Anti Popes?

Quote below from comment 11 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2014/04/an-interview-with-dr-thomas-madden-on-the-medieval-catholic-church/

R. Scott Clark, Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California, recently wrote an article titled “The Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy” that appeared in the July 1, 2014 issue of Tabletalk, and can be read in its entirety on his blog here. In this article he seeks to show that the succession of bishops in Rome from St. Peter to the present is notunbroken, and that therefore the Catholic Church is not an “ancient church,” but only a “medieval church.” (Clark’s own denomination, the United Reformed Churches in North America [URCNA], is about eighteen years old, having formed in 1996 as a break away from the Christian Reformed Church.) Clark focuses his attention on the Avignon papacy, and the Western Schism (1378 – 1417), which Thomas Madden has discussed in the interview available at the top of this page from the 15th to the 26th minute of the podcast. In particular, Clark claims that the existence of antipopes shows that there is discontinuity in the succession of popes.

As a brief review, an antipope is “a false claimant of the Holy See in opposition to a pontiff canonically elected.” (source) The first antipope was St. Hippolytus who in opposition to the canonically elected Pope St. Callistus in AD 217 “immediately left the communion of the Roman Church and had himself elected antipope by his small band of followers.” (source) Eventually he was reconciled to, and martyred with Pope St. Pontain in AD 235-6 in the mines of Sardinia. St. Hippolytus is the only antipope who became a saint, in his case, through martyrdom for the faith, in union with the Church. The subsequent antipopes are spread throughout Church history, as can be seen in the yellow highlighting in this list of popes. But there have been no antipopes of any notability since the fifteenth century.

In his article Clark writes the following:

If we believe the popular myth, we might think that there has been an unbroken succession of popes in Rome since Peter. But according to Roman Catholic scholars, there have been no fewer than forty-six “antipopes” in the history of the papacy, and in the early fifteenth century there were no fewer than three popes ruling simultaneously.

Clark seems to think that an antipope somehow interrupts the continuity of the succession of popes. However, an antipope is not a figure who occupies a temporal gap between otherwise legitimate popes, but rather a person who exists simultaneously with an actual pope, and claims falsely to be the true pope. So the existence of any number of antipopes does not show or demonstrate any discontinuity or break in the actual succession of popes. Moreover, contrary to Clark’s claim, it was never the case that there were “three popes ruling simultaneously.” The popes in succession from Urban VI, i.e. Boniface IX (1389-1404), Innocent VII (1404-06), Gregory XII (1406-15), were the actual popes during this time period. The other claimants were antipopes, not popes, for the reasons Thomas Madden explains in the podcast.

Clark also writes:

Each of the “popes” had excommunicated the others and their followers so that all of Western Christendom at that point was excommunicated.

An antipope cannot excommunicate anyone from the Church. He can disallow someone from his own schismatic communion, but he cannot excommunicate someone from the Catholic Church, because, not being pope, he has no authority over the Catholic Church. So the true popes (and those persons in communion with them) were never excommunicated from the Church during the Western Schism.

Clark continues:

The Avignon crisis is just one of many examples from the history of the medieval church that illustrate the futility of seeking continuity, unity, and stability where they have never existed.

The Avignon crisis was indeed a time of crisis, turmoil and confusion in the Church. But the Church never lost her unity during that time. She retained each of her four marks (i.e. one, holy, catholic and apostolic). She retained her unity because those who followed antipopes separated themselves from her unity, the same unity she had maintained the previous thirteen centuries. She retained her continuity because there is a continuous, unbroken succession of actual popes from Gregory XI (1370-1378) through Urban VI (1378-89), Boniface IX (1389-1404), Innocent VII (1404-06), and Gregory XII (1406-15), to Martin V, at which time the schism was ended. The stability claimed for the Church is not a stability in which there will be no crises. The history of the Church would immediately refute such a ridiculous claim. Rather, the stability claim is that of indefectibility, which I have discussed in more detail here. And the Western Schism, though a time of trial and contention, was not a case of the Church losing her indefectibility. So although the Avignon crisis is an example of a serious Church crisis involving disputed and contested authority, and significant confusion as a result, it does not show or demonstrate that the Church lost her unity or continuity or stability. On the contrary, it shows the providence and protection of God in preserving that unity, continuity, and stability through this crisis, among many others in the course of her long history.

Clark continues:

The historical truth is that the Roman communion is not an ancient church. She is a medieval church who consolidated her theology, piety, and practice during a twenty-year-long council in the sixteenth century (Trent). Her rituals, sacraments, canon law, and papacy are medieval.

Clark is here not controverting the existence of the Church in Rome even from the first century, which we’ve recently discussed in some detail here. We should not think he is saying here that the Church in Rome did not exist until the medieval era. Rather, what he means is that the medieval era left its mark on the Church. She was not exactly the same at the end of the medieval era as she was going into it a thousand years earlier. That’s true, but it does not mean that the Church of Rome is not ancient. A redwood tree looks very different at full maturity than it does as a seed or sapling. But it is still the same tree. Likewise, the developments that occurred within the Church during the medieval era were an organic unfolding of what she already was. For this reason she is both ancient and medieval.

Clark continues:

The unity and stability offered by Roman apologists are illusions—unless mutual and universal excommunication and attempted murder count as unity and stability. Crushing opponents and rewriting history to suit present needs is not unity. It is mythology.

Of course crushing opponents and rewriting history to suit present needs is not unity. No one claimed that it is, so here Clark goes after a straw man. And for the reasons I’ve just explained, he has not shown that the unity and stability the Catholic Church teaches that she possesses were lost during the Western Schism. He has only asserted this.

Clark continues:

The existence of simultaneous popes in Rome, Avignon, and Pisa, each elected by papal electors and some later arbitrarily designated as antipopes, illustrates the problem of the notion of an unbroken Petrine succession. The post-Avignon papacy is an orphan who has no idea who his father was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Here Clark misrepresents Church history by claiming that there were three simultaneous popes. In actuality at any given time there was only one pope. The other two claimants were antipopes. The determination that these were antipopes was not done “arbitrarily,” contrary to Clark’s mere assertion. Rather, as Thomas Madden explains above, unless a pope abdicates or dies, then no new pope can be legitimately selected. And Pope Urban VI was canonically elected. So the processes in which the cardinals subsequently engaged in selecting Robert of Geneva (and his successors) and the council of Pisa added a third, were nevertheless illegitimate and void because in each case the existing rightful pope had neither abdicated nor died.

Clark concludes:

Our Protestant forebears were deeply skeptical of the papacy as an institution—for good reason. The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that the papacy is a purely human institution without divine warrant, and that it has a complicated history. Claims to an unbroken succession crash on the rocks of history, especially those great rocks cropping up at Avignon, Pisa, and Rome for a century in the late medieval period.

How Clark infers from the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI to the papacy being a “purely human institution” is unclear. Prima facie, nothing about the papacy being a divinely established institution or a merely human institution follows from Pope Benedict’s abdication. Yes, the papacy has a complicated history, but that too does not entail anything about its being a merely human institution. Clark writes in closing that the Catholic Church’s claim to having an unbroken succession of popes “crashes on the rocks of history,” referring here to the Western Schism. But as I have explained above, nothing in the Western Schism entails any break in the succession of popes, from St. Peter down to Pope Francis.