From Dante’s Inferno to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly: Papal Magisterium in Support of Satire and Invective Against Popes

Traditionalists who author pieces aligned with Rorate today shrink from this language, but like all classically educated men of learning, they celebrate Dante’s every line. Traditionalists see this rhetoric as a bridge too far! Yet, did pre- or post-Vatican II popes see it as an eyesore to be covered up? Minime. Pope Boniface had recently passed at the date of composition, only to be destined by the poet to Hell, in the realm of simony.

Let’s turn to Pope Clement V, the “lawless shepherd” (Inferno XIX.82-87):

For after him shall come one of the fouler deeds, from westward, a shepherd without law, such that he must cover both him and me. A new Jason he shall be, of whom we read in Maccabees, and as his king was indulgent to him, so shall the ruler of France be to this one.

Clement is compared to the wicked high priest Jason befouling the priesthood and Temple and is portrayed as a mere creature of the contemporary political power, groveling to what may be interpreted as the forerunner of the secular state.

Next, we turn to Inferno XIX.90-96, where Dante once again rails against simoniac popes. There, Dante rhetorically asks the Pontiff how much treasure Peter gave to Jesus to purchase his keys?

This culminates in Inferno XIX.97-103 in what would appear to papalists nowadays to be an impossible case: Dante continues his condemnation of Pope Boniface, while professing his utter reverence for the Keys of Peter:

So, stay [to Pope Nicholas] where you are [in Hell], for you are rightly punished; and guard well the ill-gotten money that made you bold against [King] Charles. And were it not that I am still restrained by reverence for the Supreme Keys, which you held in the happy life, I would use words still more severe.

While the traditionalist coterie of Rorate would shrink from writing such things so bald-facedly about recent popes Francis and Leo, Dante recognized the boundaries of proper reverence extended farther than our ultramontane sentiments. Today’s papalists on matters of invective seem analogous to the vestiges of Victorian fashion and taste so popularly lamented.

The affinity between said traditionalists and Dante is most obvious, however, at Inferno XIX.112-114: “You have made yourselves a god of gold and silver; and what difference is there between you and idolaters, except that they worship one and you a hundred?” As the Pachamama papacies proliferate their ecological agenda, we might simply reverse the order: “You have made for yourselves, O Francis and Leo, a god out of [pagan] culture, and what difference is there between you and idolaters, except that they [idolaters] worship their god but you worship yours and theirs together.”

Following the anomalous excommunication of the SSPX, we might apply to the present situation Dante’s prophetic description of Boniface VIII from Inferno XXVII.85-88:

The prince of the new Pharisees having war near the Lateran, and not against Saracens or Jews, for every one of his enemies was Christian.

And why did this medieval pope erringly turn his wrath on fellow Catholics instead of true enemies of the Christian religion? The Supreme Poet gives a diagnosis in Inferno XXVII.91-92:

Neither the highest office nor holy orders did he regard in himself…

Thus, the Fugitive Ghibelline.

Dante’s modern opposites are the papalists-at-all-costs. Fashionable papalists, forbidding the use of reason and revelation together, ought not to be classed among Aquinas’s more noble opponents, the double-truthists of the Parisian Faculty of Arts: Reason—said they—can conclude one thing with scientific certitude but revelation the contrary. Our contemporary papalists hunger only for positive legislation, unacquainted with either natural law or “rational worship” (Romans 12:1). What, instead, does the living magisterium pre- and post-Conciliar judge, irreconcilable with this newfangled incoherence of would-be philosophy?

