Did Francis have the authority to "manufacture truth"? - Fr. Schall: "[S]eems...real target is the encyclical Veritatis Splendor of John Paul II that spelled out the conditions for dealing with absolute evils...It may explain the reason why Pope Bergoglio does not answer specific questions about the truth of doctrine"
"Yes. That adds an important theological-juridical dimension to the problem you have been developing."
"The surprising assumption is that the pope's authority works something like legislative sovereignty: if the pope possesses supreme authority, then whatever he declares can simply become doctrine by an act of will. But that is not the classical Catholic conception of papal authority."
"The distinction is between authority to teach and authority to manufacture truth." -ChapGPT
"What is even more surprising is that many think that he has the power simply to change doctrine as if he were a voluntarist potentate free to change things as he wills...
...In a recent talk to the Jesuit Congregation, the Holy Father again spoke of seminaries wherein 'law' was taught, where priests became “rigid.” Instead, he advocated what appears to be a version of St. Ignatius’s 'discernment of spirits' as the alternative to this 'legalism.' It often seems that the real target is the encyclical Veritatis Splendor of John Paul II that spelled out the conditions for dealing with absolute evils. It is of some interest to reflect on this approach. It may explain the reason why Pope Bergoglio does not answer specific questions about the truth of doctrines...
... I myself do not think opposing 'legalism' in favor of 'discernment' is a good idea. Law and equity, discernment of both good and bad spirits, are necessary. Not all questions need to be clarified immediately. I, at least, belong to the school of thought that thinks that the most important ones should be clarified. It is not “legalism” to do so. We are not a people who seek to live in darkness. We seek to live in the light that teaches us about what is." - Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. [https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=11458]
Notes:
ChapGPT: Use the following to explain what Bergoglio is doing [in quote] above:
Father James V. Schall, a prominent Jesuit political philosopher, argued that modern "rights talk"—including the framing of moral issues around a "right to life"—is problematic because it shifts the basis of ethics from objective truth and virtue to subjective individual claims and state power. [1, 2, 3, 4]
The Problem with "Rights" Language
- Subjective Origins: Schall noted that modern rights theory, tracing back to thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, treats a "right" as an individual's raw power or claim to get what they want rather than an reflection of an objective moral order. [1]
- Competing Claims: When public discourse is reduced to competing "rights" (such as a "right to life" versus a "right to abortion"), it enters an arena of endless conflict where no shared standard of truth remains to adjudicate the claims. [1, 2]
- State Definition: By resting moral standing on legally declared rights, society invites the sovereign state to become the ultimate arbiter of what a human being is and which rights are permitted to exist. [1, 2]
Duty Over Prerogative
- Precedence of Obligations: In classical and traditional Christian thought, human beings first have objective duties—rooted in reality, natural law, and relationships—prior to claiming individual prerogatives. [1, 2]
- Loss of Virtue: Schall argued that focusing strictly on what is "due" to an individual or what "rights" one possesses undermines personal self-rule, virtue, and the recognition that human life is a transcendent gift rather than a political construct. [1, 2]
Schall's critique gives you a useful way of interpreting the issue you raised about Bergoglio. The connection is not that “discernment = rights theory”; rather, Schall identifies a broader intellectual tendency in which objective realities and objective norms cease to be the primary starting point, and moral reasoning increasingly begins from the claims, circumstances, and subjective position of the individual.
Applied to the Bergoglio passage, the contrast can be reconstructed this way.
1. The starting point shifts
In the classical natural-law framework, the order is roughly:
reality → nature → objective good → law → prudential judgment → action.
The question begins with what is true about reality. What is man? What is marriage? What constitutes an intrinsically evil act? What does justice require? What does God command?
Only then does one ask what a particular person should do.
What you are noticing in Bergoglio's emphasis on discernment is a potential reversal:
concrete person → concrete situation → discernment → pastoral judgment.
