Anti-Pope Francis the Heretic?

well as if things couldn't get more distressing there have been some anxiety-inducing things claimed and discussed on social media as of late so if you're somebody who has your your fingers on the pulse of social media especially catholic social media you've probably seen a lot of conversation uh speculating about whether or not pope francis is truly the pope or is he an anti-pope or if he's possibly a heretic as well and some of these uh speculations have come from a lot of the usual suspects which shouldn't be terribly surprising but also from some who are uh quite respectable in circles of catholic commentary and so i can understand if for a lot of people this is a source of of again distress and anxiety and like many controversies i see a lot of people falling into two alternative camps one is to completely dismiss these commentaries in these arguments as if they are just insane outlandish and not worthy of consideration and then to insist that things are things are fine there's nothing to worry about pope francis is a he's a great pope and things are good in the church the other is to obviously immediately adopt these these kinds of arguments and to embrace them and to denounce the problems that they see in the church and to interpret the problems they see in the church through this lens of either pope francis being an anti-pope or a heretic i'm not terribly convinced that either of these approaches are fruitful or helpful for us as the laity who i'm primarily aiming this this video at um so when i talk about us and what it is that we should be doing i'm talking about people like myself who sit in the pews if if you are somebody who wields significant authority in the church i'm flattered that you're watching one of my videos but this isn't primarily for you you have bigger responsibilities and uh authority to apply that i i couldn't comment on and i i wouldn't know how uh to give you advice about that but for the rest of us who have similar functions in the church and society to me um i thought i would offer this video as an opportunity to hopefully help you in your discernment about these kinds of things and i also want to urge you to listen to this entire video if if you plan on considering any of it this is going to be something that is easily misunderstood if you jump to conclusions about what i'm saying without the entire context of what i intend to say in this video so please watch the entire video if you don't have time if you're just kind of surfing at the moment and you only have a few minutes here or there and you can't listen to this entire video i would urge you to turn it off and wait for a moment when you do have time to listen to the entire context of what i have to say and also just a very quick mention of a sponsor of my channel if you want to support my channel and you happen to be in a position where you can make use of the sponsor of this video then please do it's real estate for life if you're somebody who is moving who is looking at moving especially to a place where you don't have contacts or or people who you are familiar with especially realtors then real estate for life is a network of realtors who share your values they're pro-life they're christian often catholic and they will understand the unique needs that you might have in trying to find a home and a neighborhood and a place to live that will suit your family's priorities and needs so if you want to get connected with a realtor like that check out realestate4life.org and let them know that you heard about them through my channel and that will help them or that will help my channel through by them giving me a donation through that [Music] let me start by saying that the controversial opinions that will swirl around a topic like this uh some some are absurd but some of the arguments i've heard put forward more recently are not absurd and i i even find them to be somewhat persuasive now there might be holes in their logic and they might be um not as convincing or conclusive as you might want for such an important question but i don't think they're the kinds of arguments that you can just easily dismiss and set aside and say oh that's that's utterly ridiculous based on your necessary conclusions about the fact that there can't be an antipope and the pope can't be a heretic because that's not necessarily true there have been um there have been anti-popes that's part of the church's history and the people who lived through those periods of history i'm sure they struggled with some of these dilemmas if they were aware of the intrigue and what was going on in rome at the time but likewise there are also good arguments that say that pope francis is a legitimate he was legitimately elected and that pope benedict uh legitimately resigned um and there are good arguments to say that pope francis isn't even uh isn't a heretic that some of the things that may have convinced you that he might be are maybe based on a misunderstanding based on poor translations because he's often speaking in italian or because he's speaking in a casual way without the kind of precision you might want from someone who's addressing doctrines or even dogmas for that matter so that's probably the first point i would want to make about this is that this is difficult to resolve it takes a lot of awareness it takes a a very deep understanding of ecclesiology of theology if you're evaluating something he said compared to certain doctrines or dogmas and philosophy for that matter it takes a very shrewd person to scrutinize all of these details and to formulate a conclusion based on them and if that's not you if you aren't trained in these areas if you don't have a lot of experience in studying these these disciplines then you could find yourself in very deep water in over your head as you attempt to try to resolve these questions but luckily for us there is an out there is a third option here which is that you don't have to resolve this question um again if you're someone like me you're you're a layperson living somewhere remote from the city of rome this the question of whether or not pope francis is an anti-pope or a good pope or a heretic or heterodox doesn't necessarily