Naturally,
I’m not saying that such videos are always
of low quality or that written pieces are always of good quality. Obviously, there’s a lot of good material to
be found at YouTube and similar platforms, and a lot of garbage in written
form. The point is just that, all things
being equal, written pieces are likelier than quickly-made videos to be of
intellectual substance.
There’s also
the fact that watching a video requires a much higher time commitment. A book or article is all laid out in front of
the reader, and typically organized into units – chapters, sections and
sub-sections, paragraphs, and so on. You
can scan the whole and get a sense of what it covers and where, and thus see
relatively quickly whether it is necessary to read the whole thing, which parts
are relevant to your interests, whether certain topics that are not covered in
one part are addressed in another, and so on.
Videos are not like that. You
pretty much have to watch the whole thing in order to know exactly what’s in
it. And though a video is sometimes
broken into segments, the brief descriptions of these are nowhere near as
helpful as being able to scan ahead in a text and see exactly what is covered
in each section or paragraph. On top of
that, if you want to reply to such a video, you have to carefully transcribe
any remarks you want to quote and comment on, which requires playing and
replaying the same segments, and this also sucks up time.
Finally,
such videos are typically made either by amateurs, or by people who, though
they may have some academic training, spend far more time making videos and
other online ephemera than doing the much harder work of producing written
material that is publishable and has to get through the gauntlet of an editor
or a referee. Hence the videos and other
online ephemera are not popularizations
of their more substantive work. The
videos and online ephemera pretty much are
their work. Naturally, this work is
simply not going to be as substantive as that of someone who has an
intellectual day job, as it were.
The bottom
line is that engaging with what I am calling “the extended YouTube hot take”
requires a high time investment with the promise of a low intellectual
return. And I’m just not interested in
that, which is why I don’t watch a lot of this stuff. That includes material of this type that is
directed at things I’ve written. Over
the years, readers have often asked me to reply to this or that video commenting
on some book or article of mine. I
rarely do it, because I’ve got too much else going on. There is, for example, always a ton of
written material, much of it of high quality, that I need to get through in the
course of working on whatever book project or academic article I’ve got going
at the moment. To be sure, the
occasional respite from that is welcome.
But even then, it rarely seems to me worthwhile to (for example) spend
two or three hours watching snarky videos some kid has made about an academic
book that I spent years writing.
Lofton’s libel
All the
same, occasionally I’ll make an exception.
That brings me to Michael Lofton, about whom I know very little other
than that he appears to fancy himself an upholder of Catholic orthodoxy and
devotes a lot of time to making videos of this kind. This week he posted a YouTube video
responding to my recent Catholic World
Report article “Cardinal
Newman, Archbishop Fernandez, and the ‘suspended Magisterium’ thesis.” It’s quite bad, in just the ways that
“extended YouTube hot takes” tend to be bad.
But on top of that, it’s bad in a special way that online Catholic
content, in particular, tends to be bad these days. I refer to the kneejerk tendency of a great
many Catholic commentators of all stripes to approach any topic having to do
with Pope Francis in a Manichean, ideological manner. Too many of the pope’s critics will accept
nothing but the most negative and apocalyptic interpretations of his every word
and action. Too many of the pope’s
defenders refuse to consider even the most measured and respectful criticism of
him. Everything one side says is folded
by the other side into a simplistic “good guys/bad guys” narrative. And if you plead for nuance, you will be
accused by each side of “really” aiming subtly to do the work of the
other. It’s tiresome, intellectually
unserious, and deeply contrary to justice and charity. And while each side self-righteously thinks of
itself as defending the Church, all they are really accomplishing is tearing it
further apart.
How does
this play out in Lofton’s case? Over the
course of an hour, he works through my article line by line, suggesting early
on to his listeners that there is something “weird” or “odd” about it and
hinting darkly that it “serves an agenda.”
And what agenda is that? By the end
of the video, it is finally revealed that:
To entertain talk about suspense in
the magisterium… I think is to prepare people to reject magisterial teaching…
to prepare people to reject papal teaching authority… to use it as an excuse to
ignore the papal magisterium.
