Francis, King by Divine Mandate. What No Pope Before Him Had Dared to Say

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The new fundamental law of Vatican City State was published the very day, May 13, when everyone’s attention was on the meeting between Francis and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. With the effect that the coverage was scanty and poor. When instead from its very first lines it marked a reckless and unprecedented turning point in the history and conception of the papacy.

Mark well. The turning point does not lie in article 1 of the new fundamental law, in which it is written that “the Supreme Pontiff, Sovereign of Vatican City State, has the full authority of government, which includes legislative, executive, and judicial power.”

To this point all is as before, even if one is struck by the contrast between the “synodal” evolution of Church governance in more democratic guises, which Francis says every day he wants to promote, and the unbridled monarchical absolutism with which he in fact rules both the Church and the small state of which he is “pope king,” concentrating all powers within himself and exercising them as he pleases.

The real turning point is in the preamble, also signed by Francis, which starts off like this: “Called by virtue of the ‘munus petrino’ to exercise sovereign powers also over Vatican City State….”

It is in this “by virtue of the ‘munus petrino’” that the unprecedented novelty lies. That is, in having even the pope’s temporal powers stem from his religious service to the Church as successor of the Apostle Peter. Or in other words: in cloaking with divine right not only the spiritual government of the Church but also the temporal government of Vatican City State.

In reality, in the doctrine of the Catholic Church the “munus petrino” that Jesus conferred on the first of the apostles has nothing to do with any temporal power. And history confirms this. From its origins and for many centuries the papacy did not have a state of its own. And after it lost what remained of the Papal States in 1870, it went another sixty years without any territory at all.

The minuscule Vatican City State was born in 1929 by virtue of a treaty between the Holy See and Italy. And both before and after it is the Holy See, not the state, that is the titular subject of international sovereignty. Between 1870 and 1929, when the Papal States no longer existed and Vatican City State did not yet exist, the Holy See retained the right of active and passive legation, opening new nunciatures and accrediting to itself diplomatic representatives of new countries, as well as signing concordats, which by their nature fall under international law, and becoming involved in international missions and arbitrations. During the pontificate of Benedict XV alone, between 1914 and 1922, the Holy See established diplomatic relations with ten new states.

Always taking the greatest care to avoid giving in to theocratic doctrines of fusion between throne and altar. Neither in the treaty of 1929 nor in other previous or subsequent documents over the span of centuries is anything of the like recorded before this year’s fateful June 7, the day on which the new fundamental law of Vatican City State will go into effect. (Continued)

https://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2023/05/31/francis-king-by-divine-mandate-what-no-pope-before-him-had

>>18930271

Francis, King by Divine Mandate. What No Pope Before Him Had Dared to Say

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Of course, temptations have surfaced here and there, in the history of the Catholic Church, to cloak with divine right the powers of the “pope king.” But they have always been rejected. And precisely by Church representatives of an ultraconservative stamp, whom one would instead imagine more inclined to succumb.

Giovanni Maria Vian, professor of ancient Christian literature and former director of “L’Osservatore Romano,” in the newspaper “Domani” of May 21 rightly quoted the great jurist and canonist Nicola Picardi, who defined as “substantially extraneous to Catholic doctrine” the theocratic conception, “on the basis of what such a conservative as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani formulated in 1960: ‘Ecclesiae non competit potestas directa in res temporalis,’ meaning that the Church does not have direct power in temporal affairs.”

Still before this one can cite Pius IX, the very pope who had the Papal States taken from him and a year after the loss, in the 1871 encyclical “Ubi nos,” indeed protested by asserting the need for a state that would protect the “complete freedom” of the pope to “exercise in all the Church supreme power and authority,” but wrote that “the civil rule of the Holy See has been given to the Roman Pontiff by the singular counsel of Providence.” Nothing more than “by the singular counsel”; far from “by virtue of the ‘munus petrino’,” as in today’s fundamental law of Vatican City State!

But even more apropos is what the Church historian and professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University Roberto Regoli wrote in the journal “Barnabiti Studi” in 2011, in an erudite essay on Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini, secretary of state with Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846), both with a reputation – not always historically founded – as “sinister reactionaries.”

Called upon to evaluate a forthcoming text “in defense of the temporal authority” of the Holy See, Lambruschini began by objecting that “primacy was given to the person of Peter and not to the See.”

Getting then to the heart of the matter, that is, to the origin of the temporal power of the Roman Church, Lambruschini admitted that it is appropriate “for the very good of Religion that the Supreme Head of the same should have an independent State, in order to be able to govern with the necessary freedom and impartiality the Church and the faithful spread throughout the Catholic world.” But rejecting straightaway the assumption of the text’s author, according to which “the origin of the Holy See’s temporal authority is Divine, as is the origin of the Chair of St. Peter established in Rome.”

For Lambruschini, linking the temporal power of the popes to the “divine origin of the Chair of St.Peter” – that is, as today, to the “munus petrino” – “is unsustainable and dangerous,” because “if temporal authority were absolutely necessary for the Supreme Head of the Church in the way expressed by the Author, it would therefore follow that Jesus Christ would have failed his Church ‘in necessariis’ at the very beginning of the age that established it, since for several centuries the Supreme Pontiffs were certainly not temporal Sovereigns.”

Lambruschini was heeded, and that text was withdrawn. Until today, when that “unsustainable and dangerous” thesis has become official, with the signature of the reigning pope.

https://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2023/05/31/francis-king-by-divine-mandate-what-no-pope-before-him-had

>>18930268

>Flight 93

Anyone have the archive link handie from reporter saying that the flight landed in Cleveland earlier that day?

>>18930370

>what plane

Kek.

Folks on the ground at WTC saw only explosions. Folks watching the Tell-A-Vision saw planes and explosions. Missile hit Pentagon. Flight 93 landed in Cleveland.

What is missing?

>>18930715

>Separate deal there.

>>18930763