This is an excellent reminder that the Church is not a media brand, and the pope is not its CEO. But it’s more than that. Hyperpapalism isn’t just a distortion of ecclesiology, it’s a distortion of incarnation. We begin to think grace descends through press conferences, that holiness can be tracked in policy shifts, that renewal must be managerial before it can be mystical.
But God didn’t wait for good governance to redeem the world. He came into a world where Caesar ruled and Herod schemed, and He changed it not by issuing decrees but by inhabiting flesh. If Christ chose to sanctify the world through a body, not through a bureaucracy, then the way forward for the Church is not to scrutinize Rome’s gestures like omens, but to tend to the places where Christ is still taking on flesh… the altar, the neighbor, the wound, the word whispered in prayer.
The danger of hyperpapalism is not just that it exhausts us, but that it subtly trains us to look for transcendence in abstraction rather than in the present moment. And the enemy is pleased to have us watch the sky for signs while God passes by in the face we’re too distracted to see.
Pray for the pope, yes, but let’s remember: the mystical Body is incarnate in the person beside us, not just the person in white.
Local news coverage is expensive, news organizations are taking the easy route, and so we get endless national and international news without being made wiser about the context. Neil Postman explained the trajectory of news as entertainment and titillation and the social result. So the popular misperception has grown that only national politics matters, but so has a sense of powerlessness and despair. Which dovetails with your wise analysis regarding the papacy and your spiritual guidance. I couldn’t agree with you more, Dr. K. Every word, 💯
A very good point. Isn't it strange? Local news should concern us 90% of the time, anything beyond that 10% of the time, but it's exactly the other way around. This goes together with the dissolution of intermediate bodies, so that, as in the political world it is the isolated citizen vis-a-vis the Leviathan of the federal government, so in the Church it is the isolated believer vis-a-vis the Monarch of the Vatican. We need to recover the rich diversity of "intermediate" life again. This also means subsidiarity, which is an aspect of synodality (rightly understood).
Yes, indeed. I think Tocqueville lauded the early US voluntary organizations and mediating structures, now thinned out.
The texture of life can again be thick and rich if we are traditional.
Also from Prime, the Lectio for Easter is, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is, seated at God’s right hand, and not the things of earth.” Not even the earth of Vatican City. This reminder accords with all your concrete suggestions for daily life and prayer and attention to our duties…that the real and immediate, here and now, lived liturgically and sacrificially IS the long view.
Sursum corda.
And as Mattei says—what a great passage—this is a time for hope. Thank you for encouraging us to expect God to do more than we can perceive. To have faith.
I'm surprised at how one month's distance from an abuser has lightened the load. Requiescat in pace.
I DO want to hear our Holy Father pray solemnly,, on behalf of His Bride and children, in the tradition of our people. Even somewhat regularly. . I do want to read encyclicals written in the spirit of Leo XIII so I can learn the Faith more deeply. I don't want to know his daily thoughts on the relations and conflicts involving every combination of allies and combatants the world over. Nor do I want to know about Vatican meetings or receptions. I don't want to be a synodal Christian; whatever way being such a person may be interpreted in a good way, I am certain that there is a traditional Catholic version of that thing that's already being put into practice.
I think the assertion that people in Pope Pius IX's day and before didn't know who the Pope was is somewhat hyperboluc. Any cleric or prelate who offered the Mass definitely knew who he was, and so did anybody those men spoke with about Church affairs. Catholic delegations from Catholic kingdoms to the Papal States knew who he was, and anybody who spoke with members of those delegations about Church affairs.. if social classes were not generally adverse to one another in the days of Christendom, Isn't it reasonable to think that such information might circulate - not universally to all people, but to a fair number of laboring and merchant populations? Also, at very least, to the extent that any body living in a diocese knows his bishop, the Roman people would definitely know
theirs.
The internet is a great thing, but it has made us desirous of too much information about too many things, and on a monent-by-moment basis. There's a type of curiosity that IS a sin.