affect you directly i mean there might be things um apostolic things that he can do in terms of legislation that will affect you in some way and when it comes that far then there's there might be a need for you to address the way that it affects you but otherwise you know again resolving just this this very high level question of whether or not he's he's an anti-pope that's not necessarily your responsibility and one of the ways i could come at that that conclusion that i'm trying to make is is by asking a question did you elect the pope for starters no that gives a pretty strong indication that you don't have a responsibility a direct responsibility in who is the pope and whether or not he's a good pope whether or not he's doing his job well whether or not there are decisions that will need to be made in the future about electing the next pope and how he might govern the church uh as an alternative or incompatibility with the the currents that we are currently flowing down so you didn't elect the pope you don't have that responsibility you don't have a responsibility to um see him resign or see him replaced or anything like that which is a very unusual way of governing the church even if you did have that responsibility so what good comes of drawing a conclusion about whether or not he's an anti-pope or not even if you come across clever arguments or even if you can formulate clever arguments yourself um there's a lot of risk that comes along with something like this and since it isn't your responsibility you don't need to assume that kind of risk like think about the potential here on the one hand you could ignore a question like this and just say i don't know and i don't need to know and i'm not responsible for knowing there's nothing i can really do about that and i don't bear responsibility for resolving the question anyways so i can i can stay somewhat agnostic about that i can say i don't know and therefore the best i can do is to pray for the church and focus my attention locally on my parish maybe my diocese if i have some responsibilities there certainly on my family and my friends and on my my relationship with god and through our lord jesus and through the holy spirit i can study i can pray i can try to grow in sanctity that way i don't it isn't a prerequisite that i know who what's taking shape in history right now and and what what the outcomes of that will be this is one of the big problems with with living through history is that it often requires hindsight to write those history books the history books about the francis pontificate and the fact that we have an apparent emeritus pope those history books aren't written yet and so and for good reason because it's occurring right now and that's a difficult thing for us to live through there's a lot of history happening right now and those of us who are struggling in the midst of that might be doing so to a degree that is unnecessary because we're trying to draw conclusions about this we're trying to make sure that we understand everything that's going on conclusively and those conclusions just aren't available to us yet there is a degree with which we have to allow these events to unfold and we have to do so with calm and with peace and without risking our own souls in the process and that's probably the critical critical thing about this question um first of all again you don't have to resolve the question of whether or not pope francis is an anti-pope um but you could you could try to but what are the risks associated with that if you decide that he is an anti-pope and you're wrong you've seriously jeopardized yourself your soul and embraced schism as a result which is this very very serious sin if you decide that you don't know the answer to that question and you will act as if pope francis is the pope or that pope benedict might still be the pope and that you will pray for both of them out of good will well is god going to blame you for that is he going to say you should have figured this out i don't think so because again it's not your responsibility and there's no risk with that there's no you're not jeopardizing yourself and you're not potentially becoming a schismatic in the process and what reward is there in in trying to resolve this question you may decide that pope francis is an anti-pope and you might end up being right in that not because you had considered all the possible variables and you knew for sure you had done all the necessary due diligence to resolve that question that's not why it would be because of luck it would be because some of the things that that might contribute to that conclusion made sense to you and there's a lot that you didn't know and you just avoided those and then out of luck you ended up having the right answer well when your judgment comes do you think god will be like way to go wow that was a tough riddle i set for you and you figured it out well done good and faithful servant or do you think he'll say that was kind of reckless i mean you you got it right but you didn't exercise a lot of prudence in insisting upon that and what good came from it anyways what were you able to do with that knowledge from the role that i set for you in the church and do you think that he'll blame you if you don't figure out that the pope is an anti-pope when he is do you think he'll say you know i gave you this one responsibility this is all you had to do was resolve this question you didn't do it so sorry um you failed uh you the gates are closed or if you if we do let you into heaven you're demoted for not having figured this out that seems like a fairly unlikely outcome to me and i know that some people will hear that and they'll say well to to avoid the question is to embrace cowardice we can't be indifferent during times of crisis within the church and i would to that i would reply that's true if it's your responsibility if it's necessary to resolve this question and i don't think it is necessary i think that for our function in the church for me as a father and as a husband and as a disciple and a faithful member of the church i have enough that i can draw from that i know for sure is good is dogmatic is the truth of the catholic faith to inform me in my