Introducing The Katholic Krazies 2

I mentioned in my previous blog about sedevacantism and I want to explore this idea a bit more because it represents Katholic Wingnuts at their most extreme.  Sedevacantism is an idea that emerged in the years after the Second Vatican Council when various parties rejected the Council and its ideas—in particular ecumenism, inter-religious dialogue, and freedom of conscience (freedom of religion) because these ideas reversed (contradicted) previous Church teaching.  Underlying this conflict is the argument over the development of doctrine vs. doctrine as stasis.

So, let’s start to unpack this, first Development of Doctrine or Doctrine as stasis (unchanging.)  In the nineteenth century Blessed John Henry Newman, at the time still an Anglican, demonstrated the idea in his book The Arians of the Fourth Century that Catholic doctrine is not static and unchanging, but continues to develop through history.  To a historian this idea is self-evident but the idea had grown, especially among the neo-scholastics of the period, that all doctrine was fully known at the time of the Apostles.  In other words, many theologians believed that the Apostles knew about the Immaculate Conception, Transubstantiation, Papal Infallibility, the Assumption of the Virgin, original sin, etc.  Maybe they never wrote this stuff down, maybe it only got committed to paper in the eighth or eleventh or whatever century, but the deposit of faith was known in its entirety from the time of the death of the last Apostle and the consequent “close” of revelation. 

As I said, to a historian this is like flat-earth theory.  Historians can demonstrate from the historical material and texts that these doctrines were gradual elaborations upon the earlier truths known from Scripture and Tradition but were not themselves known in their entirety until specific points in history.  Truth does not change but our knowledge of the Truth can evolve.    
Of course, if doctrine can develop it can change.  Truth does not change but our appreciation of Truth can increase, our ability to articulate Truth is refreshed in each subsequent generation, and indeed as our appreciation of Truth grows and develops we may understand Truth in radically different ways than previous generations had.  Moreover, we may see that the articulation of Truth (aka doctrine/dogma) as put forth in an earlier generation utterly fails to convey Truth in ours.  Let me give an example.  Even in the scriptures, slavery was seen as a morally permissible condition, but over the centuries until Gregory XVI in the nineteenth and then later popes in the nineteenth and twentieth, the Church has come to see slavery as an absolute evil—equivalent to abortion in its univocal moral character as evil—never morally permissible.    In a reverse situation, the Church at one time taught the loaning money at interest was morally reprehensible, but in the thirteenth centuries theologians and then later the magisterium began to justify those situations under which money could be lent at interest.   Truth does not change but our understanding and application of it can. 
The Second Vatican Council marked not only superficial changes such as Latin to the vernacular language for the Liturgy, but several doctrinal developments as well.  As recently as 1928 Pope Pius XI had condemned Catholic participation in the Ecumenical Movement in the encyclical letter, Mortalium Animos.   Even more strongly condemned was any sort of inter-faith prayer or collaboration with non-Christians.  (Ecumenism refers to dialogue and collaboration with non-Catholic Christians; “Interfaith” refers to the same with non-Christian religions such as Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.)  In addition to this, the Catholic Church held as a matter of faith and taught that the Civil Law should only permit Catholic Worship and practice and that “freedom of religion” was in fact evil because it permitted false worship.  As late as the 1950’s Catholics were instructed by Rome that when we became a political majority in the United States our Constitution had to be changed to establish Catholicism as the official religion and to restrict other religious practices.  Just a few years before Vatican II, the Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, was silenced by Rome and forbidden to publish or teach that the American Constitutional settlement guaranteeing freedom of religious practice was acceptable to Catholics.
Well, a lot of things happened at Vatican II.  There was an entire decree on Ecumenism encouraging the Ecumenical dialogues and friendly collaboration with Orthodox and Protestant Christians.  The Church also had positive things to say about the other great world religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism including:

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.  

Moreover in Dignitas Humanae the Church calls for freedom of conscience so that all can be permitted to Worship God according to the lights of their own conscience.