I agree with all of the above. In fact, I've never been fully persuaded that "most medieval Catholics didn't know who the pope was." They certainly would have known who he was. However, they might not know right away when he died or was replaced, so there would be an information lag, and some possibility of material error.
I appreciate your efforts on this important matter. I am a believer now because grace flowed through Novus Ordo channels and Divine Mercy was offered and accepted 27 years ago. The mystery of this reversion experience still boggles my mind. At its climactic moment, three words, "It's All True" pierced my heart and anchored in my soul. Amazing grace then flowed.
This was on April 16, 1998, the Feast of St. Bernadette and Pope Benedict 's birthday. So you can see where this is heading.
What's all true?
I immediately knew it was everything the Roman Catholic Church officially teaches.
With this now an anchor, a given, I dove deep into everything I could find and I have marveled at the ways of Divine Providence.
Tradition inspires me. You are holding the line there and we need that stone to stay unmoved for the duration.
Some of us are missioned in other ways in this apparently irretrievably broken world...
"Get ready, stay ready" is what I try to share.
On March 27, 2019 I received the message, "Ride it out with Love, Joy and Peace."
I agree that there is a danger of turning the Pope into a rock star (I even wrote an article way back when about the JPII generation and this danger:https://open.substack.com/pub/jfish1535/p/pope-or-rockstar?r=7x87o&utm_medium=ios) and it is also dangerous to over-expect certain actions/policies to be just what we wanted. From the perspective of the post Francis church, I can look back on Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II and wish they had done things differently. All of the liturgical abuses I began to notice in the 1990’s (that had been happening since the 1960’s) were under MY pope, JPII. We all felt abandoned by BXVI when he resigned. They are men, not angels. And they need our prayers, and filial devotion, and more prayer. Full stop.
I agree. It seems to me that all the popes since John XXIII have been afraid to crack down on the serious abuses and heresies in the Church, they have taken a largely "hands off" approach - "If I preach about this often enough, the problem will go away." And so we are still seeing and suffering under the same problems that there were decades ago. This is very poor fatherly governance. Like Eli in the Old Testament who let his sons get away with murder. As the issues get more entrenched, they become more difficult to extricate. That is why it will take someone of the stature of a Pius IX or a Pius V to bring serious change.
A great post, Dr K. I feel such a sense of relief with Pope Leo ~ he is calm, measured, and has a monk’s eyes, as if he actually has a prayer life. God help him and all of us!
This is (NOT?) something Francis would have said?: "Truth, then, does not create division, but rather enables us to confront all the more resolutely the challenges of our time, such as migration, the ethical use of artificial intelligence and the protection of our beloved planet Earth. These are challenges that require commitment and cooperation on the part of all, since no one can think of facing them alone."
Telling lies about truth... not my cup of tea. Truth most certainly does create division. The act of judgement is the proper locus of truth, that is, acts of composition and division (always both, since the one always implies the other). Do not think the Word of Truth came to bring peace! He came as a sign of contradiction. The sword, division, your enemies will be of your own house, etc. We need to excise the cancer of false irenicism in the Church.
You are like Francis in that you write and write and write as if you are some approved writer of the Holy Catholic Church. But you still don't get it. You don't get what the papacy is and thus, don't understand that you cannot claim one is the pope but you don't have to obey him if you don't agree with him. And because of your prolific writings and interviews, you are leading those who follow you on the path to perdition with your Protestant view, as disobedience to the pope is just like Protestantism with it's individual interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
I pray daily for your conversion to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic faith.
This is quite incorrect, on every point, but I will not try to spell it out here. I understand quite well what the papacy is. If I had to direct people to a single piece, it would be this one:
A bumper roundup edition! The St John Fisher book looks incredible. I'm buying.
I share your thoughts on uncoupling from insidious technology. I've almost completely moved to substack for my self-curated media consumption, now use a brick phone, and eschew video for long-form. I give credit to my reversion to Cal Newport.
I pray Leo XIV will be a Holy Pope. But as you said, do what you can do in our little daily lives, and leave the rest to God.
