Stop Waiting for Pius XIII: How Papal Change Actually Happens

Pope Martin V

It is honestly delusory to imagine that some future pope is simply going to openly repudiate the errors of the post-Conciliar age. There is not going to be some future pope who anathematizes Francis and his policies. There will never be any subsequent ecumenical council that nullifies Vatican II. There's not going to be some spectacle where Lefebvre is rehabilitated and proclaimed the savior of the Church. There will never be anything like a new Syllabus of Errors excoriating the policies of the modern Vatican. None of this is ever going to happen and we are completely detached from reality if we expect otherwise.

I think about this a lot when I see Trads getting furious that Pope Leo has not repudiated the errors of Francis or that he has not fundamentally course corrected on many issues, despite the more conciliatory tone of his papacy compared to his predecessor. I, too, am frustrated by these things—but at the same time, I think it's foolish and unrealistic to expect anything drastic. It is certainly unrealistic to expect anything like this from Leo, but in a larger sense, it's unrealistic to expect such a bold course correction from any pope.

With very few exceptions from history, popes do not openly repudiate or condemn their predecessors. There are a few notable exceptions from the Monothelite Controversy (e.g. Honorius) and the time of the Cadaver Synod, but these examples came from very difficult times of the sort which no pope is keen on revisiting. Not to say our current times aren't difficult as well, but the point is no pope is going to invite such comparisons by gunning for his predecessors.

I do believe it is possible for a future pope to turn the ship around, but it will not be with any such bold renunciation as many Trads fantasize about—no Pius XIII summoning a Second Council of Trent. There are certain ways that popes have historically changed course when things have gone awry. When a pope wants to distance himself from his predecessor, he is typically more interested in outcomes than principle. That is to say, popes have historically been content to let their predecessor's bad legislation remain "on the books" if they can circumvent it in practice. 

Here are four ways popes have historically perform a volte-face from their predecessors.

1. Interpretive Recontextualization

Interpretive recontextualization happens when a pope offers a "clarification" on the work of a predecessor which effectually defangs the previous pontiff's policy. This may entail drastically narrowing the scope of the obnoxious legislation, or suggesting that the target policy has been "misinterpreted" and needs to be clarified, or by simply nudging the interpretation of a document in a certain direction by stressing certain aspects and neglecting others. However it is accomplished, the end result is that the pope effectually gives the work of his predecessor a new and different meaning than was originally intended.

The best example of this is the relationship between Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII (1302) and Meruit of Clement V (1306). Boniface VIII was an opponent of the French King Philip IV, the latter of whom had attempted to tax the Church in France to pay for his wars against Edward of England, appealing to the monarch's alleged autonomy over the Church in his realm. Boniface issued Unam Sanctam was in response to Philip's claims, famously teaching that no one is independent from the jursidiction of the Holy See, not even kings. Philip consequently captured and assaulted Boniface, holding him captive at Anagni where he died (1303). Boniface was ultimately replaced by Clement V, a Frenchman who was a partisan of Philip the Fair.

Philip now had a friend on the Chair of St. Peter, but the question was what to do about Unam Sanctam, which was still on the books. Clement addressed this by issuing the brief Meruit in 1306, which was structured as an interpretive gloss on Unam Sanctam. While Unam Sanctam had boldly declared that "it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff" because "it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgement if it has not been good," Meruit recontextualized the document to negate its sweeping claims of jurisdiction over the King of France. Clement wrote (relevant text in bold):

The integrity of sincere affection of our beloved son Philip, illustrious king of the French, toward ourselves and the Roman Church merits—and also the very clear merits of his forefathers and, moreover, also the purity and sincerity of devotion of the inhabitants of his kingdom deserve—that we bestow benevolent favour both upon that king and his kingdom. That is why we do not wish or intend that any prejudice be engendered for that king and kingdom by the definition and declaration of our predecessor Pope Boniface VIII of happy memory, which begin by the words "Unam sanctam." And we do not wish or intend that through this declaration the aforesaid king, kingdom and its inhabitants be more subject to the Roman Church than they had been before, but we wish that all be understood to remain in the same state as it had been before the above-mentioned declaration, both with regard to the Church and to the aforesaid king, kingdom and its inhabitants.

Given at Lyons, on the Kalends of February, in the first year of our Pontificate.

Whereas Boniface VIII had clearly intended to assert the authority of the Roman pontiff over the King of France, Clement V decrees that his predecessor's decree changes nothing; "all [is to be] understood to remain in the same state as it had before the above-mentioned declaration." Unam Sanctam is to be regarded as if it never happened. Clement never condemned Unam Sanctam; Boniface VIII's bull stayed on the books, cited for centuries by theologians. Nevertheless, we can see how only four years after its issuance, Clement V recontextualized it to empty it of any import when it came to the matter of King Philip.

2. Strategic Disregard

Another method popes use to distance themselves from decrees they disagree with is by simply maintaining a strategic silence about them, effectually ignoring them and treating them as if they don't exist. A pope who does this hopes that disregarding prior legislation will simply make it go away, or at least greatly diminish its importance. The authority of ecclesiastical legislation grows to the degree that it is reaffirmed by succeeding generations and becomes precedent. The pope can prevent this if he is able to stop legislation he disagrees with from becoming precedent in the first place, and the best way to do this is to strategically ignore it.