This is a total about-face from pre-Conciliar Catholicism and it represents how our appreciation of the Truth revealed in Scripture and Tradition can develop in some remarkable ways, but for those who regard doctrine as static, this is a contradiction of previously taught doctrines and thus is heresy.  The Second Vatican Council to them is not a true Council of the Church but had fallen into heresy.  And the Popes who presided over the Council and who insisted on implementing its teachings after the Council are heretics. 
Now, the problem is this—there is a long tradition traceable back at least to Innocent III (Pope from 1198-1216) and including such illustrious figures as Saint Antoninus, Saint Robert Bellarmine (Doctor of the Church),  Saint Alphonus Liguori, and numerous non-saint theologians that when a person lapses into heresy they cut themselves off from the Church and thus when a Pope falls into heresy he is no longer a member of the Church and thus loses his papal office as visible head of the Church.
It all makes sense and it is all logical.  But the question is: Did Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis fall into heresy?  Are the teachings of the Council heretical?  Yes, they represent a dramatic shift from pre-Conciliar teaching, but does that make them heretical?
One of my favorite quotes and I used it in the last post is Saint Augustine’s: securus judicat orbis terrarum: “Secure in the judgment of the entire world.”  Sometimes this is translated “When the Whole world judges, it judges aright.”  In other words, while we won’t say that the Church runs on majority opinion because it doesn’t, we must say that the sensus fidelium, the faith of the faithful, is validating and determinative.  That the Council and its teaching was accepted by all but a handful of bishops, that it has not only been accepted but welcomed by the overwhelming mass of the faithful, assures us of the soundness of its teaching.   
Indeed, if anyone is cut off from the Church it is that small group of people who refuse to accept the Council.  And there are such groups.  One of the first to espouse this idea that the Council and its Popes have fallen into heresy, leaving the See of Peter vacant (sede vacante) was Francis Konrad Schuckardt whom we mentioned in our previous post as towards the end of his life he began to tell people that he was the true pope.  Schuckardt was in a seminary for less than a year before being dismissed.  He began a very active ministry promoting the message of Our Lady at Fatima and, with the permission of his bishop, established a religious community.  But by 1968 Schuckardt was convinced that the Church had lapsed into heresy and Pope Paul VI had lost the papal office due to his heretical teachings.  His community: The Congregation of Mary Immaculate, Queen and his lay followers who styled themselves the Tridentine Latin Rite   Catholic Church broke with Rome—which they refer to as the post Vatican II Church—and purchasing a disused Jesuit novitiate in Washington State called Mount Saint Michael, established their own variety of Catholicism.  Schuckhardt had himself ordained a priest and consecrated a bishop by one Daniel Quilter Brown whose own episcopal consecration goes back to Arnold Harris Mathew, one of the founders of the Old Catholic Church in Great Britain, a conglomerate of disaffected Roman Catholics, Anglicans with scruples about the validity of Anglican Orders, and schizophrenics.  One can more or less purchase episcopal consecration from a variety of episcopi vagantes in the various Old Catholic lineages that trace back to the Utrecht schism of the eighteenth century.  We will have to do a posting or two on that at some point.  In 1984 Schuckhardt was accused, falsely or truly depends on with whom you speak, of financial malfeasance and sexual misconduct by his chief aide, one Dennis Chicoine and, along with a handful of his disciples, driven out of the Mount St Michael’s sedevacantist group.  Chicoine was a fromer US marine and a bricklayer.  Chicoine was ordained a priest by the same bishop who had ordained and consecrated Schuckhardt, though he later went through a second conditional ordination by Bishop George Musey whose orders are in the lineage of one Archbishop  Ngô Đình Thục, brother of the deposed (and murdered) dictator of South Viet Nam, Ngô Đình Diệm.  The Archbishop is another topic with which we will have to deal as many of the various sedevacantist and schismatic groups trace their ordinations back to him.  Suffice it for the present to say that the Archbishop was the Catholic Archbishop of Hue in Viet Nam who several times was excommunicate for consecrating bishops without papal license and several times was reconciled to the Church.  Chicoine never advanced himself to the episcopate, however, remaining a priest until his  death in 1995.  Since his death, the Mount Saint Michael sect has been led by one Bishop Mark Pivarunas who was consecrated a bishop by Moisés Carmona, an episcopus vagans in the Ngô Đình Thục lineage.  Pivarunas and his followers hold, as had Schuckardt and Chicoine before him, that the Holy See is vacant due to the heresy of the Vatican II Popes. 
The next posting will probably pick up with this theme of the sedevacantists among the Katholic Krazies.  The Mount Saint Michael group, at least under Pivarunas’ leadership is off track theologically but not nearly as flamboyantly bizarre as some of the other—and smaller—sedevacantists. 

Introducing the Katholic Krazies 1

The Episcopal Consecration

of Lucien Pulvermacher as 

Pope Pius XIII

Let me do an introduction to the Katholic Krazies for those of you who lead a simple life unaffected by fellow Catholics and Catholic claimants who cover the spectrum from merely angry to “crazy as an outhouse rat.” 

I am going to begin at the extreme of the delusional and work my way back in towards the merely unhappy dissatisfied Catholic, but even so it is difficult to know exactly where to start.

Let me begin by talking about sedevacantism as most of the extreme wing nuts are one or another variation of sedevacantists—though not all sedevacantists are crazy.  Sedevacantism is the theory that should a pope fall into heresy, he ipso facto ceases to be pope and thus the Chair of Peter is empty.  Classic sedevacantists can live with the tension of no one in the papal chair, but the extreme wing-nut variety finds this too disconcerting and resorts to one method or another of filling the supposedly empty shoes of the fisherman. 

