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Articles written, translated or selected by John S. Daly
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Hylomorphism and Heresy
One Hundred Most Powerful Prayers
(https://romeward.com/618150232096/05- MATTER AND FORM
one-hundred-most-powerful-prayers)
The ultimate collection of $15.50
uniquely powerful, More…
ONTOLOGICAL USE
(https://romeward.com/618150232096/05-
one-hundred-most-powerful-prayers) Aristotle’s theory of ontology holds that corporeal
things are comprised of matter and form. The matter is
The Pope and The Antichrist
(https://romeward.com/10476367303/the- the stu" the thing is made of, while the form is the
pope-and-the-antichrist) $17.47 shape the stu" is made into. Matter must always be
Cardinal Manning's 1861 study of the disposed in some shape or other, but it is the shape
papacy as More… that makes the thing what it is. Willow wood is the
(https://romeward.com/10476367303/the-
matter of a cricket bat, but it isn’t a cricket bat — not
pope-and-the-antichrist)
until it is carved to have the shape of a bat. On the
Father William Doyle S.J. other hand if some other matter (such as glass or
(https://romeward.com/10476344263/father- chocolate) were fashioned to the form of a cricket bat,
william-doyle-s-j) $25.00
it would not be a real cricket bat either, any more than
The Irish military chaplain Father William
Doyle More… a chunk of uncarved willow-wood is.
(https://romeward.com/10476344263/father-
william-doyle-s-j) ANALOGICAL USE
Heresy
This theory is applied by analogy to many other things
(https://romeward.com/10476337607/heresy)
"The delict of heresy in its which are incorporeal. For instance, most Catholics
$15.95
commission, More… know that theologians use the term “material sin” to
(https://romeward.com/10476337607/heresy)
refer to an act which of its nature is sinful, when the
Michael Davies - An Evaluation agent is invincibly ignorant of the sinfulness of what he
does and therefore does not incur guilt before God by
(https://romeward.com/10476335367/michael-
davies-an-evaluation) $35.00
doing it. Here the term matter is used for the immoral
Cambridge-educated translator John S. Daly
act, while form is used for the evil will. But it should be
puts More…
noted that “material sin” is not sin — it is the matter
(https://romeward.com/10476335367/michael-
davies-an-evaluation) which would become sin if the will were evil, but the
matter alone can never make the thing. A material sin is
Commonitorium Against Heresies
no nearer to being a
sin than a willow-tree is to being a
(https://romeward.com/10476352007/commonitorium-
against-heresies) cricket bat.
$19.95
Bilingual English-Latin edition of the !fteen More…
LATENT AMBIGUITY
(https://romeward.com/10476352007/commonitorium-
against-heresies)

