The Church’s Zero Day

Cyber espionage, as much as cyber imbecility, has been in the news frequently in recent years. Most recently was the revelation that the Vatican was hacked by the Chinese Government, which is yet another reason to argue that the whole neo-Ostpolitik of the Vatican is foolish in the extreme. The Vatican primarily has one great weapon to use, which St. Pope John Paul II utilized with such power: its moral authority. When the Holy See postures as if it were a nation-state actor completely on par with others, the outcome is usually disastrous, unless the outcome is in the interest of other nation-states, such as the restoration of the Papal States at the Congress of Vienna, or the various concordats.

The concept of a “Zero Day” is a term borrowed from the world of computing and hacking, wherein a vulnerability in a program is usually discovered by a person who is not the creator of the program. There are several of these that have been discovered (and patched) for the Windows OS in recent years, just to give one example. Various actors, both for good and evil, make it their business to discover and utilize Zero Days. For instance, it is generally well known that the American NSA regularly hordes Zero Days for their domestic and international espionage. Another famous example was the so-called “Shadow Brokers”, who are suspected to be linked to the Russian government, and released massive amounts of data, along with exploits used by the NSA, on Twitter and other places. The NSA, ostensibly due to national security, told no one about the Zero Days they know, precisely for the same reason why “black hat”, or mostly criminal hackers, do not disclose their own: when your target is known to have a vulnerability, why reveal it to your victim?

The concept of a “zero day” arose in my mind recently when having a discussion with a fellow Priest with whom I have kept a correspondence. Among other things, we talked about the current Papacy and the seeming meltdown in ecclesiastical structure since 2013. My correspondent pointed to recent Vigano’s assertion that the problems we are experiencing are because of inherent problems with the Second Vatican Council. I disagreed. I believe they are due to inherent problems with the First Vatican Council, which the Second Vatican Council only seemed to magnify. Let me explain.

The proclamation of the First Vatican Council of the Dogma of Papal Infallibility is well known to have caused consternation in not a few extremely educated, committed minds at the time: St. John Henry Cardinal Newman foremost among them. Even though the scope of Papal Infallibility was strictly and narrowly defined, there was at the same time, shall we say, a “Spirit of Vatican I”; that is to say, an attendant hermeneutical ‘school’ which assigned to the Pope prerogatives and authority which would have made even Gregory VII blush with envy. Coupled with the natural sympathy the Church had with the Holy Father for the loss of his temporal possessions, and Pius IX’s adamant refusal to accept the loss of the same, the Papacy became a living martyr both to modern liberalism and to the nation-state. Even though the Holy See may have lost its temporal possessions for the most part, it gained a degree of freedom of action which most commentators view as a move of providence. Although I also agree with traditionalist commentators and historians that the temporal freedom of the Holy See is extremely important, so that it can be free from subordination to the state and its coercion, I view the historical loss of most of the Papal States as a corrective.

Returning the theology surrounding the Papacy after Vatican I, the aforementioned approach to the Papacy and the Church, which may perhaps be termed ‘maximalist’ in favor of the Pope and his authority, has come to be known as ultramontanism. Ultramontanism, in my opinion, is the ‘Spirit of Vatican I’. Vatican I closed abruptly due to the Franco-Prussian War, and other matters regarding ecclesiology were not discussed. Vatican I technically was still “active” until St. Pope John XXIII closed it just before Vatican II.

As can be seen from a study of the praenotanda of the Second Vatican Council, there were several matters on the minds of the world’s bishops in the years and decades before it was convened. Many wanted a revision of the Lectionary. Many wanted some sort of renewal of the Roman Liturgy in general. What can also be readily identified, time and time again, is the desire of the world’s bishops to settle the question of what their relationship was to the Papal Office, especially in terms of its Magisterium. The fruits of this discussion, as enshrined in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, are quite interesting. The world’s bishops saw themselves as forming a college with the Pope as head, and this understanding is rightly viewed, from a perspective of the magisterium, as binding teaching.

