The Mormonic Papacy

Donald P. Goodman III

Note: This article is not intended as an anti-Mormon polemic. Especially given the timing, it is also not meant as a “piling on” given the shooting of the LDS church in Michigan, for the victims of which your author continues to pray, as should we all.

In 1852, Brigham Young, the leader of the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” (the Mormons), decreed that blacks—that is, those of African ancestry—could not become priests in the Mormon church. Despite (very) occasional exceptions, this rule was very scrupulously followed, to the point that missionaries were instructed to investigate the lineage of prospective converts to ensure that they had no black ancestry. Given that priesthood in the Mormon church is received by nearly all males in at least some degree, and is a significant point in any young Mormon boy's life, this was a very dramatic prohibition.

Then, however, the civil rights movement arose in the United States, the home of Mormonism, and resulted in a great deal of protest of this doctrine. On June 9, 1978, the then-prophet of the Mormon church, Spencer W. Kimball, announced that the church had received a new revelation: now blacks were allowed to be priests.

So the Mormon church went from “blacks can't be priests” to “blacks can be priestsᷝ”, because their prophet allegedly received a revelation from God that the previous prohibition on black priesthood was in error.

No one, I think, will argue that excluding a race from the priesthood was a good thing; the fact that the Mormon church has corrected this manifestly unjust prohibition is not our point here. The point is that that is how the Mormon church works. The Mormons simply do not believe that there is a body of revelation, made known to man by Jesus Christ, that we must hold to, whole and entire; rather, they believe that there is, in fact, some revelation given to Christ, but also to their first prophet, Joseph Smith, and to the next, Brigham Young, and to many others, including Mr. Kimball. They believe that these prophets do receive revelations from God, and that new revelations may very well contradict old ones.

Catholics, though, do not believe this. We believe that Jesus Christ is God Himself, God the Son, and that He made a revelation of His truth, which concluded with the death of the last apostle, John. That revelation forms the Deposit of Faith; it is our job, as Catholics, to hold true to that Deposit of Faith, whole and entire, neither adding to it nor taking away from it. There are not and will be no further revelations; He has made known to us all truth. (See, e.g., John 14:26, 16:13)

The Pope, in Catholic theology, has a very important role in protecting the Deposit of Faith, and in making sure that it is taught and handed down without any change. However, he does not receive new revelation; he does not teach new doctrine. As Vatican I noted:

For the Holy Spirit 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.

The Pope is not a prophet. The Pope does not have the Holy Spirit whispering in his ear, telling him what to do and what not to do. He protects what he was given, and he passes what he was given on to others; he does not receive new things from above.

Does the Holy Spirit inspire him? Certainly—but that inspiration requires him to actually follow it, and it does not guarantee impeccability (the absence of sin) nor the absence of mistake. It guarantees that he cannot teach error, when he is speaking in a very particular way; he is perfectly able, as a human being, to screw things up, even very drastically.

This distinction has, unfortunately, been often lost in our modern world. Catholics all too often over-elevate the papacy into some kind of divine oracle, a Mormon-like prophet, who receives dictates from the Holy Spirit and spreads them among the faithful. This is not the Catholic vision of the papacy, and it's important for us to remember it. Ours is an apostolic faith; it comes to us from the apostles. The Pope and the bishops in union with him pass down that apostolic faith to us; they do not add to it, and they do not take anything away from it. Should they try to do so, the Scriptures tell us exactly what we should do:

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. As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema. (Gal 1:8–9)

It's hard to overstate the importance of this. If even an angel from heaven contradicts the faith of the apostles, we are to reject him. How much more, if a bishop or a pope?

This misunderstanding giving rise to a Mormonic papacy, however, has been incredibly active in the last century or two, and especially since the rise of John Paul II. But rather than tax the reader's patience, let's consider one particular alleged oracular revelation of Pope Francis: that capital punishment is always and everywhere immoral. Though casting this as a “development of doctrine”, Pope Francis attempted to change Catholic teaching in the following way:

This is not a development of doctrine, in which the later statement is facially a bit different from the earlier but also consistent with it. The two statements above are logical contradictories; the later one actually contradicts the earlier. This is not a development; this is a change. And yet many trumpeted this “development” as absolutely requiring the belief of Catholics: that Pope Francis had used his office to “develop” a doctrine into the logical contradictory of itself, and that refusing to accept this is disobedience and heresy.

Here, we don't have a protective papacy, guarding and transmitting a Deposit of Faith left to it by Jesus Christ long ago. We have an oracle, a Mormonic papacy that receives new revelations and triuphantly declares them to the people.

Given this, the recent interview of Pope Leo XIV is deeply troubling. Leo was asked about changing the Church's teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts. Given his Catholic faith, this should have been an easy answer: “No; I cannot change the Church's teaching, I have no authority to do so. My job is to pass on what I have received.” Instead, however, we had a different response:

[W]e have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the Church says about any given question.

Similarly, when asked about ordaining women, Leo said the following:

For the moment, I have no intention of changing the Church's teaching on this issue.

From the Catholic perspective—one that we would think would be foremost on the mind of the Pope himself—these responses are absolutely terrifying. Attitudes must change before doctrine? He has no intention of changing teaching “[f]or the moment”?

Again, these are easy questions to answer. “I cannot change doctrine; these doctrines are Christ's. I am merely the pope.” But evidently the Mormonic papacy runs deep in the modern Church. Pope Leo won't change Church doctrine, not because “attitudes” haven't changed enough, nor because he doesn't really want to; he won't change Church doctrine because he can't; he lacks the authority. He is not a prophet sitting over the volcanic vents at Delphi, nor a Mormon president lounging in his office in Salt Lake City; he is the guardian of the Deposit of Faith which was left for him by the apostles.

We are not Mormons; but unfortunately, many of us believe we have a Mormonic papacy. As Catholics, we must always stay true to the apostolic faith; and if anyone, even an angel from heaven or a pope from Rome, tries to teach us otherwise, let him be anathema.

Praise be to Christ the King!