I like your thoughts above: "Live by the rhythm of the traditional calendar." Do you have any suggestions for reliable online resources for same? Many thanks.
Eh. Sorry Dr. K but I've been hearing popes, and yes even including Francis a time or two, telling us we need to recover 'mystery' or some such thing in the Western liturgy since the days of JP2 - and then doing nothing, sometimes even less than that, to make it happen. Summorum Pontificum excepted of course though that did little to affect Novus Ordo land where 97% of Catholics live.
Anyways, color me unimpressed. I'll believe it when I see it.
Note that I didn't say he has acted on this sentiment yet. However, even to state the truth, in a way much clearer than anything Francis ever said, is a positive, a confirmation of what we already know to be true, but rarely hear from high up. It seems to me that each of the popes EXCEPT Francis has done particular things to advance the Eastern Churches and to permit greater access to Western tradition. Yes, breadcrumbs so far (except SP), but we're not at the end of the story.
You won't be surprised to hear that I'm not convinced much can be done to salvage the Novus Ordo.
Ok mea culpa. I just reread Desiderio desidaravi (ugh) and I had misremembered what Francis had written in there. He literally said that removing the sense of mystery from the liturgy did the liturgical 'reform' credit.
So maybe one can hope. Or maybe not. I guess I've just been burned by these guys so many times that I would infinitely prefer to see deeds than to hear words. He might be playing Richard Daley Chicago politics and throwing a bone to everybody to keep them happy and himself out of trouble. Or it might be that since American English is his native language he actually has listened to and understands the anger coming out of this country both at Francis and the generalized ice cold aloofness and tone deafness of the Vatican since forever regarding the most critical issues facing the Church and has chosen to take a different course. I hope the latter
This is an excellent reminder that the Church is not a media brand, and the pope is not its CEO. But it’s more than that. Hyperpapalism isn’t just a distortion of ecclesiology, it’s a distortion of incarnation. We begin to think grace descends through press conferences, that holiness can be tracked in policy shifts, that renewal must be managerial before it can be mystical.
But God didn’t wait for good governance to redeem the world. He came into a world where Caesar ruled and Herod schemed, and He changed it not by issuing decrees but by inhabiting flesh. If Christ chose to sanctify the world through a body, not through a bureaucracy, then the way forward for the Church is not to scrutinize Rome’s gestures like omens, but to tend to the places where Christ is still taking on flesh… the altar, the neighbor, the wound, the word whispered in prayer.
The danger of hyperpapalism is not just that it exhausts us, but that it subtly trains us to look for transcendence in abstraction rather than in the present moment. And the enemy is pleased to have us watch the sky for signs while God passes by in the face we’re too distracted to see.
Pray for the pope, yes, but let’s remember: the mystical Body is incarnate in the person beside us, not just the person in white.
I love this and couldn't agree more! Thank you a thousandfold for writing it.
"...descends through press conferences.."
that's the way it works in that *other kingdom.
I've come up with a shorter word for Dehyperpapalization: Catholic.
Aw, but I *like* long words - I'm a recovering academic!
Local news coverage is expensive, news organizations are taking the easy route, and so we get endless national and international news without being made wiser about the context. Neil Postman explained the trajectory of news as entertainment and titillation and the social result. So the popular misperception has grown that only national politics matters, but so has a sense of powerlessness and despair. Which dovetails with your wise analysis regarding the papacy and your spiritual guidance. I couldn’t agree with you more, Dr. K. Every word, 💯
A very good point. Isn't it strange? Local news should concern us 90% of the time, anything beyond that 10% of the time, but it's exactly the other way around. This goes together with the dissolution of intermediate bodies, so that, as in the political world it is the isolated citizen vis-a-vis the Leviathan of the federal government, so in the Church it is the isolated believer vis-a-vis the Monarch of the Vatican. We need to recover the rich diversity of "intermediate" life again. This also means subsidiarity, which is an aspect of synodality (rightly understood).
Yes, indeed. I think Tocqueville lauded the early US voluntary organizations and mediating structures, now thinned out.
The texture of life can again be thick and rich if we are traditional.