The Catholic Fireside Companion
(https://romeward.com/10476344711/the-
catholic-!reside-companion) $19.95
(154 pages) The Catholic Fireside
Companion is an More…
(https://romeward.com/10476344711/the-
catholic-!reside-companion)
Common parlance readily assumes that if a man who
commits sins is called a sinner, a man who commits
material sins can be called a material sinner. But this
expression is perilously ambiguous. A man who smokes
cigars is called a cigar-smoker, but if we refer to a
Cuban cigar-smoker the listener will not know whether
it is the cigars that come from Cuba or the smoker
himself. The term material sinner might denote a
perpetrator of material sins, but it could just as well
The Secret of Firefern denote a saint, for the saints alone are made of the
(https://romeward.com/10476332487/the- matter of which we sinners are made (human nature in
secret-of-!refern) $19.76
the wayfaring state), but without the formal element
Why has a haunted manor deep in the
forest of More… (vice) that would make them really sinners.
(https://romeward.com/10476332487/the-
secret-of-!refern) APPLICATION TO HERESY
Dion and the Sibyls
(https://romeward.com/10476363783/dion-When the vocabulary of matter and form is applied to
and-the-sibyls) $34.97heresy, the potential for ambiguity and consequently for
“The greatest historical novel ever written.” calamitous confusion is greatly increased. The word
More…
heresy is sometimes used to mean a heretical doctrine,
(https://romeward.com/10476363783/dion-
and-the-sibyls)
but in its primary sense heresy is an act: the act of
rejecting God’s revelation, su#ciently proposed — i.e. it
What is TRUE Education ? is the enormous sin of preferring one’s own opinion to
(https://romeward.com/10476354183/what-
divine truth. Now the formal element of heresy must
is-true-education) $27.50
Father Leen's 1943 classic is a complete
therefore be the evil will involved in such a choice,
guide to More… without which it would not be truly an act of heresy or
(https://romeward.com/10476354183/what-truly a sin. But what is the material element? If you
is-true-education) de!ne it as believing a doctrine contrary to divine
revelation, you attribute material heresy to two distinct
→ See complete Catalogue groups: (i) those who want to believe all that the
(https://romeward.com/catalog) Catholic Church teaches as divinely revealed, but err as
to whether in fact the Church teaches this or that point,
and (ii) those who reject the entire deposit of faith,
because they are invincibly ignorant of the divine
mandate of the Catholic Church to transmit God’s
revelation to men. Since the resemblance between
these two groups is entirely fortuitous, it seems safer,
as well as more logical, to de!ne material heresy as the
act of rejecting the Catholic Faith on the part of one
who is invincibly ignorant of the duty to accept it. In the
same way we should not call a mistaken statement
about a question of fact a “material lie”, or the act of
accidentally falling to one’s death from a cli" top
“material suicide”, or a miscarriage a “material abortion”.

Unfortunately, this usage has not been universally

respected, because the matter-form analogy does not
always apply neatly to incorporeal things. Heresy
comprises not two but three distinct elements: (i) the
belief contrary to Catholic teaching, (ii) the realisation
that one’s belief is contrary to Catholic teaching, and
(iii) the realisation that Catholic teaching is divinely
guaranteed and must therefore be believed by all.
When one tries to cut a tri-partite entity cleanly into
two complementary elements, it is anyone’s guess to
which end the middle will stick: that is the dilemma on
which the Christmas-cracker is based.

APPLICATION TO HERETICS

And the problem is only aggravated when we call the

person who holds a material heresy a material heretic.
For the most orthodox of Catholics is the material of
which a heretic can be made as long as he has the
capacity to fall into heresy, and that remains with us all
until death. But even if we hazard the guess (usually
correct) that the Cuban cigar-smoker is not himself
Cuban, and that it is the heresy that is material, not the
heretic, we are still left with the dilemma of whether a
material heretic means a Catholic who wants to believe
all the Church teaches but mistakes what that teaching
is on some point, or one who is not a Catholic at all
and has no intention of believing the teachings of a
Church whose divine authority has not been su#ciently
proposed to him. Cardinal Billot pleads that logic and
theology require the term to be limited to the latter. St
Louis de Montfort and many others, however, follow the
former usage. What is certain is that the term “material
heretic” is quite useless unless we know which of the
two senses it is used in. And it is positively pernicious if
its latent ambiguity is used (however unwittingly) to
confuse these two widely di"ering groups, making
statements which are true of only one sort of material
heretic, and applying them to the other.

SOUND DOCTRINE WITHOUT AMBIGUITY

It is noteworthy that the 1917 Code of Canon Law

eschews this ambiguous vocabulary altogether when
referring to heresy and heretics. If we follow its
example we can surely explain what is meant by the
words heresy and heretics without any danger of
confusion. Our conclusions will be as follows: heresy is
the sin of culpably rejecting divinely revealed truth
su#ciently proposed by the Catholic Church, and only
those who commit heresy in the fullness of this
de!nition are truly heretics. Those baptised persons
who do not accept the Church’s teaching authority are
presumed to be heretics and treated as such for all
practical purposes. They may, exceptionally, possess
divine faith, su#cient for salvation, but they do not
possess divine and Catholic faith, which is necessary to
belong to the Church juridically. They are not Catholics.
Quite di"erent is the case of the baptised person who
does accept the Catholic Church’s teaching authority,
but inadvertently holds some belief incompatible with
its teaching: he is not a heretic and is not legally
presumed to be such. In fact, all who fall into this
category are our brother-Catholics, however misguided.