The supreme example of this is the decree Haec Sancta (1415) issued at the Council of Constance, which is a particularly noteworthy case because it concerns papal authority itself. 

The Council of Constance (1414–18), convened to end the Great Schism, passed Haec Sancta (1415), which declared that a general council held its authority directly from Christ, that everyone including the pope was bound to obey it in matters of faith and church reform, and that any pope who resisted it could be coerced. This was Conciliarism at its most explicit, and it had real teeth—the council used this authority to depose two claimants and accept the resignation of a third.

Pope Martin V, elected by this same council in 1417, faced an obvious problem. If Haec Sancta was valid, it fundamentally subordinated papal authority to conciliar authority. If it was invalid, his own election was potentially questionable. Martin's solution was studied ambiguity. When asked to confirm the decrees of Constance, he confirmed those passed "conciliariter"—that is, "in a properly conciliar manner,"—without specifying which decrees qualified. This formula was deliberately unresolvable. It allowed him to appear to endorse the council while leaving open the question of whether Haec Sancta had been passed "conciliariter" at all, since the council had passed it before all three papal claimants had been removed, meaning its legitimacy as a true general council at that moment was hypothetically contestable. Subsequent popes (e.g., Eugene IV against the Council of Basel, and eventually Julius II at the Fifth Lateran Council) progressively reasserted papal supremacy over councils, effectually negating the import of Haec Sancta. This was always done by accumulating new precedents and new declarations rather than by confronting and invalidating Haec Sancta directly. The decree was simply never cited as authoritative again, treated as a kind of institutional embarrassment that could be managed through silence and countervailing precedent. It was not invalidated until the First Vatican Council's Pastor Aeternus (1870), and even then not by name. Martin and his successors got around the thorny problem of Haec Sancta by simply ignoring it.

3. Diplomatic Realignment  

Even the most zealous popes are limited by their inability to bind their successors. No pope may commit his successor to a given course, no matter how strenuously he might wish to do so. Because the Roman Pontiff is always free to act as he pleases, we often see popes break with their predecessors through diplomatic realignment. This means a new pope distances himself from the previous pope by handling situations in a drastically different manner, essentially communicating that the old pope's vision is dead.

The most drastic example of this the drastic shift in the application of the Gregorian Reform after the death of Pope St. Gregory VII. The Gregorian Reform is an era of Church history I have studied quite extensively (I have several articles on its various aspects on my sister site, as well as my 2022 article on hyperpapalism in the 11th century which was subsequently included in Peter Kwasniewski's 2024 anthology Ultramontanism and Tradition). 

The pontificate of Pope St. Gregory VII is best remembered for his explosive confrontation with Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV over the matter of lay investiture, with its famous excommunication of the emperor in 1076 that occasioned Henry's famous penance at Canossa the following winter. We do not have space here to sum up the entire history of the controversy; I presume my regular readers are sufficiently knowledgeable of its main points. Let us then move on to discuss how Gregory's successors utilized diplomatic realignment to distance themselves from the chaos of Gregory's pontificate.

Gregory VII's entire pontificate (1073–85) was built on an absolute principle: lay investiture (the practice of secular rulers appointing bishops and abbots and investing them with the symbols of their office) was illegitimate, simoniacal, and an offense against the independence of the Church. It was this principle which led to the feud between pope and emperor; so insistent was Gregory about this principle that he died in exile rather than concede. The popes who succeeded Gregory for the next hundred years continued to maintain the talking points of the reform, but departed drastically from the absolutist interpretation Gregory had insisted upon.

The conflict between Urban II (1088–99) and King William Rufus of England is a good example. Gregory VII had excommunicated Henry IV and brought the emperor to his knees at Canossa. Urban, facing William Rufus's flat refusal to recognize him as pope or permit appeals to Rome, was faced with an equally recalcitrant monarch. But whereas Gregory had recourse to excommunication, Urban chose to let it go. He negotiated recognition from William in exchange for not pressing the investiture question in England, a settlement accepted by Rufus. Urban even sacrificed St. Anselm by allowed Rufus to siphon the revenues of Canterbury and keep Anselm in exile! The accommodation may have been driven by realpolitik rather than principle, but the practical concession was real regardless of the motivation.

The point is that Urban drastically departed from the policy of Gregory, even though he never framed any of it as a retreat from Gregorian principles. He was, after all, a Cluniac reformer himself and had been close to Gregory personally. Urban maintained Gregorian rhetoric in full. But his actual conduct involved the kind of quiet accommodations with rulers that Gregory had refused to make, achieved simply by not forcing confrontations that Gregory would have forced.

