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Contrary to popular belief, Catholics don't believe the Pope to be generally infallible, only when speaking Ex Cathedra, which hasn't happened since 1950. The hierarchy of the ordained also isn't quite military-like, there's quite a bit of independence even at the level of priests. Our archdiocese is going through a restructuring process over the next year and one administrative detail is that the archbishop has requested the resignation of every priest in advance to make moving them around easier. They could refuse to resign, at which point some kind of due process kicks in, the archbishop doesn't force their resignation unilaterally.
There's also the matter of quiet disobedience in a leftist direction going unaddressed, while the people who noisily point it out like Strickland wind up having their basic competence questioned. One of the most appalling cases of this happened just recently when an archibishop gave a prominent Muslim the Eucharist.
There is serious schism potential at the moment.
Right, but there’s a lot of space between “is infallible” and “should not be publicly contradicted.”
Strickland is catapulting his own career by criticizing his superiors. That’s political suicide even before the theological questions come in.
Political suicide, yes, but this kind of thing had happened before and it was generally understood what popes would do. Dismissing a bishop for criticism of a pope was not thought to be an option on the table.
It’s not?
A bishop directly challenging the pope—or claiming his office—is the kind of thing that led to excommunications.
The usual playbook for a bad/rogue bishop who is too young to just wait until retirement is to assign a coadjutor(bishop with equal rights). Removing a bishop from office is the sort of thing that under the previous two popes simply would not have happened without, like, being arrested for sex abuse or something. It wasn’t used for insubordination.
Strickland is being removed because he’s a popular American from podunk AND because the current pope is very much a norm violator with the use of the powers of office. Other more prominent bishops(Chaput, notably) who made harsh accusations against the pope were left in place until their mandatory retirement age.
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A career in the priesthood where you stay silent about corruption in the Church isn't a career worth having.
He’s not a corruption whistleblower, he accused the pope of heresy.
Now the current pope has a lot of corruption scandals he could be accused of, but Strickland has not been a whistleblower in that regard(and is probably not much better informed in that matter than an interested layman; the Vatican leaks like a sieve but ordinary bishops of minor dioceses aren’t directly exposed to the majority of the shady stuff).
"Corruption in the church" is not a narrow legal term, and should not be interpreted that way. The church has a mission, and people intentionally compromising that mission for their own personal aggrandizement or satisfaction is a serious problem. The higher they are in the hierarchy, the worse the problem becomes.
The Pope promulgating heresy, if that is indeed what he is doing, is more than sufficiently shady to be worth denouncing.
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The Pope is only infallible when speaking Ex Cathedra. But in addition to that, a core Catholic doctrine is that the Pope is protected by from the Holy Spirit from teaching heresy, thus a Pope will not teach something that directly contradict holy scripture or established doctrines of faith. Michael Lofton has a good podcast on this issue.
Thus there is a big difference between accusing the Pope of "making imprudent statements that could be easily misinterpreted as heresy" and actually claiming the Pope taught heresy. The latter is a much worse charge for a Bishop to make, as it lays the groundwork for schism.
Pope Honorius was actually convicted of heresy and the Church kept going.
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This is a teaching of the church, but as far as I can tell it has never been infallibility defined. If a pope were to contradict a dogma, even in his magisterium, the dogma wins and the non-infallible teaching is falsified.
What I find particularly interesting is that until this happens, faithful Catholics are still bound to “adhere with religious submission of will and intellect” to the non-infallible teaching. Even if Michael Lofton secretly believes in his heart of hearts that it’s only a matter of time before Francis steps over the line, he’s not supposed to tell you that.
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