That does not necessarily deny objective truth. But it makes the concrete subject and his situation the immediate locus of moral deliberation, rather than the objective norm.
And this is precisely where Schall's critique becomes illuminating.
2. Schall's objection to rights language is structurally similar
Schall worries that modern rights discourse begins with:
“What do I have a right to?”
rather than:
“What is objectively good, and what do I owe?”
The result is that moral reasoning becomes organized around claims.
Bergoglio's approach can raise an analogous question—not because discernment is inherently subjective, but because of what happens when discernment is detached from sufficiently determinate objective norms.
Instead of:
“What is objectively true, and therefore what does this person ought to do?”
the practical question can become:
“Given this person's particular circumstances, what does discernment indicate that this person can or should do?”
That is a significant methodological shift.
3. The crucial issue is therefore not “law versus discernment”
This is where I think your earlier formulation is important.
Law and discernment are not opposites.
A traditional Catholic account can say:
The law tells me something objectively true about the good.
Prudence tells me how to act here and now.
Equity recognizes exceptional cases concerning human legislation.
Discernment helps me recognize the spiritual forces at work in my deliberation.But if discernment itself becomes the mechanism for determining what the norm means in each individual case, then something different is occurring.
The norm becomes increasingly dependent upon the case.
That is analogous to Schall's criticism of rights discourse: the subjective claim begins to displace the objective order as the principal point of reference.
4. This also illuminates the problem of “rigidity”
Suppose a seminarian is taught:
“There are objective moral truths, and certain kinds of acts can never be justified by circumstances or intentions.”
He then has a relatively definite intellectual framework within which to exercise prudence.
He can discern:
- Is this actually the kind of act the norm addresses?
- Are the relevant facts present?
- What circumstances affect culpability?
- What duties conflict?
- What does charity require?
- What does justice require?
But suppose instead he is primarily warned against “rigidity” and instructed to discern each situation.
The danger is that the seminarian may learn that the existence of a difficult concrete case casts suspicion upon the universality of the norm itself.
At that point, discernment no longer supplements law.
It begins to mediate the authority of law.
That is the point at which your comparison with Schall becomes particularly powerful.
5. And this explains your concern about doctrinal questions
There is an even deeper application.
If the intellectual habit is:
“Begin with the concrete situation and discern what is appropriate.”
then a demand for a categorical proposition—
“Is X true or false?”
—can itself appear somewhat alien to the method.
The question becomes less:
“What is the truth of X?”
and more:
“How does X function within this person's concrete situation?”
That can be perfectly legitimate after the truth of X has been established.
But if the second question replaces the first, the Church's teaching office begins to look less like an institution that defines reality and more like an institution that accompanies people through ambiguity.
And this gets very close to your earlier statement:
“We seek to live in the light that teaches us about what is.”
That is fundamentally an epistemological claim. Christianity does not merely give us a pastoral method for coping with uncertainty. It claims to reveal reality—God, man, creation, sin, grace, redemption, and the moral order.
6. Schall helps expose the danger of making the state—or the individual—the measure
There is an interesting parallel here.
Schall fears that modern rights discourse eventually produces this question:
Who decides what my rights are?
If rights are detached from an objective moral order, the answer tends toward the sovereign political authority.
Likewise, if moral norms are detached from objective truth and increasingly determined by individual discernment, the question eventually becomes:
Who determines what this concrete situation means?
And the answer can increasingly become the discerner—the individual, spiritual director, pastor, tribunal, bishop, or other authority interpreting the situation.
In both cases, the danger is the same at a structural level:
the objective order becomes less determinative, while the authority interpreting the individual case becomes more determinative.
That does not mean Bergoglio is consciously importing Hobbesian rights theory into Catholic moral theology. That would be an unjustified historical claim. The point is that Schall's analysis supplies a conceptual model for understanding the direction of the shift you are describing.