Paschal II is an even stranger case, because he actually went further astray from Gregory's policies. In 1111 he negotiated the short-lived Agreement of Sutri with Emperor Henry V, in which he proposed that the Church renounce all its imperial fiefs in exchange for full freedom from lay investiture. When this arrangement collapsed and Henry imprisoned him, Paschal, under duress granted the very thing Pope Gregory VII had died refusing: the right of the emperor to lay investiture in Germany. While Paschal later repudiated this under pressure from the reforming party in Rome, the episode nevertheless illustrates how post-Gregorian popes attempted to navigate a middle position between Gregorian principle and political reality in ways Gregory himself never considered—and precisely because Gregory's confrontational approach had produced an unresolvable crisis of authority that his successors had to live with.

Then the Concordat of Worms in 1122 under Calixtus II resolved the Investiture Controversy through a carefully worded compromise: secular rulers would give investiture with the scepter (representing temporal lands and duties) but not with the ring and staff (representing spiritual office). In Germany, crucially, this investiture could happen before consecration, meaning the emperor still effectively controlled who became bishop, because he granted the temporalities before the Church consecrated anyone, giving him a decisive veto. Pope Calixtus presented Worms as a victory; it was nothing of the sort by Gregory's standards. It did not end the emperor's role in selecting bishops and still even allowed a mitigated form of investure. Worms was a recognition that the Church could not, in practice, separate bishops from their political and territorial roles in the feudal system. But no pope said so. The Gregorian Reform rhetoric continued for decades afterward. What changed was that the actual machinery of episcopal appointment quietly returned to something very close to the pre-Gregorian arrangement in the regions that mattered most, even while the formal triumph of Worms was celebrated as vindicating everything Gregory had fought for. Half a century later, when Thomas Becket repeatedly demanded that Alexander III excommunicate, that pontiff instead chose careful negotiation with the powerful Angevin king, deliberately hoping to avoid the kind of explosive rupture provoked by Gregory VII a century earlier.

While the principles Gregory VII fought and died for were still celebrated, subsequent popes had in practice retreated from them considerably. The popes in the century after Gregory VII were managing a policy committment they could neither fully implement nor openly abandon. Gregory had made certain claims absolute; his successors found that governing required flexibility those absolutes didn't permit. The solution was to maintain the claims in full at the level of language and canonical principle while finding practical accommodations at the level of conduct—which is exactly the pattern across all the examples we've been discussing.

4. Elevation or Demotion of Personnel

There is a saying in politics that "personnel is policy." This holds true for the government of the Church as much as any secular state. Popes have historically shifted gears from their predecessors by personnel changes at the highest echelons of the Church. These kinds of personnel shifts signify a pope's changing priorities. 

Those who were around during the early years of Benedict XVI's pontificate remember the saga of the two Marinis, Piero and Guido. From 1987 until his death, John Paul II had retained Piero Marini as his Master of Ceremonies. Piero was the orchestator of all of the hideous public liturgies for most of JP2's reign (such as Assisi II); he also signed off on the infamous liturgy in Mexico in 2002 where John Paul allowed himself to be "exorcized" by a Zapotec shaman priestess during Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral. By 2007 Benedict XVI was on the throne, and there was great rejoicing in the Trad community that year when the "evil" Marini was replaced by Msgr. Guido Marini, a supporter of the reform of the reform who deliberately sought to restore some level of reverence to papal liturgies. It was to the "good" Marini that was can attribute the emergences of the so-called "Benedictine" altar arrangement during the pontificate of Benedict XVI. Benedict, meanwhile, was full steam ahead with his vision for liturgical renewal while also insisting that papal masses should be viewed as "liturgical paradigms for the entire world." Essentially, replacing the Piero with Guido signified Benedict's profound shift from the priorities of John Paul II.

Sometimes shift in policy was signified by the active persecution of personnel from previous pontificates deemed insufficiently loyal to the new pontiff's vision. Paul IV (1555–59) was a ferocious Counter-Reformation hardliner (his contemporaries said he emitted sparks when he walked). Paul regarded his immediate predecessors as having been catastrophically weak in the face of Protestantism, to the point of complete dereliction. He didn't formally condemn them, but he made his contempt visible by persecuting those of previous pontificates whom he held accountable. Paul reopened heresy investigations into figures his predecessors had protected, withdrew protections his predecessors had extended to the English Cardinal Pole, and even imprisoned another suspect cardinal. Neither the particulars nor rectitude of Paul's objections concern us here (see "Paul IV and the Heretics of His Time" by Roberto de Mattei for a basic overview); the point is that Paul's harsh measures against certain personnel from previous pontificates functionally served as a public repudiation of his predecessors.

How Change Happens

The long and short of it is that we should not expect some singular pope or council to come in with guns blazing in open disregard and repudiation of the failed policies of the 20th and early 21st centuries. I do believe change will come, but it will not be dramatic. It will be piecemeal, here a little there a little, as messy and torturously slow as any of history's varied ecclesial realignments. It will look less like a dramatic reversal and more like a gradual drift—a new personnel appointment here, a strategic silence there, a recontextualization of some document that everyone had forgotten about. This is how the Church has always righted herself after going off course, and it is the only realistic template we have. Anything can happen of course, but I suspect that Trads who are waiting for their Pius XIII will wait forever. Those who understand how papal governance actually works will recognize the small signs when they come and know how to read them.