DON'T JUST TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT!

Oh-oh, yes I'm the great pretender,/Adrift in a world of my own. The Platters


Over the last few years, Pistrina has argued -- and demonstrated --  that Traddielandia's clerical clowns are poorly educated and intellectually sloppy despite their pretense to pass themselves off as rare scholars and profound theologians. 

Today, however, we'll let someone else make that point, just to show our bewitched, cultist adversaries that we're not alone in our assessment of these sorry poseurs. 

On February 11, the rector appeared on a Restoration Radio broadcast discussion  about the resignation (sic!) of B16. The program got off on the wrong foot almost immediately, when neither the host nor the rector could get his dates right.  Here's what a Top Commenter wrote in response to the interview:

Ok....(Sigh) What is most disturbing is the fact that your history is completely incorrect. You and Bp. Sanborn state that the last pope to resign was almost a thousand years ago, Pope Gregory XII. Bp. Sanborn states that it was probably the 11th century and was possibly succeeded by Benedict the IX. You are correct in saying that Gregory the XII was the last to resign, however it was during the Great Western Schism and he renounced the throne at the Council of Constance for the good of the Universal Church in 1415 - 598 years ago. Pope Martin V was elected and Gregory was appointed Dean of the College of Cardinals. How is that you have bishops, priests and laity who cannot do the proper research to give credibility to your arguments? If you cannot even get the history correct with the power of the internet, then how are you to be taken seriously when it comes to more intricate matters? 

In our view, the better-informed lay commenter was overly kind by merely exposing the rector's fractured chronology: There was more wrong with the content of his remarks than missing a key date by 400 years. After the rector fixed the previous abdication  in the 11th century (regrettably, he used the word  "resigned"), the emboldened wandering bishop went on to enlarge upon the circumstances by adding a garbled summary * of the history of Pope Gregory VI and his godson Pope Benedict IX. What's ironically sidesplitting is that, as he almost too eagerly interposed some historical precedents for papal abdication, without realizing it, he actually did summarize (albeit imperfectly) the basic facts of Gregory XII's abdication, even going so far as to reference the Council of Constance -- the 16th ecumenical council that famously** ended the Great Western Schism.***

Now, most people with a smattering of college-level ecclesiastical history are at least aware the Council of Constance took place in the early 15th century (1414-1418). As an aside, you should know that in seminaries and Catholic universities in the old days, the Great Western Schism and its resolution were always on the syllabus, and standard textbooks usually dedicated chapter to the period. Therefore, anyone with a lively mind and a mildly informed sense of Church history would have immediately realized his earlier misreckoning after recalling a papal abdication in connection with the well-known council. Yet there wasn't the least shock of recognition in the rector's voice; no,  not the tiniest sign of a connection.  Even worse, it sounded, to our ears, as though he goofily considered the 15th-century events antecedent to the last abdication before B16's.

Top Commenter hit the nail on the head: None of the clerical cartel can be taken seriously. Not on church history. Not on una cum. Not on the crisis. Not on the liturgy. (Especially not on the liturgy!) Not on anything at all, big or small. The clownish cartel members seem not to care about getting anything right. They inhabit an alien and distant "let's pretend" universe of their own. There they compose a directionless mutual-admiration society of underachieving make-believers who are strangers to excellence. They know their empty-headed followers -- a rum, slack-jawed bunch -- won't care either; so why do "the proper research to give credibility to [their] arguments"?

To underscore the point, we'd like to dabble in a little imaginative guesswork of our own -- a little Derrida-do, if you will, based on the rector's own discourse. For whatever such fanciful exercises in hierarchy-overturning are worth, they may help rid us of the now false binary opposition of ecclesia docens: ecclesia docta. (The sede jesters, as we all now know, don't have the right equipment upstairs to teach anybody,  so until the Restoration, the mentally stable laity may use their own lights, thank you.)