To be sure,
he immediately tries to cover his rear end by acknowledging that he “[doesn’t]
know what [Feser’s] intentions are, specifically.” But he insists that “at least… some people” have
this agenda, and is “left scratching [his] head” about exactly what my own
intentions could be. The obvious
insinuation – especially given all the heavy going throughout the video about
how “weird” my article is – is that this is my agenda too and that I am being
cagey about it. Thus does Lofton fold my
article into the hackneyed narrative of a dark army of bogeymen seeking by hook
or crook to undermine Pope Francis.
The
insinuation is defamatory, and a travesty of what I wrote. What follows is intended to correct the
record. I apologize in advance for the
length of this post. Unfortunately,
Lofton has a gift for packing ten pounds of error into a five pound bag, and it
all has to be carefully and tediously unpacked.
I also apologize in advance if I lose my temper here or there –
something that has been very hard to avoid given the many hours I’ve now had to
waste on this that could have been devoted to something of greater intrinsic
value. I hope not to watch another
YouTube hot take again for a long time.
My CWR article essentially has two halves,
and Lofton badly distorts what I say in each one. In the first, I explain what some of Pope
Francis’s critics mean when they claim that the Magisterium has been
“suspended” during his pontificate up to this point. Lofton gives the impression that I am at
least somewhat sympathetic with this thesis.
But in fact, not only do I not endorse it, I explicitly reject and
criticize it. In the second half of my
article, I suggest that the remarks made by Pope Francis and Archbishop
Fernandez upon the archbishop’s appointment as prefect of the Dicastery for the
Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) imply that the DDF, specifically, will to a large
extent no longer exercise its traditional magisterial function. Lofton transforms this into the claim that the magisterium of the Church in general
will from here on out be suspended – something I never said and would not say. He accomplishes this sleight-of-hand by
reading portentous meanings I never intended into innocuous remarks, and
especially into my use of the phrase “organ of the Magisterium.”
The “suspended Magisterium” thesis
Let’s
consider each half of my article in turn.
Those who posit a “suspended Magisterium” claim to get the idea from St.
John Henry Newman, so I began my article by rehearsing some of the remarks
Newman made about the behavior of the Church’s hierarchy during the Arian
crisis. Lofton gives the impression that
my comments somehow make stronger claims than Newman himself did about the
failure of the bishops, and about the temporary lapse of Pope Liberius. That is false. I simply report Newman’s own position, and in
particular the position he took on the matter after his conversion to
Catholicism in an appendix to his
famous work on the crisis.
Lofton
claims that my remark about Liberius’s temporary agreement to an ambiguous
formula is “in error,” and cites Bellarmine in his favor. He makes it sound as if I had flatly made a simple
historical mistake here and/or gotten Newman’s views about Liberius wrong. But that is not the case. Newman himself claims that Liberius “sign[ed]
a Eusebian formula at Sirmium,” and approvingly quotes remarks from saints
Athanasius and Jerome to the effect that Liberius had under pressure
temporarily “subscribed” to the heresy, and a claim by another authority that Liberius
temporarily “[gave] up the Nicene formula.”
Moreover, Bellarmine is neither infallible nor the final word among
orthodox Catholic historians on the matter.
That is not to deny that Bellarmine, Lofton, and others have the right
to defend Liberius against this charge.
That is not the point. The point
is rather that the matter is
controversial and Catholics are at liberty to take either position. Hence Lofton has no business claiming that I
flatly made a historical “error” here.
The most he is entitled to say is that reasonable people can disagree
about the issue.
Lofton is
also right to note that Newman’s remark about there being no “firm, unvarying,
consistent testimony” for sixty years after Nicaea needs to be qualified. But Newman himself does qualify it, and
nothing in what I said is affected by the qualification. In any event, I was not trying in my article
to offer a detailed account of what happened during the Arian crisis, to defend
Newman’s own account of it, or to draw momentous lessons from it. I was simply giving a brief summary in order
to let readers know where this notion of a “suspended” Magisterium came
from. So, it is misleading for Lofton to
go on about it to the extent he does.