In answer, enter Pope Benedict XV (In Praeclara Summorum), who directly confronts them, while celebrating the Father of the Italian Language. Ultramontanes in his own day, just as ours, would have found it shocking, were they to understand magisterial teaching better than positive law:

Yet, it will be said: ‘He inveighs with terrible bitterness against the Supreme Pontiffs of his times!’ True! It cannot be denied at that time there were matters on which the clergy might be reproved…

Pope Benedict XV then confronts anti-papal invective, the classical rhetorical form of vituperation (vituperatio):

But, however he might inveigh, rightly or wrongly, against ecclesiastical personages, never did he fail in respect due to the Church and reverence for the “Supreme Keys.”[1]

Io! There it is, in an age of ultramontanism and in spite of anti-Catholic secular European surroundings: The pope refused to adjudicate each case of invective against contemporaneous popes. Why? The Catholic loved the Keys of Peter and wanted them exercised less like Simon and more like Peter. Once the so-called moderates and conservatives integrate the diachronic history of the Church and really give themselves to a hermeneutic of continuity, then an annoying fact manifests itself: the divine gadfly of traditionalism is of great service to the Church, because of its love for the Keys of Peter, not for the acts and character of Boniface VIII.

Lest the papalist remind us that the game has changed since the non-revolutionary Vatican II has made virtue into vice unlike the impolite past, Pope Paul VI taught in Altissimi Cantus (07 December 1965):

Dante is ours! Ours, that is, of the Catholic faith ... ours because he greatly loved the Church ... and ours because he acknowledged and venerated in the Roman Pontiff the Vicar of Christ.

Just to make sure the papalists can’t find so-called distinctions without a difference, by which they exclude laymen (to say nothing of clergy) from lambasting papal actions, the pope (putatively canonized for the sake of Vatican II) spoke more candidly:

Nor do we shrink from recalling that Dante’s voice rose scathing and severe against more than one Roman Pontiff, and that he had harsh rebukes for ecclesiastical institutions and for persons who were ministers and representatives of the Church…. Such fierce attitudes never shook his firm Catholic faith or his filial affection for the Holy Church.

It is too obvious to gloss the reason why the pope does not commend his affection for the three popes, because Dante showed none, depicting them as eternally in Hell, as they were devastating the Lord’s field and sowing tares among the wheat.

Why did Pope Paul VI officially teach that Dante was not schismatic or undermining the papacy? Because he did what he did out of his (Thomistic) understanding of theology and the theological conclusions derived from truths about the Keys of Peter, namely, an axiom whereby St. Peter uttered out of divine revelation the identity of Jesus Christ.

Finally, the sublime irony of Pope Francis completes the magisterial case for severe correction of popes, where the very same liberal darling penned:

Nor does this obligation exempt the Church from accepting also the prophetic criticisms uttered by the poet with regard to those charged with proclaiming the Gospel and representing, not themselves, but Christ.[2]

As we can see, the magisterium designates an unsainted layman to be a prophetic critic of popes of his own time. Should not learned or virtuous traditionalist laymen, and better still those who are both, be appreciated for the same service to Pope Leo XIV today

I fear lest the present pontiff and his entourage might respond thus: “There is one man, Micaiah son of Imlah, through whom we can inquire of the Lord; but I hate him, because he does not prophesy good for me, but evil” (1 Kings 22:8). Yet that is the vocation of Dante, and—according to Francis—an uncanonized layman can be prophetic. “Let him who has ears, hear what the Spirit saith to the churches” (Revelation 3:22), particularly to papalists of Laodicea.

But what of priests? Can the learned, or virtuous, or learned and virtuous priests be of service of the Vatican? Let us highlight the irregular and canonically handicapped Augustinian priest Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Crowning Glory of the Christian Humanists wrote (AD 1511) much against contemporary popes, but his most famous is the marvelous work dedicated to St. Thomas More, In Praise of Folly, which passage I must truncate for want of space:

