A Catholic theologian who asks me to withhold his name writes in response to Michael Brendan Dougherty’s column, which I discussed earlier today:

Thanks for your post on M.B. Dougherty’s piece on the contemporary papacy. I think that he’s mostly right on the diagnosis and mostly wrong on the cure. He acutely identifies the pathology of “saying things and then acting as if something else were true.” He’s dead-on about the papal cult of personality that has grown up in recent decades (and which has roots especially in the 11th and 19th centuries) and about the severe dangers of “papal positivism.” Here, I think that Pope Benedict XVI’s temperamental and theological modesty will someday be better appreciated. As he put at the beginning of his pontificate:

“The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the
contrary: the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.” (Roman Basilica of St. John Lateran, 5/7/05)

Dougherty’s also right about some conservative Catholics’ ‘partyfication’ of the papacy. I would add that some liberal Catholics are doing the same with Pope Francis. See the National Catholic Reporter’s apparently straight-faced section, “The Francis Chronicles,” which reports daily—and often breathlessly—on the Pope’s latest words and activities. It even has a Francis comic strip! This from a newspaper that has spent its nearly fifty-year history railing against papal centralization and cults of personality. My cynical side says that most Catholics are Ultramontanists, who merely differ on which issues they think the Pope should exercise his bully pulpit (and on which issues he should zip it). But, these Ultramontane Catholics all agree—and err—in the seeing the Pope as Great Leader and Most Important Catholic.

But, Dougherty’s remedy is problematic. It is even somewhat Marxist in its positing of a kind of class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, I mean, the hierarchy and the sensus fidelium. It is also a piece that—with minimal changes—could have been written fifteen months or fifty years ago by a more ‘liberal’ Catholic.

A few years ago, the leader of the traditionalist, breakaway Priestly Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) opposed “Eternal Rome,” to whose unchanging truth he and his community professed loyalty, to “Rome” as a flawed reality to which obedience could be withheld and full communion postponed. It would be hard to utter a more radically uncatholic statement than that one. There is no ‘ideal’ Church
divorced from history, only the concrete one made up of limited, sinful men and women (and the saints of all ages). In Jesus, God chose the path of incarnation, and so now we receive the divine treasure only through earthen vessels.

I’d add, too, that your contrast between truth and party is both right and wrong. Right, in its rejection of partisanship and of Mottramism — which is really a form of Ultramontanism. Wrong, in its susceptibility to opposing truth and community. Catholics and Orthodox alike reject as false any kind of putative ecclesial reform that would prioritize truth over community (or vice versa) or
oppose them. The Church is truly reformed only from within, one grasps truth only within the community, and the community’s life is possible only when grounded in revealed truth. In the end, truth and ecclesial community can never contradict each other, and each needs the other. Collectivism and individualism are two, dead-ending sides of the same un-ecclesial coin.