7. The deepest Schallian criticism
Schall's underlying concern is ultimately not with rights as such and, by analogy, not with discernment as such.
It is the displacement of being by assertion.
Classical philosophy asks:
What is?
From that follows:
What is good?
What is fitting?
What is just?
What is my duty?
What virtue should I acquire?
What should I do?Modern subjectivism tends to reverse the movement:
What do I want?
What do I claim?
What do I experience?
What does my situation demand?
What can legitimately be permitted?The Christian intellectual tradition insists that the first set of questions cannot simply be discarded.
And that gives a very precise formulation of your objection to the “legalism versus discernment” dichotomy:
The alternative to legalism is not indeterminacy. The alternative to legalism is reason informed by reality, law understood according to its proper end, equity, prudence, virtue, and genuine discernment.
Or, in the language you used earlier:
We do not seek darkness so that we can become better discerners of our situation. We seek the light precisely so that we can know what is, and therefore discern what ought to be done.
That is a much stronger critique than simply accusing Bergoglio of being “anti-law.” It asks the fundamental philosophical question: Is discernment an instrument for discovering and applying the objective good, or is it increasingly becoming the method by which the objective norm itself is determined in the concrete case?
That is where the Schall comparison becomes genuinely illuminating.
"What is even more surprising is that many think that he [Francis] has the power simply to change doctrine as if he were a voluntarist potentate free to change things as he wills." - Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
Yes. That adds an important theological-juridical dimension to the problem you have been developing.
The surprising assumption is that the pope's authority works something like legislative sovereignty: if the pope possesses supreme authority, then whatever he declares can simply become doctrine by an act of will. But that is not the classical Catholic conception of papal authority.
The distinction is between authority to teach and authority to manufacture truth.
A pope can:
- clarify doctrine;
- define a doctrine under the appropriate conditions;
- settle certain disciplinary questions;
- exercise his ordinary teaching authority;
- develop the Church's articulation of truths already received.
But none of that means that the pope possesses a kind of absolute legislative sovereignty over revelation.
The pope is not the author of the deposit of faith. He is its guardian and authentic interpreter.
This is particularly important in relation to the issue you have been discussing. If a pope says something ambiguous or introduces a new pastoral formulation, the question cannot simply be:
“What does the pope now want the doctrine to be?”
The prior question has to be:
“What authority does this particular statement possess, and how does it relate to what the Church has already taught?”
That is why Catholic theology distinguishes different levels of magisterial teaching rather than treating every papal utterance as a new dogmatic enactment.
The voluntarist model gets the nature of authority backwards
The picture you are criticizing resembles a political sovereign:
The pope wills X → therefore X becomes true Catholic doctrine.
But that would make the truth of doctrine depend upon will.
A more traditional account is:
Christ entrusted the deposit of faith to the Church → the Church receives and transmits it → the pope exercises an authoritative office within that received reality.
His authority is therefore ministerial, not creatively sovereign.
This connects very nicely with the Schall material you supplied.
Schall's criticism of modern sovereignty is that once authority becomes detached from an objective order, the person who possesses political power becomes the source of the order. The sovereign doesn't discover justice; his will establishes the law.
If one applied that model to the papacy, one would effectively turn the pope into a kind of theological sovereign:
What was true yesterday can become false tomorrow because the reigning pontiff has decided otherwise.
But that would be much closer to voluntarism than to Catholic theology.
And it creates a fascinating paradox
The person who thinks that the pope can simply change doctrine at will may actually be accepting a conception of authority that is less Catholic and more modern.
The modern sovereign says:
The law is whatever the sovereign legitimately promulgates.
The theological voluntarist says:
Doctrine is whatever the pope legitimately declares.
But the classical Catholic conception says something more constrained:
The pope has authority precisely within an order of truth that he did not create.
