Two Popes?!?

Here is a post I published on June 6. A friend has suggested to me that it was seen by some as an attack upon both the Pope and the English hierarchy. I find this suggestion incomprehensible. My post was quite the opposite: it was an assertion that Pope Francis (and each member of the English hierarchy) is in full, sole, occupation of his see. I have strengthened the arguments and now reprint it. (I declined to allow comments which said, in effect, 'Haha, yes, there is only one Pope, and it is still Benedict'. And I always suppress would-be comments which attack the English hierarchy.)

Some of the comments on the thread apply to the first version of this post.

I strongly condemn the idea being bandied around in some quarters that there are 'two popes'; that Joseph Ratzinger has not totally renounced what one such article called, illiterately, the 'munus Petrinus'. I consider this idea an error of the very gravest nature. There is only one Roman Church, the visible centre and organ of Unity within the visible Church Militant; and it has, can only have, one bishop; who enjoys to the full, and exclusively, the prerogatives defined in the decree Pastor Aeternus of Vatican I. To argue otherwise is to subvert the entire structure and constitution of the Catholic Church.

A second reason why it is wrong is that it appears to create a new sacramental order within the Catholic Church, with a 'character' indelibly and irrevocably marked upon the soul of a man who has once been Pope. There is no such order, and it is, in my view, heretical to say or to imply that there is. The sacramental orders in the Church of Christ are those of Bishop, Presbyter, and Deacon. A pope is the Bishop of Rome, and a pope emeritus is a Bishop who was once Bishop of Rome and now is so no longer*. (Very properly, when the Holy Father published an Encyclical largely written by his predecessor, it went out solely in his own name.)

Joseph Ratzinger is a learned man who knows that the colour symbolic of the Papacy is red. That is why, on ceasing to be pope, he gave up all use of that red, even as concerned his footwear. The significance of this is that those who promote the outrageous thesis that he is still Pope are apparently under the impression that one can draw conclusions from the wearing of a white cassock as being the symbol of papal authority. It isn't: clergy in Africa used to wear white, and perhaps still do. I have explained this matter more than once previously in my blog. Benedict changed the colour of the crosses on the papal pallium from black to red in order to make precisely the point that red is the papal colour. And now he doesn't wear it. Because he is no longer Pope. As he has also made clear in other ways.

It may be that this absurd idea might appeal to those who, with good reason, much admired Benedict XVI; and who now, with less reason, dislike Francis. I can only say that the very worst tribute that can be paid to our beloved Papa Ratzinger and to his years of sacrificial, persecuted, ministry, is to invent a couple of new heresies in his 'honour'.
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*At the time of the abdication, anticipating the possibility of just such confusions, I suggested that Pope Benedict should have a new suburbicarian See created for him. This would have given expression to his sense of still being within the Enclosure of S Peter while making clear that he is no longer Bishop of Rome. I still think this would have been sensible. Episcopus in Vaticano, or Episcopus ad Sepulturam beati Petri ...

The word emeritus ... see any Latin dictionary ... means one who no longer holds the position he previously held. Thus, there is only one Archbishop of Westminster, endowed with 100% of the powers of his See. Cardinal Cormac is not the Archbishop of Westminster; emeritus means that he was so previously but is not so now, although he is of course loved and respected both for himself and for the service he did the Church in that role. If there is an idea that a See is a corporatio in which the comparticipes are all those bishops still living who have ever in the past occupied that See, then I would like to see the authority for such a view.