“MATERIAL POPES”

It is certain that the Vatican II “popes” have erred in

ways and degrees which a true pope is protected by
the Holy Ghost from erring in. They are therefore not
popes.

If we enquire why this should be so, the most obvious,

and surely correct, answer is that they are public
heretics, and as such have automatically (“ipso facto”)
forfeited any o#ce in the Church.

Some Catholics have been loath to reach this

conclusion, however, since they mistakenly suppose
that the private individual is unable to identify public
heresy and the consequent loss of ecclesiastical o#ce.
Instead, they o"er an alternative explanation of the
manifest non-papal status of recent inhabitants of the
Vatican.

They hold that these claimants to the papacy were per

se validly elected, but failed validly to accept the
election, owing to some improper disposition on their
part – an improper disposition which the adherents of
this view carefully distinguish from heresy. Hence they
claim that the Church is today frozen in the same state
she is in for a split second during every papal election
— between the moment when the elected cardinal is
invited to accept the papacy and the moment when he
in fact accepts it. At this moment it is claimed,
correctly, following St Robert Bellarmine, that the
Church has a “material pope”, but not a “formal pope”.
And of course a “material pope” is not a pope, for the
same reason that a virgin is a “material mother”, but not
a mother.

However, those who hold this thesis (known as the

Cassiciacum thesis), do not merely mean that Karol
Wojtyła is material that could be made into a pope, as
any man1 may be. They mean that he is proximately
disposed to become pope. His relation to the papacy is
not that of any virgin to motherhood; it is that of the
bride.

Thus far the thesis errs negatively by refusing to face

the evident fact that Wojtyła is a heretic, not a Catholic,
and that this alone su#ces to explain why he is not
pope and to place him much further from the papacy
than any male Catholic. But there is no de!nite, positive
error against the faith in the notion that the interval
between election and valid acceptance might be
extremely prolonged. The idea is novel and shocking in
the extreme and could be accepted only as a last
resort (which is not our case), particularly the notion
that this state of a"airs might go unnoticed by all the
electors, but at a pinch we may refrain from bluntly
calling it unorthodox.

However, Cassiciacum adherents do not stop there.

While refusing communion with their “material popes”,
refusing to name them in the canon of the Mass,
refusing to obey them, and denying them ordinary
authority to teach or govern, they nevertheless
commonly concede to them the power of validly
naming new bishops and cardinals – who, however, by
virtue of the same defective dispositions, will become
only material bishops or cardinals.

Here we must call a complete halt. A window-pane is a

“material wine-glass”, but in the absence of due form it
cannot be used for drinking wine. By what stretch of
absurdity could it be claimed, however, that a window-
pane, being a “material wine-glass”, could be used
exclusively for drinking “material wine” – i.e. grape-
juice? Only a thoroughly dishonest vintner would dare
label a carton of unfermented grape-juice for sale as
“material wine” (Châteauneuf du Pape Matériel?)

No reality exists without its form.2 A “material pope” is

therefore not the Vicar of Christ and is utterly incapable
of exercising the powers Christ conferred upon His
vicars except perhaps in accordance with the standard
principles of supplied jurisdiction which, if they apply at
all to cases such as the Vatican II claimants, apply
because these men are widely (though mistakenly)
thought by Catholics to be popes, not because they are
material popes. Wojtyła’s appointees are no more
bishops or cardinals of the Catholic Church than his
doctrines are doctrines of the Catholic Church — unless
(a) the recognized conditions for supplied jurisdiction
apply, and (b) the nominees themselves truly profess
the Catholic faith which the Roncallis, Montinis, and
Wojtyłas have been relentlessly steamrollering since
1958. It is time for adherents of the Cassiciacum thesis
to accept that in the absence of e#cacious acceptance
of o#ce by an eligible and validly elected individual,
the see remains transparently vacant and the papal
powers in 100% abeyance.

© John S. Daly 2001 A.D.

Notes

1Even a non-Catholic male is a material pope in the

sense that he could become a Catholic before being
elected.

2 “Forma dat esse rei.”