What this ended up doing, perhaps intentionally, was giving the world’s Bishops a piece of the pie in the discussion of the authority of the Pope over the universal Church. Some commentators have remarked that it will take Vatican III to get a clearer understanding of what the specific dignity of the Priesthood has to contribute in that respect, but I digress. In 1965 when the Council closed, ultramontanism was still alive. The Church’s role as a voice for peace in a Europe ravished by war, as well as the powerful influence that a Pope “in the road” created after Paul VI, further increased her moral prestige. This was shot into hyperbolic dimensions during the long papacy of John Paul II, whose legacy of governance may not have been completely even, but his commitment to the faith and to the freedom of the Church was rock solid. When the Soviet Union fell under the weight of its own infamy, John Paul II, and the Church, stood as the moral leaders of the Western World. John Paul II was also a voluminous writer and speaker, which further added to the visibility and primacy of the Papacy in the mind of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Even with the proliferation of multimillion dollar National Bishops’ Conferences, with their interminable declarations, documents and pro forma bureaucracy, their presence to the average Catholic has remained practically irrelevant.

Let me return to the concept of Zero Days in regard to the Church and her dogmas. Although all binding dogmatic formulations of the Church’s Magisterium are infallible, because they enjoy that charism from the Holy Spirit, that does not mean that any dogmatic declaration has finished everything there is to say about a subject. A part of that is because the subject of theology, God, is by nature unable to be totally understood by means of the human intellect and human language. Yet, in order to safeguard the Deposit of Faith and to establish the limits of orthodoxy, the Church has employed certain formulas from her earliest days. These formulas, made as they are in human languages by human intellects, have often been as much the cause of peace and unity as division and misunderstanding. One need only think about the debates between the Greek and Latin speaking Churches on even matters as fundamental as the Trinity, let alone in regard to the debates with the Coptic, Assyrian and other Churches. I think it may be helpful, as an analogy, to understand the Church’s dogmas as a sort of “code” for an operating system. It is upon such “code”, made of human language (albeit given the charism of infallibility) that the “software” of the Church is able to run: her ceremonies, her laws, her sense of self. But even a cursory study of Church History shows us that as soon as one dogmatic question is resolved, several more seem to open, many of which may very well be unsolvable; the debates between the Molinists and the Dominicans on Predestination come to mind. Controversy surrounding Ecclesiology is even more ‘sticky’, not because the Church is in her essence infinite like God, but because she is joined to the mystery of God: trans-temporal, trans-spatial, unified in charity by the Holy Spirit but diverse in the proliferation of his gifts, all the while having the differences inherent in humanity. Vatican I and II tried to tackle some key issues of authority which have been a part of the Church since the Apostolic Era; and just as ink and blood were spilled over the meaning of ‘ομοουσιος and the Filioque, sometimes more refinement in our dogmatic vocabulary brings us more profound understanding, but it does not always serve to resolve all questions.

The “Zero Day” vulnerability in institutional Catholicism, introduced in Vatican I, was not removed or mitigated by Vatican II. Although Dei Verbum and other documents restated the truth that the Pope and the Bishops (along with, I would argue, all Priests) are the guardians and servants of the Deposit of Faith, and even though extraordinary statements which are considered covered by Papal Infallibility are extremely rare, I argue that the underlying tendency to appeal to the Pope, rather than to the rest of the Tradition and other binding dogmatic commitments, exposed a very vulnerable underbelly in the Church, which is one that her enemies, internal and external, have tried to exploit. It is not that the Second Vatican Council, especially in its Dogmatic Constitutions, said things that are wrong, but rather, they said things which are incomplete, and much like the first seven Ecumenical Councils, every formulation designed to silence a controversy almost always ended by setting the stage for the next challenge. Perhaps heresy is as ‘necessary’, materially speaking, for the growth of orthodoxy as hacking is for growth in cybersecurity. John Henry Newman famously said that no dogma is defined until it needs to be defended. And so it is.