In a passing
remark about the nature of the Magisterium, Lofton asserts that “there is a protection
and assistance of the Holy Spirit to non-infallible
teachings as well,” and that this is something I ought to address. If what Lofton has in mind here is the claim,
which some have made, that even non-infallible exercises of the papal
magisterium are somehow protected from error, then I
have in fact argued elsewhere that that thesis is incoherent and not
taught by the Church. (That is not say that such non-infallible
teachings are not normally owed religious assent. They are owed it. But that is a different matter.)
Anyway, the
main topic of the first half of my article is the claim that the Magisterium
has up to now been “suspended” during Pope Francis’s pontificate. Again, I explicitly
rejected this claim. Indeed, in the
past, I have defended the authoritative and binding nature of Pope Francis’s
magisterial acts even in cases where my fellow traditional Catholics have
resisted it. For example, I
have repeatedly defended the CDF’s document (issued at the pope’s
direction) on the moral liceity of Covid-19 vaccines – and, I will add, I took
a considerable amount of grief from some fellow traditional Catholics for doing
so. I
have defended Pope Francis against the charge that he has departed
from just war teaching. I
have defended him against the charge of heresy. I
have repeatedly criticized those who have claimed that his election
was not valid. It is true that, like
many others, I have been critical of parts of Amoris Laetitia and of the pope’s revision to the Catechism. But that is not because I do not regard these
as magisterial acts. Rather, while they are magisterial acts, they exhibit
“deficiencies” of the kind that Donum
Veritatisacknowledges
can exist in non-infallible magisterial statements. Lofton would presumably disagree with that
judgment, but the point is that my own objections do not rest on the claim that the pope has not exercised magisterial
authority.
Lofton
suggests that it is “weird” or “odd” that, when in my article I gave an example
of Pope Francis’s magisterial teaching, I cited documents issued by the CDF
under the pope’s authority. Why, he
asks, did I not cite instead a document like Amoris? He suggests I have
an “agenda” and insinuates that there is something suspect about the
example. In particular, he seems to
think it a ploy to try to reduce the papal magisterium to the CDF.
But there is
nothing suspect about the example, and by no means do I reduce the papal
magisterium to the CDF. For one thing,
what I actually wrote is this:
For there clearly are cases where
[Pope Francis] has exercised his magisterial authority – such as when, acting under papal authorization, the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith under its current prefect Cardinal Ladaria has
issued various teaching documents.
As the words
“such as” show, I was clearly saying that such CDF documents are examples of Pope Francis’s
magisterium. Nowhere do I say or imply
that they are the whole of it. For another thing, there is a reason why I
chose that particular sort of example, and it has nothing to do with what Lofton’s
fevered imagination supposes it to be. I
wanted to pick examples that are as uncontroversial as possible, especially among the pope’s critics. Citing Amoris
would not do for that purpose, not only because it has been widely criticized,
but especially because there are those who (again, wrongly) claim that it is
not magisterial. By contrast, some of
the CDF documents issued under Cardinal Ladaria at the pope’s behest could not
possibly be objected to by the pope’s critics – one example being the
recent responsum affirming
that the Church cannot bless same-sex unions.
It is clearly intended to be magisterial, and not even the pope’s
harshest critics could dispute its orthodoxy.
Hence it is an ideal piece of evidence against the thesis that the
Magisterium has in recent years been “suspended” under Francis – a thesis which,
again, I was criticizing, not
sympathizing with.
It is true
that I also say that “because Pope Francis has persistently refused to answer
[the] dubia, he can plausibly be said
at least to that extent to have
suspended the exercise of his Magisterium” (emphasis in the original). But Lofton reads into this remark exactly the opposite of what it is
saying. He asks, shocked: ““What?! Pope Francis is teaching constantly! He hasn’t suspended the magisterium!” But I did not say that he has; indeed, I had
just got done saying the opposite, and I immediately go on to say: “Again, though,
it doesn’t follow that the ‘suspended Magisterium’ thesis is correct as a
general description of Pope Francis’s pontificate up to now.”
