Where Is the Remedy Today?

The duty of resolving the legitimacy of the pretender to the Apostolic See cannot be the responsibility of those who do not hold the Catholic Faith. This has never happened in the history of the Church. It was never the heretics who brought a solution to the various Church crises, but rather the clergy who remained steadfast in the Faith.

“God is one,” says St. Cyprian; “Christ is one; the Church is one; her faith is one; her people are one, bound together by the bond of concord into one solid unity of body. You cannot split that unity, nor can you break apart the structure of a body that is one in itself.” [1]

There cannot therefore be two Churches, as some imagine:

​

1. A Church of jurisdiction, legality and authority on the one hand, which while not having preserved the integral Faith has somehow retained the right to elect the Pope or determine his legitimacy, and
    

2. A Church of Faith on the other, which while possessing the Mass and Sacraments and the integral Faith,  inexplicably has no legal authority to resolve doubts regarding the legitimacy of the Supreme Pontiff.

​

Such a conception is not Catholic. That portion of the Pastors who have unfailingly preserved the faith have also necessarily preserved the jurisdiction of the Church. Let us listen to the teaching of His Holiness Pope Pius XII:

 

“Wherefore we grieve over and reject that fatal error of those who dream up for themselves an imaginary Church, as though it were a kind of society nourished and shaped by charity, and who—not without contempt—set over against it another, which they call ‘juridical.’ But they introduce this distinction altogether wrongly; for they do not understand that the divine Redeemer, for this very reason, willed the body of men founded by Him to be a society constituted, in its own kind, as a perfect society, furnished with all juridical and social elements, so that the saving work of Redemption might endure on this earth; and that, to attain the same end, He willed it to be enriched with heavenly gifts and endowments by the Paraclete Spirit.” [2]

Monsignor Maur Cappellari (the future Gregory XVI) teaches us:

 

“That body of pastors which, amid the most subtle conflicts, the most unfounded pretensions, the most illegitimate usurpations, in short, amid the thickest shadows of fanaticism, violence, and ambition, withstands them with invincible firmness, and is the only one that does not allow itself to be seduced, would alone constitute the true Church, and would therefore possess the marks and qualities inseparable from the true Church. […] The Church must always subsist as Christ established her, and therefore must always preserve, in a manner that cannot be overcome, the essential form of her government; but this is not found in the party that does not resist innovations; therefore it is found only in the party that does resist them, and that party alone will consequently be the true Church.” [3]