journey in my pilgrimage and gives me the principles i need to live by whether or not the current reigning person sitting in the chair of saint peter is legitimately there or not doesn't affect my ability to do those things and again because it's not my responsibility i'm not a cardinal i'm not i'm not a bishop certainly um i don't i just don't need to resolve that question so no i don't think that it is cowardice i think it's prudence and i think it goes a long way to avoiding the sin of curiosity which many people will be surprised to learn is actually a vice st thomas aquinas and asuma theologiae has an article for i think it's question 167 where he addresses this vice of curiosity he says there are a lot of reasons why a person might try to grow in knowledge that attaches sinful sinful aspects to it one might be that to grow in knowledge for the sake of pride to puffeth oneself up for example that's that's a bad reason to try and grow in knowledge another might be to use the knowledge gained four sinful ends which is again of course a problem and then he quotes the book of sirach that says do not try to grow in knowledge for things that are too high for the too high for your intellect or may be too high for your station which is something that for us as a lady this seems like a very appropriate um admonishment or caution about trying to resolve these kinds of ques these intrigues about rome and and the pope and the vatican this is definitely too high for our station and in most the vast majority of cases too high for our knowledge and our intellect we're not trained to resolve these kinds of questions we're not training canon law we're not trained in ecclesiology we're not trained in theology um so while yes there are aspects of those things and those disciplines that we do need to familiarize ourselves with we do need to understand and know the faith insofar as it is as it helps us in our station and in our vocation but when it comes to the pope when it comes to whether or not the pope is legitimate whether he's legitimately elected whether he legitimately resigned we don't need to know these things it's not been assigned to us by god and it hasn't been assigned to us by the church it's been assigned to us in a way in a really weird way by mark zuckerberg um by social media i wouldn't i wouldn't be aware of these things if it wasn't for social media if that was all stripped away you know the kind of weird things that pope francis might say in his general audiences i would never hear about them the only thing that would really come to my attention would be encyclicals because i do read encyclicals and there have been things in in pope francis's writings that strike me as a bit curious if not um if not something i would be cautious about accepting but for most people they wouldn't hear about this if it weren't for somebody on social media who was bringing it to your attention and this is the great temptation with social media is that it inspires curiosity we have limitations there's only so much that we should know about insofar as it informs our lives and the things that we can do with that knowledge we should learn about things that apply to us in our lives to our relationships to our community to our formation and then apply them appropriately but social media inundates us with information that we can do nothing with and therefore creates distress or causes us to adopt certain conclusions that might be bad for us or to assume that we have certain kinds of knowledge that we that are incomplete or simply wrong and that those are all the kinds of risks that come with the device of curiosity and social media is relentless in tempting us towards curiosity so don't fall for that don't fall victim to that don't let that steal your peace don't let that funnel you into potential skismatic waters and don't let that potentially rupture your relationship with the pope with the pontiff and with the church and ultimately with god so again what can we be doing well i don't think expressing your outrage or sharing this kind of information on social media does much good at all if any what we can do is pray for the church we can pray for pope francis we can pray for pope benedict we can pray for renewal and cleansing and healing and clarification in this age we live in such that the church can then function again in a way that reaches the souls of those it needs to reach but for those of us who have already been reached by the church we don't need to jeopardize that that relationship and the work that the holy spirit has already done with us by preoccupying ourselves with information that and questions that we can't resolve and that run the risk of of turning us into schismatics in the process so i hope that is a help to you i hope that that's a consolation to you and that it helps helps you if nothing else spend less time fixating your attention on this kind of information and these kinds of questions thanks for watching the reason i can continue making content like this is because of the generous support of my viewers if you feel called to support this work then consider joining the reinforcements which is my online community there are multiple tiers including free access for those who can't help financially but still want to join you can join up at www.brian www.brianholtsworth.ca certain levels will also get a free gift basket from glory and shine who is a family owned catholic bath and body products company whose beard bomb i'm wearing right now it's like aromatherapy for your face even if you don't join they make amazing products so check them out at glorynshine.com and don't forget to like and subscribe you don't have to agree with everything i said to get value out of these kinds of conversations so be sure to subscribe to be edified or challenged there's value in both [Music] you

Channel: Brian Holdsworth

Views: 20,468

Keywords: Brian Holdsworth, Holdsworth Brian, Worthy Commentary, Brian Holdsworth Catholic, Catholic Apologist, Catholic Speaker, Catholic Philosophy, Catechism, Catechesis, patrick coffin, timothy gordon, taylor marshall, catholic schism, pope francis, anti-pope

Id: aJNrFBw_pQg

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022