What I meant
by the remark Lofton expresses shock at should be obvious to any fair-minded
reader. I was saying that even if one could maintain that Pope
Francis has failed to exercise his magisterium in the specific case of not
answering the dubia, it simply would not follow that his magisterium has been
suspended beyond that – and, again, I gave specific examples of acts of Pope
Francis that are magisterial in nature.
Lofton also,
as it happens, goes on to claim that the pope has in fact answered at least
four of the dubia, but that is
irrelevant to the present point. For the
present point is that even if he has
failed to answer any of them, that is no grounds to think his magisterium has
somehow been suspended beyond that
particular example. Lofton’s problem
is that he completely gets my intentions wrong in interpreting what I say about
this example. He seems to think that I
am citing the dubia controversy to lend plausibility to the “suspended
Magisterium” thesis. No, what I was
doing was citing it precisely to deny
plausibility to the thesis. I was not saying: “Consider the dubia controversy – that’s pretty good
evidence for the suspended Magisterium thesis.”
Rather, I was saying: “Consider the dubia
controversy – that’s very weak evidence for the thesis, because it does nothing
to show that the pope has failed to exercise his magisterium beyond that one
case.”
Organ of the Magisterium?
But what
Lofton tries to make the most hay out of is my reference to the CDF (now the
DDF) as an “organ of the Magisterium.” He
treats this as if it were a bizarre claim or even a theological howler. First, he objects that DDF documents have no
teaching authority on their own, but only when issued under papal approval – as
if this were something I don’t know. But
in fact I explicitly qualified my claim in just this way when I said that Pope
Francis “has exercised his magisterial authority… when, acting under papal authorization,
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under its current prefect
Cardinal Ladaria has issued various teaching documents.” (Indeed, Lofton admits this later on in the
video. Here’s a good example of the
limitations of the “YouTube hot take” format.
If, instead of his stream-of-consciousness commentary, Lofton had tried
to put together a well thought-out written response, he would have caught this
and avoided giving his audience the false impression that I had made some
rookie mistake.)
Lofton even
claims that the CDF/DDF “is not a magisterial organ” at all, and that in fact
there are “only two organs of the magisterium, the pope and the college of
bishops.” This makes it sound as if the
phrase “organs of the Magisterium” has some precisely delineated technical
meaning in Catholic theology, and that I misidentified what these well-defined
“organs of the Magisterium” are. But
neither of those things is true, and in fact it is Lofton who is using the term
in an unusual way.
First of
all, the phrase has no precise technical meaning or doctrinal significance, but
is simply an expression that crops up from time to time in writing about the
Church to refer to agencies through which the Church might speak or operate. And it is in fact often used in these
contexts to refer to the CDF and other such bodies (as a little Googling will
reveal to anyone ignorant of the fact). For
example, in a Pontifical Biblical Commission statement
on the relationship between the Magisterium and biblical exegetes,
then-Cardinal Ratzinger noted that “Paul VI completely restructured the
Biblical Commission so that it was no longer an organ of the Magisterium” (emphasis added). Note that this entails that the Biblical
Commission once was an “organ of the
Magisterium” – which suffices to falsify Lofton’s claim that the term is used
to refer only to the pope and college
of bishops. (Of course, the CDF/DDF and
other such bodies are magisterial only insofar as they operate at the pope’s or
bishops’ behest. But I never denied
that, and in fact implied it when I spoke of the CDF “acting under papal authorization.”)
Now, in my
article, I also referred to the CDF/DDF as “the main magisterial organ of the Church,” and Lofton reacts as if this
were somehow especially suspect. Indeed,
he calls it a “jaw-dropping error” and reiterates his claim that “it’s not an
organ, it’s inappropriate to call it an organ, and… it’s not the primary mode
or means by which the pope teaches.” But
my remark is only an “error” (jaw-dropping or otherwise) if one understands
“organ” in Lofton’s idiosyncratic way.