Also from Prime, the Lectio for Easter is, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is, seated at God’s right hand, and not the things of earth.” Not even the earth of Vatican City. This reminder accords with all your concrete suggestions for daily life and prayer and attention to our duties…that the real and immediate, here and now, lived liturgically and sacrificially IS the long view.
Sursum corda.
And as Mattei says—what a great passage—this is a time for hope. Thank you for encouraging us to expect God to do more than we can perceive. To have faith.
Christ is risen. Christ is King.
I'm surprised at how one month's distance from an abuser has lightened the load. Requiescat in pace.
I DO want to hear our Holy Father pray solemnly,, on behalf of His Bride and children, in the tradition of our people. Even somewhat regularly. . I do want to read encyclicals written in the spirit of Leo XIII so I can learn the Faith more deeply. I don't want to know his daily thoughts on the relations and conflicts involving every combination of allies and combatants the world over. Nor do I want to know about Vatican meetings or receptions. I don't want to be a synodal Christian; whatever way being such a person may be interpreted in a good way, I am certain that there is a traditional Catholic version of that thing that's already being put into practice.
I think the assertion that people in Pope Pius IX's day and before didn't know who the Pope was is somewhat hyperboluc. Any cleric or prelate who offered the Mass definitely knew who he was, and so did anybody those men spoke with about Church affairs. Catholic delegations from Catholic kingdoms to the Papal States knew who he was, and anybody who spoke with members of those delegations about Church affairs.. if social classes were not generally adverse to one another in the days of Christendom, Isn't it reasonable to think that such information might circulate - not universally to all people, but to a fair number of laboring and merchant populations? Also, at very least, to the extent that any body living in a diocese knows his bishop, the Roman people would definitely know
theirs.
The internet is a great thing, but it has made us desirous of too much information about too many things, and on a monent-by-moment basis. There's a type of curiosity that IS a sin.
I agree with all of the above. In fact, I've never been fully persuaded that "most medieval Catholics didn't know who the pope was." They certainly would have known who he was. However, they might not know right away when he died or was replaced, so there would be an information lag, and some possibility of material error.
A very hearty "Thank you" for the tone and content of your argument.
And that, despite my very deeply felt concern for our/the future.
You're welcome. May God be glorified in all things!
Dr. K
I appreciate your efforts on this important matter. I am a believer now because grace flowed through Novus Ordo channels and Divine Mercy was offered and accepted 27 years ago. The mystery of this reversion experience still boggles my mind. At its climactic moment, three words, "It's All True" pierced my heart and anchored in my soul. Amazing grace then flowed.
This was on April 16, 1998, the Feast of St. Bernadette and Pope Benedict 's birthday. So you can see where this is heading.
What's all true?
I immediately knew it was everything the Roman Catholic Church officially teaches.
With this now an anchor, a given, I dove deep into everything I could find and I have marveled at the ways of Divine Providence.
Tradition inspires me. You are holding the line there and we need that stone to stay unmoved for the duration.
Some of us are missioned in other ways in this apparently irretrievably broken world...
"Get ready, stay ready" is what I try to share.
On March 27, 2019 I received the message, "Ride it out with Love, Joy and Peace."
He then added, "I got the com."
I agree that there is a danger of turning the Pope into a rock star (I even wrote an article way back when about the JPII generation and this danger:https://open.substack.com/pub/jfish1535/p/pope-or-rockstar?r=7x87o&utm_medium=ios) and it is also dangerous to over-expect certain actions/policies to be just what we wanted. From the perspective of the post Francis church, I can look back on Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II and wish they had done things differently. All of the liturgical abuses I began to notice in the 1990’s (that had been happening since the 1960’s) were under MY pope, JPII. We all felt abandoned by BXVI when he resigned. They are men, not angels. And they need our prayers, and filial devotion, and more prayer. Full stop.