I do not want to accuse Pope Francis of mens rea in this regard, but I think he has both exploited and is vexed by the importance of this vulnerability. Any observer of Catholic media or commentary knows that much of 2013-2014 was focused on trying to understand what the Roman Pontiff ‘actually meant’ by his statements. The chaos and horrifying statements made by some of the world’s bishops at Synods, along with the Pope’s own words, have struck a serious blow to the combined integrity of the Pope and the Bishops’ roles as guardians of the Deposit of Faith. I do think that the Holy Father’s push toward decentralization does have a basis in some good instincts, however: the Papal Office has always been one which both teaches and “referees” the theological dialogue within the Church. But it is not the only locus of teaching or of authority. At the same time, I feel it is a mistake to turn to Synodality as the solution to this problem. It is my opinion that the current age requires more ‘localism’ in the sense that individual Bishops hold themselves up to a standard not seen since the Patristic Era. We often speak today of the need for holy Priests. Even more important, to borrow from St. Teresa of Avila, are learned ones; men who are not just possessed of moral excellence, but also men who exercise their kingly and prophetic charisms with zeal. Synodality, as it is currently practiced and understood, I think, is just another level of bureaucracy, which tends to conceal corporate mediocrity.

The internal and external enemies of the Church have been extremely adroit in their exploitation of the vulnerabilities in the “code” of her Ecclesiology. In the realm of computing, vulnerabilities require a timely ‘patch’ in order to resolve them. We probably won’t get such a ‘patch’ until the next Council. However, in the realm of computing, we also have ‘security hygiene’. In that field, that means good passwords, good firewalls, and good ‘social engineering’ resistance tactics. To translate this into the arena of the Church, that means adherence to the whole Tradition of the Church (passwords), improved vetting of candidates to the Priesthood and, most importantly, the Episcopacy (firewalls), and resistance to social engineering, which in 2020, means identifying threats, and organizing Priests and people together in order to resist the sort of Alinskyite polarizing tactics which are designed to capitalize on human weaknesses.

The Papacy and the Second Vatican Council, like most Councils, have particular vulnerabilities due to how they are expressed. Benedict XVI famously said that the solution was a “hermeneutic of continuity”, which to me seems as uncontroversial as saying we should understand something like 1 Constantinople without forgetting what was proclaimed in 1 Nicaea. Some commentators believe that approach, and his reform, is now dead. I wholeheartedly disagree. Some want to ‘reboot’ the Church to an older theological operating system, so to speak, in order to tackle the current problems we face. I see an analogous approach historically in the resistance to Aristotelianism and Thomism in the High Middle Ages. Today, we can acknowledge that modernism may be a heresy, while modernity is not. We need more theologians and Churchmen, especially now in the twilight years of the Council Fathers, who can do the scholarship necessary to counteract this post-modern counterfeit resourcement, which I would define as a “returning to sources” in the sense of “retreating to sources”. While the proponents of the resourcement in the 20th century advocated drawing from the wisdom of the Patristic Fathers and the Scripture as a method to understand the Mysteries of the Faith, we must resist a facile resourcement which does not seek to utilize ancient insights to defeat the “synthesis of all heresies”, or Modernism, but rather seeks to retreat from this challenge as if it never was a legitimate challenge. Just as all temptations test and hopefully grow the moral health of the individual person, so too heresies test the Church, and help her to grow.

I understand this essay may cause consternation and disagreement among my readers of the more ‘traditionalist’ mindset. They will point to the legitimate problems in the postmodern world, especially the proliferation of apostasy and heresy within Church. Yet almost every dogmatic development is preceded by one or several great rebellions against it. Arians, Nestorians, Monophysites and Iconoclasts all seemed to have the ascendency in their day, and exploited the weaknesses in the dogmatic and governance structure of the Church of their time. They occupied important secular and ecclesiastical posts. They were wealthy and highly motivated. They persecuted their adversaries with extreme prejudice. Today, the theological ‘virus’ is a false ecclesiology which, coupled with other fallacious philosophical principles of Modernism, make for a formidable challenge. By God’s providential grace, he has raised up men and women, like John Paul II and Benedict XVI, not to mention others who do did not hold the Papal Office, to authentically interpret the Vatican Councils. Now is not the time to retreat, but to advance. Only our adversaries stand to gain when the forces of orthodoxy are divided among themselves.