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In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):
Seems simple enough right?
Whoops.
Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.
Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.
If this is a topic in which you are actually interested, rather than simply a convenient opportunity to bemoan Christianity, here is a recent podcast of two canon lawyers discussing exactly this topic
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/ep-202-the-next-benevacantism
More or less, the rule was only put in place by Paul VI in 1975, and a Pope can't bind future Popes. The rule can be changed at any time by the Pope, and papal canon law cannot bind the Pope because it derives its authority directly from him.
Okay, I listened to the podcast. These guys are just wrong.
You're right that the rule can be changed at any time by the pope, except that the pope didn't actually change it. The 120 cardinal electors rule remains in place. The error that the podcast guys make is that they assume that the pope appoints "cardinal electors", but the pope doesn't appoint "cardinal electors", the pope appoints cardinals. "Cardinal elector" is not an office, it is simply a description of a cardinal who votes in the conclave. The rules for which cardinals get to be cardinal electors comes from the document Universi Dominici Gregis. Universi Dominici Gregis contains both the proposition that cardinals under the age of 80 have the right to vote, and the proposition that the maximum number of cardinal electors is 120.
As far as I can tell, the pope never decided which proposition controls. If he did, please cite it to me. Both propositions are from the same document and of equal weight.
Doesn't matter, the Pope can do whatever he wants (on this matter). The law cannot bind the Pope, because the law is an instrument of the Pope. He has supreme unlimited absolute authority over the rules for creating cardinals, and can change or ignore them as he sees fit. He cannot be bound by his own authority or the authority of his predecessors.
They go over this in detail at about 35 minutes into the podcast
My point is a bit more subtle than that. Universi Dominici Gregis is not a restriction on the pope's creation of cardinals. It is a restriction on how the conclave is to operate. I think your argument is that the pope's creation of more than 120 cardinals under the age of 80 in and of itself changes the law about how the conclave is to operate. This seems like an argument from, "it would really suck if that were true." Yeah, it would suck if Francis put the church in a position where we couldn't elect a pope until 13 otherwise eligible cardinals voluntarily agreed to give up their right to vote, but that is the best reading of the current law (in my opinion). It would be much easier to proceed as if Francis changed the law to let the maximum number of Cardinal electors exceed 120, but anyone reading the rules without the preexisting comittment of fidelity to the church can see that they're making it up as they go along.
The canon lawyers disagree with you.
The part about creating cardinals is a restriction on the person who creates cardinals, the Pope, who can ignore it at will.
The part that says no cardinal elector may be denied his right to elect the Pope is a restriction on the people who run the papal election, who are not the pope. They cannot dispense with it.
It might be that the Pope is in fact making up rules as he goes along, and you could make an argument that it would be better if the last 4 Popes had actually changed the wording of the law rather than just ignoring it, but none of that changes how the law actually applies and none of it changes the rules that require all cardinal electors to be allowed to vote.
It's like the arguments about "how many representatives to our national parliament should we have?" that go on in nearly every country. I've seen arguments about "now the population has increased to X million, we only have Y representatives, clearly we should have Z representatives instead so everyone gets a balanced representation" and the counter-arguments about "we can only fit Y number/Y number is the maximum workable, if we had Z number it would be too big to function".
OP seems to be taking it that "Pope A, who is held to be divinely infallible by the Catholics, made it a rule that there could only be 120 electors. Pope B is now contradicting this divine rule, this means it's all fake!" as though this was something in the Gospels that Jesus said had to be the way. No, it's a civil service procedure. It has nothing to do with "so is adultery okay after all if we call it polyamory?" or "baptism is all fake, really?" statements of doctrine.
It's like saying "the public service regulations say there should only be 150 departmental secretaries but the last president appointed an extra 20 so now there are 170, well I guess this means democracy is a total sham and having elections is fake! congress is a farce! the only true government is benevolent dictatorship!"
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