Certainly it is perfectly innocent if one reads “organ” in the sense in
which I meant it. The Church is a body
with the pope as its visible head. The
“organs” of the Church, as I was using the term, are those agencies through
which the pope and the Church act, just as a human being acts by using organs
such as the tongue (to speak) and the hand (to manipulate objects). An office like the Dicastery of Divine
Worship is the “organ” or agency through which the pope and the Church he heads
handle liturgical matters. And the DDF
is that “organ” or agency through which the pope and the Church he heads handle
doctrinal matters, specifically. As I was using the term, it wouldn’t make
sense to call the pope himself an
“organ,” because, again, the “organs” I had in mind are the agencies the pope
works through. It also wouldn’t make sense to call other
modes by which the pope teaches – encyclicals, for example, or sermons –
“organs” of the Church, for they are not agencies
in the sense in which the DDF is an agency.
Issuing an encyclical or giving a sermon is an action that the pope carries out, not an “organ.”
When
properly understood, then, my remark that the DDF is “the main magisterial
organ of the Church” is perfectly innocuous.
If Lofton or anyone else wants to argue for using the expression “organ”
in some other way, that’s fine. But he
has no business accusing me of an “error,” jaw-dropping or otherwise. Again, my use of the expression is in line
with common usage, and the term has, in any event, no precise technical or doctrinal
meaning that would render objectionable my description of the DDF as an “organ”
or “the main organ” of the Magisterium.
Certainly, Lofton has no business drawing from my remarks an absurd
inference to the effect that I am trying to reduce the entire Magisterium of
the Church to whatever documents the DDF happens to issue. This is a sheer fantasy on Lofton’s part, and
not anything I either said or implied.
Archbishop Fernandez and the DDF
Let’s turn
finally to what I said in my article about Archbishop Fernandez’s appointment
as Prefect of the DDF. My claim was
quite precise. I said that the pope’s and the archbishop’s remarks
implied that the DDF would largely no longer be exercising its traditional magisterial
functions. Each of the words and phrases
italicized here is crucial, and they highlight aspects of my remarks that
Lofton ignores in order to make his inflammatory charges.
First, I
spoke only of the DDF. I did not
say that the remarks in question implied that the pope or the Church as a whole would cease exercising their
magisterial functions. It’s true that in
the second to last sentence in my article, I quoted Newman’s phrase “temporary
suspense of the functions of the ‘Ecclesia docens,’” in order to wrap up the
discussion by tying it into the reference to Newman with which the article
began. Read in isolation, one might
suppose from that one sentence that I was speaking about the Church as a
whole. But the larger context makes it
clear that that is not what I
meant. I was clearly referring to the
“temporary suspense” of the exercise of the
DDF’s traditional function within the Church, specifically.
Second, I
did not say that the archbishop’s and pope’s remarks implied that the DDF (much
less the pope or Church as a whole) would lose
its magisterial function. I said
explicitly that what was in question was the exercise of that function.
Naturally, even if the DDF did stop
exercising that function, it could take up its exercise again immediately any
time the pope wanted it to. Hence the
point is not nearly as radical as Lofton implies. Third, even then I explicitly said that the
archbishop’s and pope’s remarks implied only that the DDF would largely no longer be exercising its
traditional magisterial function – largely,
not entirely. Lofton says that the pope’s and the
archbishop’s remarks make it clear that the DDF would still be teaching, as if
this were something I denied. But I did
not deny it. On the contrary, I quoted those remarks myself, and –
again – claimed only that the remarks implied a partial refraining from the exercise of the teaching function, not
a complete refraining.
Finally, I
was not putting forward any bold thesis about the nature of the Magisterium, or
furthering an “agenda” to “prepare people to reject magisterial teaching,” or
whatever else Lofton fantasizes might be my motivation. I was simply noting the logical implications of what the pope and the archbishop themselves
had said. And I did so tentatively,
explicitly remarking that “it is possible that the remarks will be clarified
and qualified after Archbishop Fernandez takes office.”
It is true
that I went on to indicate that I doubted such a qualification would be
forthcoming. I was definitely wrong
about that, because as it happens, the archbishop issued some clarifying
remarks only a few days later, as I noted in a
follow-up article. And his
latest remarks essentially nullify the implications of his earlier
remarks. But as I argue in the follow-up
article, that makes the significance of the earlier remarks less clear, not
more. The whole episode amounts to yet
another instance of a pattern of action exhibited by the pope and his
subordinates throughout his pontificate – a tendency to generate needless
confusion and controversy by failing to speak with precision.