Let's start with the rector's declaration in the interview that he learned of the abdication on the morning of February 11 from watching the AP. While we have no idea of the exact content of the AP story he saw, we found on the AP's "The Big Story" a report released at 6:22 a.m. that day. Its lead-in reported that B16 was the first pope to abdicate "in nearly 600 years." Many other media outlets reported the same fact, some even giving the exact year. The important thing  here is that the correct time interval between abdications was available on cable, online, and on the air very early on and throughout February 11.  A little care and attention would have saved the day. (If you were going to be interviewed on "radio" about the abdication, wouldn't you have paid close attention to all these historical tidbits? You would've had to suspect that they might come up.  You'd've wanted to look good, right?)

Pace Top Commenter, but there are hints in the broadcast to suggest that, while the rector indeed didn't do "proper research," he might have done some. We suppose this because, in spite of his confusion, several of  his half-remembered  facts -- Benedict IX's appointment "at 20 years old" -- and his misremembered  details -- "both the Roman and Avignon pope resigned in favor of the one elected by the Council of Constance" -- have all the earmarks of someone who hastily and recently skimmed  through a raft of material but couldn't quite keep it straight. (Insufficient background knowledge, perhaps?) In addition, without prompting from the host, the rector seemed, in our estimation, a wee bit too keen to supply other examples, to wit,  a breathless "But there were others [who resigned]," an insistent  "there is precedent."  

But, then again, maybe not. Maybe he thought he could fly blind and still escape withering flak. Very poor judgment, we'd say.

Heaven knows that through many stretches of papal history it's hard to follow the arc of events without a scorecard. Like Lou Costello, even serious, well-educated students of history sometimes find themselves demanding in exasperation, Who's on first⁉  Top Commenter's complaint (and ours, too) is not about human memory and its cold-hearted betrayals. It's about unprofessional standards, about not making the effort to get it right, about gross amateurism, about ersatz competence.****

Why on earth would any sede high-muckamuck consent to do an interview about a Novus Ordo pope's abdication without first having made a thorough, air-tight preparation? It wouldn't have taken too much effort. The internet is bristling with resources that could have been printed out or accessed easily from a smartphone or tablet before or during the interview. (The Wikipedia has a really handy and readable chart that would have saved the rector from Top Commenter's rebuke, Pistrina's scorn, and Trad-World's stinging disappointment.) 

If the rector had wanted to inform -- or to impress -- why didn't he do his homework? Why did he risk certain exposure when he knew unsympathetic adversaries were parsing his every word?

We guess the Platters had the right answer:

 "I seem to be what I'm not, you see." 

Now that's a dead-on, accurate statement. 

*His account is strongly reminiscent of Sellar and Yeatman's 1066 and All That, but without the underlying intelligence, wit, and profound historical awareness.

** We won't lengthen this long post unnecessarily by transcribing the rector's ramblings or providing a historical summary of what really happened. You can listen to Sanborn by clicking on the link in ❡3 above (go to minute 9:37). For excellent short accounts of the two mid-11th-century popes and of Pope Gregory XII and Benedict (XIII), the antipope of the Avignonese obedience, we recommend The Oxford Dictionary of Popes.

***In the face of so much gaseous B.S., we can't resist riffing on a shop-worn Latin adage: nec inscientia, nec peditum celatur.

****The rector's  February 2013 MHT Newsletter gives us yet another instance of his shaky  knowledge of matters papal. In his article, he styles B16 as "a powerless antipope." However, the correct technical definition of antipope is a false claimant of the Holy See in opposition to a pontiff canonically elected (1907 Catholic Enclyclopedia). B16 never opposed a canonically elected rival, for the simple reason that no one else but he was elected in 2005. Even the rector himself, faithful to some form of the materialiter thesis, dutifully affirmed in his interview (minute 6:11) that "what [ B16] did achieve was an election to the papacy." Not knowing the correct significance of a common term of the historian's art is quite simply too embarrassing for words.