In July, an international group of 62 Catholics delivered a challenge to Pope Francis, charging him with propagating heresies in his 2016 suggestion that divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Communion, a sacrament from which they are currently barred.
After they had received no satisfactory response from the pope, they released their “Filial Correction” to the public in September. Since then, the number of signatories has grown to 235.
The incident — Catholics challenging the pope, even accusing him of heresy — no doubt seems shocking. But challenges to papal authority are nothing new in the Catholic Church. Laypeople, theologians and priests have claimed the right to define the nature of Catholicism throughout its 2,000-year history.
Many of the signatories of the Filial Correction are Americans, and they are part of a long history of American laypeople challenging priests, and American laypeople and clergy challenging the pope, over matters of doctrine, governance and culture. What is notable about this document, though, is that it accuses the pope of “modernism.” This is not a rejection or condemnation of modern life, however. Instead, “modernism” refers to a particular set of beliefs formally condemned by church doctrine as heretical, including the belief that church dogma can change over time, which the authors argue the pope has advanced with his directions on the pastoral care of Catholics who are divorced or remarried.
Even more striking is the role of Americans in pressing this challenge, because of the way that the American Catholic experience contributed to the branding of modernism as a heresy at the end of the 19th century — a status that some Americans have now turned back on Pope Francis.
Central to this history is the exercise of lay power in the American Catholic Church. Although the first U.S. diocese was founded in 1789, the Catholic population was small and sparsely settled. As a result, church infrastructure grew slowly in the United States — so slowly, in fact, that in many locales, Catholic parishes and missions frequently had no resident priests. This forced Catholic laypeople to fend for themselves, with parishes incorporated under existing state laws that gave these laypeople — known as trustees — significant power over congregational governance and property.