Pope Francis, the dubia, and doctrine

Don't be so sure. Pope Francis's opponents have been working real hard to question and undermine papal authority, so that if a new pope should try to reverse his reforms, he will find it almost impossible to reassert papal authority. Sorry, but Pope Francis's detractors have really shot themselves in the foot with their "dubia". The genie they set loose is bigger than any Pope, and he's here to stay.

It's like a ratchet: it only moves in one direction. And it's also like dominos: once one falls, they all fall. Burke and Company shouldn't have bumped the table and made that first domino topple.

As for the "clarity" conservatives desire, Pope Francis has already given them a perfectly clear answer. It's just not the one they wanted. "Lack of clarity" is just conservative talk for "Boo, hoo, hoo".

Most predictions about the future turn out to be ridiculously wrong. E.g. some fashionable 1920s intellectuals were certain that in 100 years the whole world will be communist.

Also, I am not a traditionalist like you think. I think there is wisdom on both liberal and conservative sides.

Nor am I the stereotypical progressive you might think I am. I'm very well read in Church and medieval history, and treasure all the glorious things the Church has given us just as much as I deplore the abominable things.

As far as wisdom on both sides, I agree. But this morbid obsession with the intimate details of other people's love lives is tasteless, downright creepy, and supremely foolish. And it's killing not only the Catholic Church, but all of Christianity. I'm glad Pope Francis is disgusted as well and is pulling us out of that sordid business. It's like a cancerous tumor. If we don't cut it out, the Church is done for.

Questions of future Popes reversing this or that actually bring out what I see as a very healthy phenomenon in Catholic discourse in the Church today, largely driven by engaged laity.  

That phenomenon is to look at the Faith itself, rather than looking to this Pope or that one as some kind of arbiter of truth, as though he were like, let's say, the "Seer, Prophet, and Revelator" of the Latter-day Saints sect.  The truth never changes, and the Pope is merely the custodian of it.  True can never become false, good can never become bad, right can never become wrong (and vice versa).

The promulgation of Humanae vitae in 1968 seems to have been the watershed.  Paul VI clearly explained, in a way that had not been nearly as fully elucidated up to that point, why contraception is both intrinsically evil and gravely sinful.  True, he had a commission that was imploring him to decide otherwise, but they were wrong and he was right.  He created nothing new, but merely took the issue apart, dissected it, and gave us what we have today.  His logic was unassailable.  Yet this was not what the world wanted to hear --- in the West, the collective response was more like "oh, hell no!".  And it was not merely a matter of discipline, pastoral practice, or judgment upon what was appropriate for the Church of our time (such as was the decision to revise the Roman Missal, for instance), it concerned a fine point of moral theology, presented with the laser-sharp precision that was needed.  I read recently where some churchmen asked him simply to reiterate the traditional teaching without explanation or analysis, but he did not do that, no, he took his time, and in the end, said in effect, "the deliberate and willful separation of the unitive and procreative ends is intrinsically disordered and contrary to natural law, and here's why".  We do not accept this on the Pope's authority, but rather by the reasons given, and good, solid reasons they were.  

For the first time in Church history of which I am aware, you had a stark cleavage between a moral teaching of the Church and the people's assent to it.  The response of some was to assert papal authority, and to say "if the Pope says it, it's true", which gave rise to organizations such as Catholics United for the Faith (CUF), which was founded in the wake of HV and largely in response to it.  But then the question is whether something is true because the Pope says it is true, or because it is true.  The Pope does not create truth, indeed, he cannot.

Fast-forward to the 21st century.  We have a Pope who some have charged with being a heretic.  Let's suppose he is.  Let's suppose that he has taught something that is, in fact, false. Then we are not bound to say "truth has changed because the Pope says so".  No, the truth remains what it always was.  He may have lost the papal office by becoming a heretic.  Opinions vary on how, when, and if that can take place.  But the faithful have nothing to fear --- simply adhere to the truth.  Now, to be fair, in actual practice, Catholics have not always been very good at seeing truth apart from what someone in authority tells them.  When they are challenged, they often cannot really give reasons why the truth is, indeed, true, they just respond with something such as "I don't know, but that is what I was always taught".  They've lost the argument right then and there.  And, God forbid, if someone whom they've always trusted to teach them the truth does, indeed, teach them error, then they're toast.  They have nothing to appeal to, except the authority of that person who taught them.  

Today, you have a growing number of engaged, well-informed, motivated laity who have studied the Faith, studied what the Church has always believed, and who are able to see through error, and to question it, not just based upon appeals to authority, but upon the truth itself.  You have this one, or that one, who speaks up and says "hey, this isn't right", and they are shouted down by some and seen as "having gone over to the dark side", as it were, having challenged the authority of this teacher or that one.  But others can see clearly and say "hey, you're right, this isn't right".  And that's where we are right now.

Galatians 1:8 --- But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.

We might be looking at traditionalism driven by modernism, i.e., the latter as part of being more informed (the laity having greater access to Scriptures and Church documents) but the former characterized by the opposite (for centuries, the laity was not allowed to read Scriptures unsupervised, and information wasn't widely disseminated quickly, if at all).

In addition comes beliefs related to liberal democracy (e.g., approval by the majority) vs. the Papacy as a monarchy, and so on.

Just as a thought experiment, if through some miracle, issues involving liberty of sexuality, marriage, or gender identity ceased to exist tomorrow --- if everyone were to wake up tomorrow and no longer have any difficulty in following the Church's traditional teachings on these matters --- how strong would the quest for revolutionary change in the Church be anymore?

There are very few people who get up in the morning and face a day in which they have a strong urge to kill someone, steal things, tell lies other than the "white lies" that are a lifestyle accessory of so many, do meth or cocaine, kick homeless people in the shins and take their few belongings, desecrate the Blessed Sacrament, stampede cattle through the Vatican (sorry, couldn't resist that homage to Blazing Saddles), and so on.  But conforming one's life to the Church's traditional teachings on sexuality and issues associated with it, that's another story entirely.