DANIEL JOHN GORHAM
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This question and answer from another website is in referance to the change of the liturgy in the Catholic Church …. The change was unlawful and the action of heretics!

 

Question:
Is one pope's decision more binding than another's? Pius V declares that the Mass is be of a certain structure until the end of time. Does he have the authority to speak for subsequent popes? When another pope declares a change, does his voice carry over the previous pope's decision? I am not talking about making an error, but the more recent pope's notion that he is moving the Church closer to the Kingdom.

 

Answer:
Yes, one pope's decree may be more binding than another's. It depends upon the content of the decree, not the pope. No pope may change a dogmatic decree. Otherwise, we could find Benedict rescinding the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Obviously, that would be absurd.

Pope St. Pius V's decree Quo Primum is the most binding form of papal decree. It was issued to carry out the decrees of a dogmatic council, the Council of Trent. Pope Pius V was not "declaring a change." Quite the contrary. He was simply confirming for the world, in the face of the Protestant heresy, Catholic and Apostolic Tradition, the precedential Mass of the Holy See, of Rome, of St. Peter. Therefore, it is binding, as the pope specifically decreed, in perpetuum.

In comparison, the decrees surrounding the implementation of the Novus Ordo service (setting aside the invalidating defects in its content) had no such force. The decrees arose out of a pastoral, not a dogmatic, council. They did not confirm Catholic and Apostolic Tradition, but overturned it. As the theologian, Fr. Kramer, put it:

Quo Primum is no 'merely ecclesiastical law' (can. 11) that can be revoked, but has been enacted into law and declared ex cathedra to be irreformable, and is therefore a solemnly defined moral doctrine, which is also of itself infallible and irreformable.... The statutes of Quo Primum, therefore, pertain to Divine Law insofar as they constitute a particular application of the divine law....

Sometimes the heretics within the Catholic Church try to make the argument that one pope is equal to another, so one can "overrule" another to change "modernize" the Church after the pope's own notion. That is not Catholic doctrine. That statement arises from a "legalistic" (Pharasaic) error. The popes are not to be petty potentates trying to overrule one another. No, the popes are to be as one, in succession to one another in the continuity of Catholic and Apostolic Tradition. As the dogma on the papacy describes it:

For the Holy Ghost was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by His revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by His assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or Deposit of Faith transmitted by the Apostles.

Nor are popes prophets. That is not their office, just as Moses and Aaron, Saul and Samuel had different offices. Whether in their personal, fallible opinion, they are bringing the Church "closer to the Kingdom" is not a matter for them to decide. The papacy is not a personal office in the sense that each pope can do as he pleases or can follow his personal notions. The pope is merely the "vicar," that is the subordinate of his Principal, Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Church as He, not the pope, established it.

 

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