Several people claim to have been appointed to be Pope directly by God through a private revelation.   Indeed there is an alternative Catholic Church in Spain, the Iglesia Católica Palmariana (Palmarian Catholic Church) situated in El Palmar de Troya, Spain.  This Church has produced three “popes” since its founder Clemente Domínguez Gómez, a thirty-two year old well-known figure among the gay community in Seville, declared that Christ had come to him and appointed him to succeed Paul VI when Paul died in 1978.  He styled himself as Gregory XVII and among his papal acts was to canonize General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who died in 1975  and Christopher Columbus.  (You can’t make this stuff up!)  He was succeeded by Manuel Alonso Corral as Peter II and he, in turn, on his death was succeeded by  Sergio María, still gloriously reigning as Gregory XVIII. 

There are about a dozen other popes supposedly appointed directly by Jesus in some sort of mystical consecration or private revelation.  A figure we will hear more about in a future posting is Francis Konrad Schuckardt who founded the Sedevacantist group the Congregation of Mary Immaculate, Queen and the Tridentine Latin Rite Catholic Church.  In 1984 Schuckardt was ousted from control of these organizations by a disgruntled disciple named Dennis Chicoine and the majority of members followed Chicoine; Shuckhardt and a small group of loyalists continued as the Tridentine Latin Rite Catholic Church while the rebel faction changed their name to the Latin Rite Catholic Church.  Schuckardt told his followers that Christ had appointed him as Pope, the papal office being empty due to the “heresy” of Paul VI. Schuckardt died in 2006.   

In 1977 an Episcopalian priest by the name of Chester Olszewski named himself Pope Chrisekial Elias.  Olszewski was never received into the Catholic Church, thus giving people the opportunity to say “no” when asked “Is the Pope Catholic?”  Now if we could only do something about the mess the bears are making in the woods.  He later changed his regnal name to Peter II.  I can’t quite find out if he is still around or not, but there are plenty of these pseudo-popes to go around, so no worry.

In addition to the various popes whom Jesus appointed directly there are also a number of popes who have been elected by what might best be called “extra-canonical conclaves.”  The reasoning goes like this: the papacy being vacant due to the heresy of the alleged incumbent (John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict and now Francis) and the College of Cardinals likewise contaminated by heresy, it falls upon responsible groups of the Catholic faithful laity who have preserved the authentic faith to join in conclave and elect a pope.

The most famous of these popes was Pius XIII, aka Lucien Pulvermacher, a Capuchin priest disgruntled with the changes of Vatican II who was chosen Pope on October 24, 1998 by electors voting via telephone (as the expense of actually gathering would have been prohibitive).  Pius was consecrated Bishop and assumed his papacy in  a rented hotel ballroom in Kalispell Montana  by Gordon, Cardinal Bateman on July 4, 1999.  There were 28 of the “faithful” present.  In a sort of strange clerical roundabout, or an apostolic short-circuit,  Cardinal Bateman himself had been ordained to the priesthood some weeks earlier by Pius XIII.  Pius XIII died in 2009.  Bateman seems to have been the only Cardinal created by Pius and later broke with him. 

Pius XIII might have been the best known of the conclavist popes, but the most interesting—by far—is one David Bawden, aka Pope Michael, of Delia Kansas.   Like other sedevacantists, David and his parents, Kennett and “Tiki” Bawden, believed the Chair of Peter was empty due to the heresy of its claimants—again, Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and—well you know the story.  They had not begun as sedevacantists—nobody does.  Initially they were just disturbed by the “changes” of Vatican II.  They affiliated initially with the Society of Saint Pius X, a group of priests and laity who followed Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in rejecting the teachings and practices of the Second Vatican Council.  Young David, while still in his teens, went off to a seminary run by the Lefebvre group but was dismissed for unspecified reasons.  From there the Bawdens drifted into sedevacantism and then, deciding that the Church needed a pope, gathered a conclave of six people—including David, Kennett, and Tiki.  David, then 30 years old, came out of the conclave as Pope Michael.  His Vatican in exile is the family’s frame farmhouse where clad in a white cassock the Pope helps with the farm chores and teaches his two seminarians via the internet after beginning the day by celebrating Mass in the pre-conciliar rite.  He was ordained priest and consecrated bishop (the Pope must be a bishop) some 21 years after his election by a bishop of the National Catholic Apostolic Church. It must have been difficult for him to submit to ordination from a bishop not under his jurisdiction but it would have been impossible for him otherwise to become a bishop and without being a bishop he cannot claim to be pope, a fact that eluded him for those twenty years.  Well, actually one could make this stuff up, but why bother when the Krazies’ stories are better than anything I could think of?

There have been several other conclavist claimants to the papal throne but recognition seems always to go to that guy in Rome.  Sorry Michael and Pius and Gregory (all of  you Gregories) and whoever else but possession, after all, is nine tenths of the law. And, to boot, securus judicat orbis terrarum as Saint Augustine was inclined to say.  Since y’all love the Latin so much, no need to translate it for you.  For you Vatican II types, the translation will appear in the next posting on this topic.