Lofton
himself halfway admits this. Speaking of
Francis’s magisterium in general, Lofton says: “I would like to see more
clarification from Pope Francis in some cases.”
Of the pope’s letter announcing Archbishop Fernandez’s appointment,
Lofton admits: “I have some criticisms of the letter.” Specifically, with respect to the goals of
upholding orthodoxy while allowing for different ways of expressing the Faith,
Lofton acknowledges that the pope regrettably seems “to kind of pit these
things against each other.” In that
case, though, it is intellectually dishonest for Lofton to insinuate that when
I and others have criticized the pope’s and the archbishop’s recent remarks,
this criticism must reflect some suspect “agenda.”
There is one
more concession that Lofton makes that is extremely important, and the
significance of which he and other self-appointed defenders of Pope Francis
routinely overlook. Commenting on
Archbishop Fernandez’s remarks about the “persecution” some theologians
suffered from the CDF around the time of Vatican II, Lofton says:
There were things that the Second
Vatican Council taught that ended up vindicating some of the people that…
previously… [had] a negative judgment against them [by the Holy Office]… Over and over and over, the Holy Office did
render negative judgments about people who were later on vindicated… That’s a
fact, and it’s a fact we see often.
End
quote. For those unfamiliar with the
details of this period of Church history, what Lofton is referring to is the
situation of thinkers commonly classified as part of the nouvelle théologie (“new theology”) movement – Henri Bouillard,
Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, and many
others. These writers were highly
critical of, and engaged in a sustained controversy with, the Neo-Scholastic
Thomists who represented the mainstream of Catholic theology in the decades prior
to Vatican II. Some of them were considered
suspect by the CDF at the time, and Pope Pius XII’s Humani
Generis was in part a correction of nouvelle théologie excesses. (For example, Pius’s famous criticism of those
who “destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order” is widely understood to be
a shot across de Lubac’s bow.) These
thinkers had to “fly under the radar,” as it were, until the arrival of a more
friendly pontificate. With Vatican II,
they were rehabilitated. Some of them
even became cardinals, and Ratzinger, of course, became pope.
The irony
here is many of these thinkers are heroes to Pope Francis’s most ardent
defenders – who nevertheless condemn the pope’s critics for doing exactly what
the nouvelle théologie writers
did! They can’t have it both ways. If it was legitimate for nouvelle théologie writers respectfully to criticize the
shortcomings they claimed to see in the Magisterium of their day, then it
cannot be denied that it can be legitimate respectfully to criticize the
shortcomings some see in Pope Francis’s magisterium. If the nouvelle
théologie writers shouldn’t be dismissed en masse as “dissenters,” then it is not fair to dismiss Pope
Francis’s critics en masse as
“dissenters.”
More to the
present point, if Lofton is willing to acknowledge the good will of the nouvelle théologie writers and the
soundness of some of their views, despite their having been at odds with the
Magisterium of their day, then justice and charity require him to afford the
same courtesy to the sober and respectful critics of Pope Francis. For example, he should refrain from
insinuating that they have an “agenda” of “prepar[ing] people to reject papal
teaching authority.”
One final
comment. Apparently worried that his
video was insufficiently condescending, Lofton adds a little trash talk in the
comments section, remarking: “I think [Feser] needs to stick to his lane which
is philosophy.”
Well, as the
Scholastics and the pre-Vatican II popes who commended Scholasticism
emphasized, training in philosophy is a prerequisite to doing theology
well. The reason is that it disciplines
the intellect, teaching one to use words precisely, to make careful conceptual
distinctions, to reason with logical exactness, and to evaluate texts and
arguments with caution and charity.
Lofton’s response to my article provides evidence that he is lacking in these capacities. Hence I’d suggest that he might consider sticking to his own lane, which is making facile YouTube videos – but about topics other than theology, which requires levels of rigor and charity that he appears to lack.