That is why Vatican I's teaching on papal primacy and infallibility has to be read together with its limitations. Pastor Aeternus does not say that the pope is infallible whenever he speaks, much less that he can create new revelation. Its definition concerns a very specific exercise of his teaching office concerning faith and morals, under specified conditions.
And Vatican II makes the point particularly clearly when it describes the pope and bishops as “servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” A steward possesses genuine authority, but precisely as a steward he does not own what has been entrusted to him.
This brings us back to your original concern
There is therefore an interesting three-way distinction:
Legalism:
The law is applied mechanically without prudence, equity, or attention to reality.
Subjectivism:
The concrete person's discernment determines what is morally true or permissible.
Voluntarism:
The authoritative person's will determines what is doctrinally true.
The classical Catholic position rejects all three.
It says:
Truth is prior to both the subject's preference and the ruler's will.
The pope himself stands under the truth he teaches.
And that makes your earlier emphasis on “what is” especially significant. The pope does not make Christ true by declaring Christ true. He does not make the Trinity true by defining the Trinity. He does not make an intrinsically evil act evil by prohibiting it. Rather, the Church's teaching authority bears witness authoritatively to a reality that precedes the exercise of that authority.
This also explains why a serious Catholic response to an apparently novel papal formulation cannot simply be either:
“The pope said it, therefore it is true.”
or:
“I dislike what the pope said, therefore it is false.”
The proper question is much more demanding:
What exactly has been said? With what degree of authority? Is it compatible with prior authoritative teaching? Is it a development, clarification, disciplinary determination, theological opinion, or something genuinely incompatible with what has previously been taught?
That is a very different intellectual posture from treating the papacy as an ecclesiastical sovereign legislature.
And ironically, if one really believes that the pope can simply change doctrine by will, one has made the pope into precisely the sort of voluntarist potentate that the older Catholic intellectual tradition was generally suspicious of.
- Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia and for the restoration of the Church.Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.
I ask all The Catholic Monitor readers to also pray for the end of this war. Watch "Trump Calls Putin To Get Iran War Offramp! w/ Scott Ritter" on YouTube: ...Read more Please Pray for Trump to end the Iran War: Watch "Trump Calls Putin To Get Iran War Offramp! w/ Scott Ritter" on YouTubeFranklin & Graham calls on Christians to pray for 'end to the bloodshed' ahead of Trump-Putin summit...7mo
Please Pray for Trump to end the Iran War: Watch "Trump Calls Putin To ...
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Conclave Notes:
-- Open letter urges Pope Leo XIV to correct ‘scandalous incoherence’ in Amoris Laetitia...[Wow! Even notorious Popesplainer Fr.] Harrison warns that Pope Francis taught a ‘dangerous self-contradiction’ on Communion for the divorced and ‘remarried,’ petitioning Pope Leo to correct the record. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/08/open-letter-urges-pope-leo-xiv-to.html]-- Dr. Seifert, regarded as one of the greatest living Catholic philosophers, founding Rector of the International Academy of Philosopher & friend of John Paul II, to Cardinals: INVESTIGATE FRANCIS' HERESIES, VALIDITY BEFORE THE CONCLAVE.."If Francis is found guilty of heresy or apostasy, then: - His cardinal appointments would be invalid" [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/dr-seifert-philosopher-personal-friend.html]-- Are the Cardinals who will participate in the upcoming conclave authentically appointed & morally justified in voting, or will the shadow of Francis's possible illegitimacy cast itself over the next papacy? [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/are-cardinals-who-will-participate-in.html]
-- 5 Dubia Questions for 1P5's Steve Skojec & All faithful Catholics especially Francis is definitely Pope Cardinals, Bishops & pundits [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/06/5-dubia-questions-for-steve-skojec.html]
Francis Notes:
l– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:
“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html
– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html
– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html
– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:
The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”
– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:
“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”
– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:
“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.Election Notes:
– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]
– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html
– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1
– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the [J6] DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”:
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1]Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.
Pray an Our Father now for America.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
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