The baldacchino of St Peter’s
By Roberto de Mattei | 30 October 2024
On 27 October, for the concluding Mass of the synod, the scaffolding that for nine months has covered the baldacchino in St Peter’s Basilica was removed, and Bernini’s masterpiece once again exalts the triumph of the papacy before the eyes of the faithful.
St Peter’s Basilica is a figure of the Church, built on the tomb of Peter. This Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is a monarchical society, uninterruptedly governed by the legitimate successors of the prince of the Apostles. The pope’s primacy of government, full and immediate, constitutes the principle of the unity of faith that exists only in the Catholic Church. The foundation of pontifical sovereignty does not consist in the charism of infallibility, conferred by Christ on Peter alone as head of the Church, as well as on the Apostolic College united with Peter, but in the primacy of jurisdiction that the pope possesses over the universal Church. This primacy includes, together with the power of teaching, the full power to shepherd the Church in its entirety, to guide and govern it, as was defined by the First Vatican Council.1
Over the course of history, the Catholic Church has seen many schisms and heresies, but the hatred of its enemies has raged against the papacy above all, precisely because it represents the visible summit of the Church, its centre of gravity, the katechon destined to confront and defeat the Gates of Hell. In recent decades, however, what Paul VI famously called “the smoke of Satan”2 has mysteriously penetrated the Temple of God, creating profound disorientation. The Synod on Synodality of 2024 is one of the latest manifestations of this dark fog that has raised the alarm of authoritative figures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Colin Fisher, for example, recently stated that the synod cannot “reinvent the Catholic faith or the Catholic Church”, because they are “a tremendous treasure that we’ve received from generation after generation before us, all the way back to Our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles. And we are here to transmit that faithfully to the next generations after us”.
The “reinvention” of the Catholic faith or Church is not limited to the call for the diaconal ordination of women or the marriage of priests, which are stated goals of Catholic progressivism. The ultimate aim, implicit in actions rather than expressed in words, is the deconstruction of the papacy, replacing the hierarchical constitution of the Church with a “synodal dimension” that democratises and overturns it. This is the outcome of a revolutionary process that has been long in the making and aims, as Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira predicted back in 1977, to take “the noble and osseous rigidity of the ecclesiastical structure, as Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted it, and twenty centuries of religious life have magnificently moulded it”,3 and turn it into a flimsy ectoplasm.
This process of making papal authority fluid is unfortunately also getting help from some of those who defend the Tradition of the Church against the doctrinal errors and deviations of our time. It is they who declare Pope Francis’s illegitimacy, attributing to him alone (or mainly to him) the responsibility for the current crisis in the Church, defining him as an antipope and a usurper who arbitrarily occupies the Chair of Peter. It has been rightly observed that, for them, the figure of the pope has in fact become superfluous for the life and existence of the Church, and the rejection of Pope Francis in fact turns into the denial of the authority of the Roman pontiff.4
The fallacy of these positions is further demonstrated by the existence of bitter polemics among those who accuse Pope Francis of being a false pope. The dynamic of dizzying self-fragmentation is inevitable when the unitary principle of the Church is lost, as Bossuet demonstrated in his famous History of the variations of the Protestant churches (1688).
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the best-known exponent of these “anarcho-vacantists”, maintains the invalidity of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s election on the basis of manifest heresy and “defect of consent”. The journalist Andrea Cionci and the (laicised) priest Alessandro Minutella, on the other hand, reject Archbishop Viganò’s doctrinal criticisms of the conciliar popes and declare Pope Francis antipope on account of the canonical invalidity of Benedict XVI’s abdication, which remains their point of reference. The Carmelite priest Giorgio Maria Farè has recently taken the same line. But when Fr Farè, supported by Cionci, announced that he would present a canonical appeal against his foreseeable excommunication, Minutella accused him of being in contradiction, because resorting to the Vatican tribunal means recognising the jurisdiction of the Bergoglian “neo-church”. For Minutella, Viganò was more consistent in his refusal to appear before the “Bergoglian sect” when summoned by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. But faced with the verbal violence of the latest statements of former Papal Nuncio to the United States, even priests and lay people who have always supported him are now distancing themselves from him. The confusion is extreme, and no one is able to present an alternative to the “antipope” Francis, seen as wrongfully occupying the Apostolic See.
The history of the Church numbers many “antipopes”, from St Hippolytus (217–235) to Felix V (1439–1449), not to mention some irrelevant contemporary pretenders. The historical dictionary of the papacy edited by Philippe Levillain lists about forty antipopes.5 A recent work by Mario Prignano presents an overview without defining their number precisely, but underlining the importance of these conflicts for understanding the history of the Church.6
In reality, the very existence of these antipopes demonstrates that the Church cannot exist without a pope. What is called the sede vacante is a transitory phase, provided for by canon law, between the death of a Roman pontiff and the election of his successor, but in this brief period the structure of the Church remains unchanged. It is theoretically possible for a pope to lose the pontificate through heresy, even if this has never happened in history, but the Church certainly cannot live without a pope.
Whoever today affirms the existence of the sede vacante due to the heresies of Pope Francis, the illegitimacy of his election or the nullity of Benedict XVI’s abdication cannot ignore one undeniable fact: acceptance on the part of the universal Church as the theological criterion that ensures the legitimacy of the pontiff. Otherwise he strips the Church of its character as a visible society, depriving it, moreover, of its possibility of intervening in the future to resolve the current crisis once and for all. Only a supreme and solemn voice can put an end to the process of self-demolition underway: that of the Roman pontiff. Christ, in fact, walks on the fluctuating waves of history with Peter and with his successors, to whom He continues to address the words engraved on the inside of the dome that sits atop the baldacchino of St Peter’s: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam, et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam — “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it”.
Notes
- Denzinger, 3065 ff. ↩︎
- Paul VI, Homily, 29 June 1972. ↩︎
- Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution & Counter-Revolution (It. tr. Luci sull’Est, 1998) p 158. ↩︎
- Fr Daniele Di Sorco (ed.), Parole chiare sulla Chiesa (Edizioni Radio Spada, 2023) pp 87-90. ↩︎
- Philippe Levillain (ed.), Dizionario storico del Papato (Bompiani, 1996) pp 73–76. ↩︎
- Mario Prignano, Antipapi. Una storia della Chiesa (Laterza, 2024). ↩︎