Now as for the Supreme Pontiffs, who act in the place of Christ: if they were to attempt to imitate his life, namely his poverty, labors, teaching, cross, and contempt for life; if they were even to reflect upon the name “Pope,” that is, “Father,” or upon the title “Most Holy,” what creature on earth would be more afflicted? Or who would purchase that office at the cost of all his possessions [...]?
How many [worldly] advantages would Wisdom take away from them [i.e. popes], if once she gained entrance! Wisdom, did I say? Nay, even a single grain of that salt of which Christ speaks!
So much wealth, so many honors [...] so many dispensations, so many revenues, so many indulgences [...] You see what a marketplace, what a harvest, what an ocean of good things [...] in these few words. In place of all these things Wisdom would introduce vigils, fasts, tears, prayers, sermons, studies, sighs, and a thousand miserable labors of this sort. Nor should we overlook what would then happen: all those writers [today’s ghostwriters and consultors], copyists, notaries, advocates, promoters, secretaries, [...] bankers, pimps (lenones) [sic!]. I nearly added something rather more delicate, but I fear it might be too harsh for your ears.
All this enormous multitude, I say, which burdens, pardon me, I meant to say honors, the Roman See, would be driven to starvation.
But as things now stand, whatever labor there is, they leave to Peter and Paul, who have plenty of leisure for it. But whatever splendor and pleasure there is, that they take for themselves.
And thus, through my [i.e. Folly’s] assistance, scarcely any class of men lives more pleasantly or with less anxiety, since they believe they have abundantly satisfied Christ if they play the bishops with mystical and almost theatrical ornamentation [...] titles [...] and with blessings and curses.
To work miracles is primitive, antiquated, and hardly suited to our times. To teach the people is troublesome. To interpret Sacred Scripture smacks of Schoolmen. To pray is idle. To shed tears is miserable and womanish. [...]
What remains are weapons and those sweet blessings of which Paul speaks, and these indeed they employ with considerable generosity: interdicts, suspensions, denunciations, aggravated denunciations, anathemas, terrifying pictures, and that dreadful thunderbolt by which, with a mere nod, they cast the souls of mortals down beneath Tartarus itself.
Yet these thunderbolts the most holy Fathers in Christ and Christ’s vicars hurl against no one more fiercely than against those who, at the devil’s instigation, attempt to diminish or nibble away at the patrimony [viz., rents] of Peter.
For although Peter says in the Gospel, “We have left everything and followed you,” they call his patrimony lands, cities, taxes, tolls, dominions.
While they fight for these things, inflamed with Christian zeal [...] they believe that in this way they are apostolically defending Christ’s spouse, the Church [...] As though the Church had any enemies more destructive than impious pontiffs, who allow Christ to disappear in silence, bind him with laws made for profit, adulterate him with forced interpretations, and murder him by their pestilential manner of life. (In Praise of Folly §59; ellipsis mine)

After the virtual condemnation of Pope Julius II by a canonically irregular regular, his successor Pope Leo X wrote thus of Erasmus to Henry VIII in a papal brief: “Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom we reckon among the foremost men of this kind of learning and erudition…”[3] Why? Erasmus’s exceptional reputation for erudition, along with conspicuous virtues, meant that Pope Leo was disposed to praise with paeans, not eschew with excommunication, the irregular cleric who had published the notorious In Praise of Folly. Later, Pope Paul III, in a 31 May 1535 papal brief, lauded Erasmus: “whose famous name we have always loved and whose learning we have always highly esteemed.” Both pontiffs did not judge satire of papal dereliction of duty, even when public and biting, to smack of either schism or disobedience in the least.

Yet, perhaps inspired by the New Ethic from today’s Vatican, someone will quote me the adage: alia tempora, alii mores. Ignoring the locus theologicus of history and even more so Roman magisterium, he refers to the past as passé only thereby making precisely the traditionalist’s point: “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful” (Pope Benedict XVI, 7 July 2007, Letter to the Bishops accompanying Summorum Pontificum).

In short, satire and vituperation of whatever is not Catholic, even when directed against popes and their acolytes, are not merely historically but magisterially appreciated in the annals of the Holy See and are not, by themselves, a breach of charity or grounds for the accusation of schism.

[1] Benedict XV, Encyclical In praeclara summorum (30 April 1921), Acta Apostolicae Sedis 13 (1921): 209–217, especially §6.

[3] Leo X, Leo X to Henry VIII (10 July 1515): Epistle 339, in Collected Works of Erasmus..., 3:142–43

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From Dante’s Inferno to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly: Papal Magisterium in Support of Satire and Invective Against Popes

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