steve Speray has featured this open letter on his website and his offer still stands to post your organization’s official answer to this question.
Yours in Christ,
Matt Haltom
Given the following facts, on what grounds do you believe Vatican II popes aren’t in a state of manifest heresy?
a) Obstinate post-baptismal denial of a dogma is heresy, and public denial is manifest heresy.
b) The First Vatican Council infallibly anathematized anyone who professes that the understanding the Church has always had of a dogma can change. [1] Pope St. Pius X later designated this “evolution of dogma” the heresy of modernism.
c) The Church being one in faith, governance and worship is dogma, so this understanding can’t be redefined or supplanted by a new understanding.
d) Vatican II popes from Paul VI on have openly approved of, or openly declared, that the Church is divided, or that Eastern Orthodox and their religion are part of the Church, which means these popes reject the dogma on the Church being one, and believe dogma can change.
e) Eastern Orthodox are heretics and schismatics for denying papal primacy of jurisdiction, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary. [2]
[1] “Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy mother Church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding. May understanding, knowledge and wisdom increase as ages and centuries roll along, and greatly and vigorously flourish, in each and all, in the individual and the whole Church: but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding (Session 3, chapter 4, para. 14). . . “ If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema” (Canon 4, paragraph 3).
[2] The Catholic-Lutheran Joint Statement on Justification (November 1, 1999), which John Paul II praised numerous times, concludes by saying, “We give thanks to the Lord for this decisive step forward on the way to overcoming the division of the church. We ask the Holy Spirit to lead us further toward that visible unity which is Christ’s will.” As for the popes endorsing the idea that the Orthodox and their religion are part of the Church, the Balamand Statement declares that “the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches recognize each other as sister Churches, responsible together for maintaining the Church of God in fidelity to the divine purpose …“ Paul VI, Benedict XVI and Francis I have all stated publicly that Eastern Orthodox Patriarchs are “pastors in the Church of Christ” who “guide the Church.”