I agree. It seems to me that all the popes since John XXIII have been afraid to crack down on the serious abuses and heresies in the Church, they have taken a largely "hands off" approach - "If I preach about this often enough, the problem will go away." And so we are still seeing and suffering under the same problems that there were decades ago. This is very poor fatherly governance. Like Eli in the Old Testament who let his sons get away with murder. As the issues get more entrenched, they become more difficult to extricate. That is why it will take someone of the stature of a Pius IX or a Pius V to bring serious change.
A great post, Dr K. I feel such a sense of relief with Pope Leo ~ he is calm, measured, and has a monk’s eyes, as if he actually has a prayer life. God help him and all of us!
This is (NOT?) something Francis would have said?: "Truth, then, does not create division, but rather enables us to confront all the more resolutely the challenges of our time, such as migration, the ethical use of artificial intelligence and the protection of our beloved planet Earth. These are challenges that require commitment and cooperation on the part of all, since no one can think of facing them alone."
Telling lies about truth... not my cup of tea. Truth most certainly does create division. The act of judgement is the proper locus of truth, that is, acts of composition and division (always both, since the one always implies the other). Do not think the Word of Truth came to bring peace! He came as a sign of contradiction. The sword, division, your enemies will be of your own house, etc. We need to excise the cancer of false irenicism in the Church.
You are like Francis in that you write and write and write as if you are some approved writer of the Holy Catholic Church. But you still don't get it. You don't get what the papacy is and thus, don't understand that you cannot claim one is the pope but you don't have to obey him if you don't agree with him. And because of your prolific writings and interviews, you are leading those who follow you on the path to perdition with your Protestant view, as disobedience to the pope is just like Protestantism with it's individual interpretation of Sacred Scripture.
I pray daily for your conversion to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic faith.
This is quite incorrect, on every point, but I will not try to spell it out here. I understand quite well what the papacy is. If I had to direct people to a single piece, it would be this one:
https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-popes-boundenness-to-tradition-as.html
Sedevacantism is a total dead end.
Would double-like if I could.
A bumper roundup edition! The St John Fisher book looks incredible. I'm buying.
I share your thoughts on uncoupling from insidious technology. I've almost completely moved to substack for my self-curated media consumption, now use a brick phone, and eschew video for long-form. I give credit to my reversion to Cal Newport.
I pray Leo XIV will be a Holy Pope. But as you said, do what you can do in our little daily lives, and leave the rest to God.
I like your thoughts above: "Live by the rhythm of the traditional calendar." Do you have any suggestions for reliable online resources for same? Many thanks.
Eh. Sorry Dr. K but I've been hearing popes, and yes even including Francis a time or two, telling us we need to recover 'mystery' or some such thing in the Western liturgy since the days of JP2 - and then doing nothing, sometimes even less than that, to make it happen. Summorum Pontificum excepted of course though that did little to affect Novus Ordo land where 97% of Catholics live.
Anyways, color me unimpressed. I'll believe it when I see it.
Note that I didn't say he has acted on this sentiment yet. However, even to state the truth, in a way much clearer than anything Francis ever said, is a positive, a confirmation of what we already know to be true, but rarely hear from high up. It seems to me that each of the popes EXCEPT Francis has done particular things to advance the Eastern Churches and to permit greater access to Western tradition. Yes, breadcrumbs so far (except SP), but we're not at the end of the story.
You won't be surprised to hear that I'm not convinced much can be done to salvage the Novus Ordo.
Ok mea culpa. I just reread Desiderio desidaravi (ugh) and I had misremembered what Francis had written in there. He literally said that removing the sense of mystery from the liturgy did the liturgical 'reform' credit.
So maybe one can hope. Or maybe not. I guess I've just been burned by these guys so many times that I would infinitely prefer to see deeds than to hear words. He might be playing Richard Daley Chicago politics and throwing a bone to everybody to keep them happy and himself out of trouble. Or it might be that since American English is his native language he actually has listened to and understands the anger coming out of this country both at Francis and the generalized ice cold aloofness and tone deafness of the Vatican since forever regarding the most critical issues facing the Church and has chosen to take a different course. I hope the latter
My prayers for Church leadership are for me to be patient and clear-eyed.