Edward Feser writes,

“Fathers have the authority to teach and discipline their children, but this authority is not absolute.  They may not teach their children to do evil, and they may not discipline them with unjust harshness.  Everyone knows this, though everyone also knows that there are fathers who do in fact abuse their children or teach them to do evil.  Everyone also knows that it is right for children under these unhappy circumstances to disobey and reprove their fathers, while still acknowledging their fathers’ authority in general and submitting to his lawful instructions.

All the same, probably no father ever says to his children: “Children, here’s what to do if I ever start to abuse you or teach you to do evil.”  The reason for this is surely that the default assumption is that children will never need to know what to do under such circumstances, and that explicitly addressing it in this way would give them a false and disturbing impression.  Children might start to wonder whether abuse or evil teaching is a likely prospect, and for that reason come to doubt their father’s wisdom and good will. 

Hence, in the typical case, what to do in such a situation is left implicit and vague.  The nature of paternal authority is such that this is the way things should be.  Because the presumption that fathers will not abuse their authority is so strong, and because children need to believe viscerally that this is extremely unlikely to happen, the matter almost never comes up in most families.  There is a downside, of course, which is that on those rare occasions when a father does abuse his authority, children are bound to be confused about how to deal with the situation.  What do you do when the man appointed by nature to be your primary teacher and guardian starts to mislead or harm you?

Now, the papacy is like this.  The Church has no official and explicitly stated policy about how to deal with a pope who teaches error or otherwise abuses his office.  That is not because such error and abuse are not possible.  On the contrary, not only has the Church always allowed for the possibility that a pope can teach error when not speaking ex cathedra and that he can make policy decisions that do grave harm to the faithful, but both of these things have in fact happened on a handful of occasions – for example, the doctrinal errors of Pope Honorius I and Pope John XXII, the ambiguous doctrinal formula temporarily accepted by Pope Liberius, the Cadaver Synod of Pope Stephen VI and its aftermath, and the mistakes of Pope Urban VI that contributed to the Great Western Schism.  (I have discussed these cases here, here, and here.)  

… Continue

“I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.“

Paul Rebukes Peter at Antioch

¹¹ But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. ¹² For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. ¹³ And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity. ¹⁴ But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” ¹⁵ We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, ¹⁶ yet who know that a man is not justified^[a] by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified. ¹⁷ But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we ourselves were found to be sinners, is Christ then an agent of sin? Certainly not! ¹⁸ But if I build up again those things which I tore down, then I prove myself a transgressor. ¹⁹ For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God. ²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. ²¹ I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose. —Galatians 2:11-21

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+ John XXIII, Benedict XVI and Francis