The Bogeyman of “Ultramontanism”

Long ago, when I was researching and writing BY WHAT AUTHORITY?, I noted a curious pattern.

It was this: While retention of Catholic Sacred Tradition fragments tended to keep Protestantism in such sanity as it still possesses, in those places where Protestantism attempts to reject Catholic Sacred Tradition, the narrative suddenly and wrenchingly changes. Suddenly, the demand is made for nothing less than an explicit proof text from the Bible.

It works like this:

1. If a thing is condemned by the Church, but permitted by the Protestant (say, abortion) the demand is for an explicit text forbidding it (“Show me where Jesus said one word about not allowing abortion! That’s just the Church imposing its purely human ideas on what Jesus came to say!”).
    
2. Conversely, if a thing is allowed by the Church but condemned by the Protestant, the demand is for an explicit text commanding it. So, for instance, we get demands like, “Where in the Bible do you find anyone commanding us to pray to dead people? That’s just the Church imposing it’s purely human ideas on what Jesus came to say.”

I call this the Semi-Permeable Membrane of Dissent, though “Heads I Win, Tails the Church Loses” is also a reasonable descriptor.

These days, the loudest and most bitterly anti-Catholic forms of Protestant are Traditionalist Catholics. Just a few years ago, when Benedict was Pope they were expanding some of his views (such as allowance of the Latin Mass and certain opinions on aesthetics to quasi-dogmatic status. Failure to sign off on participation in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass marked you out as second-class Novus Ordo vermin (despite the fact that participants in the EF remain a vanishingly small minority in the global Church. Consigning most of the Body of Christ to “not Real Catholic” status was par for the course in Traddery. They stood, they imagined, with the Pope and those who did not get on board with his every opinion were of dubious fidelity to Pure Catholic Faith.

But then the (in their view) Great Catastrophe struck. Benedict resigned and Francis, the Grand Arch-Heretic Antipope and Enemy, the Great Dictator Pope, the Pagan Liberal Communist Socialist Subverter of All that is Right and True was elected and, in a trice, it became the duty of all Real Catholics[TM] to “resist him to his face.”

And so, all the vermin in the Church who hitherto had, with perfect orthodoxy, understood that they were not obliged to agree with Benedict’s aesthetic views or permission of the Extraordinary Form also understood that they were under no obligation to spend their days and nights putting the blackest possible contruction on everything Francis said and did.

For this betrayal of Reactionary Trad fear and loathing of Francis, Normal Catholics have earned the label “Ultramontanist”. It is a term that used to refer to people who thought that the Pope was utterly incapable of saying or doing anything wrong ever. But now it is, for Reactionary Francis-haters, a term much like “woke” is for MAGA cultists: a swear word meant to mark out for ostracism from their holy ranks every Normal who does not react with scorn and contempt every single time Pope Francis clears his throat or twitches his pinky. It is a designation which means, “Every Catholic who does not hate and condemn everything the Pope is, says, and does, and who does not spend their life scrutinizing him with ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling, merciless hostility.”

The reality, however, is that Normals like Scott Eric Alt already know that the pope, while protected by infallibility from defining error as Catholic doctrine, only exercises that charism on extraordinarily rare occasions because he only defines dogma on extraordinarily rare occasions. Most of the time, he’s just schlepping along like everybody else, using such wits, gifts, and information as he has to give his views on the weather, the music of Mozart, or the infield fly rule. And he can make bad calls like everybody else.

The irony of all this is that, because Normals have never signed off on the utterly unCatholic notion that we are all supposed to play Simon Peter Says (in which every word the Pope says is either infallible or is contemptible heresy), we need not freak out over Francis’ folksy casualness. Not every non-infallible thing a pope says is wrong, contemptible, and demands condemnation by every Real Catholic[TM]. Nor is respect for the pope when he speaks, as he typically does, as an ordinary person with ordinary views, a mark of “ultramontanism”. I listen to my doctor and my car mechanic with respect for their views, not because they are graced with infallibility, but because they know way more than I do about their field. I do not listen to every prating wahoo on the internet with a conspiracy theory filled with indiscriminate hatred for car mechanics, doctors–or Francis–because that would be dumb.