Vatican II Apologetics Now Means Denying Vatican I and Gaslighting anyone Who Notices

When the Papal Maximalist Becomes the Papal Minimalist: Michael Lofton vs. Reality

There is a peculiar species of Vatican II apologist whose job has gotten infinitely harder in the last few years. Not because the modernist crisis has gotten worse; though it has. And not because Pope Leo XIV keeps quoting Francis, Benedict, and Fratelli Tutti like they’re Holy Writ; though he does.

No, their job is harder because their own team keeps saying the quiet part out loud. And when the talking points collapse, the last line of defense is to gaslight the critics, belittle their intelligence, and hope no one remembers what the Church actually taught prior to the Council.

Enter Michael Lofton

In a recent meandering, eighteen minute YouTube meltdown (complete with hand-wringing, analogies about house rules and taking off your shoes, and the usual cries of “fake news!”) Lofton tried to refute the claim that Pope Leo XIV had denied papal supremacy by calling for full communion with all Christians. His defense? Apparently, you can affirm Vatican I while also ignoring it entirely.

Yes. Really.

Lofton insists this is all just a misunderstanding. According to him, when Leo XIV tells Protestants and Orthodox that they can enter into full communion without saying a word about papal supremacy, he’s not denying Vatican I, he’s just practicing what Lofton calls “a hermeneutic of continuity.”

The Logic of Loftonland

The core of Lofton’s argument, if one can call it that, is that it’s totally fine for the Pope to invite heretical sects into “full communion” without any mention of Vatican I’s solemn definition of papal supremacy and infallibility. Why? Because… somewhere, buried under layers of nuance and context, is an implicit expectation that they’ll eventually come around.

Sure.

What makes this all the more comical is that Lofton spends a solid eight minutes ranting about how “fake news” apologists are making mountains out of molehills, never once realizing he’s arguing with a headline that literally quotes Leo XIV’s own words. His voice trembles as he protests: “It’s not my first rodeo… I know how to verify sources… I know how to think critically.”

Then he proceeds to miss the point for another ten minutes.

The Ratzinger Reveal

Lofton’s position collapses under the weight of actual historical admissions from the very authorities he thinks he’s defending.

His entire argument in this video rests on the false dichotomy that either (1) full communion entails acceptance of papal supremacy as defined by Vatican I, or (2) calling for full communion must mean one is implicitly denying papal supremacy unless that demand is repeated in explicit doctrinal terms. He then uses this setup to portray anyone suggesting Pope Leo XIV’s ecumenical gestures undermine Vatican I as spreading “fake news.”

But here’s the problem: Joseph Ratzinger himself, Cardinal, then Pope, explicitly admitted that the Eastern Orthodox Church would not have to accept Vatican I in the form it was defined. That’s the very premise Lofton dismisses as ridiculous.

In Theological Highlights of Vatican II, Ratzinger wrote:

“Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than was formulated and lived in the first millennium.”

This is devastating to Lofton’s position. Because if Rome “must not require more” from the Orthodox than what existed before 1054, then Rome cannot require formal submission to the Vatican I definitions of papal supremacy and infallibility, definitions the East has always rejected.

So the Orthodox apologist’s “exhausted” lament that Lofton mocks, “imagine spending years defending Vatican I just to have your own pope abandon it,” is in fact consistent with what Ratzinger himself already implied decades ago. The irony is Lofton’s contempt for that very idea exposes his own ignorance of modern Catholic ecumenism, even though it’s publicly documented and advanced by the highest levels of his own magisterium.

This is just more evidence of the post-Vatican II apostasy, where even the defenders of the “living magisterium” don’t understand the compromises their popes already made. Ratzinger’s concession confirms the radical disjunction between the pre-Vatican II Church, which taught that the Orthodox were in schism and had to submit to the pope, and the post-Vatican II Church, which says “unity does not mean submission to Vatican I.”

Ratzinger doubled down on this in Principles of Catholic Theology:

“Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than was formulated and lived in the first millennium. When the Patriarch Athenagoras, on July 25, 1967, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit to Phanar, designated him as the successor of St. Peter, as the most esteemed among us, as one who also presides in charity, this great Church leader was expressing the essential content of the doctrine of primacy as it was known in the first millennium. Rome need not ask for more.”

(Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 198–199)

He goes further:

“Reunion could take place in this context if, on the one hand, the East would cease to oppose as heretical the developments that took place in the West in the second millennium and would accept the Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form she had acquired in the course of that development, while, on the other hand, the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox and legitimate in the form she has always had.”

(Ibid., p. 199–200)

Papal Maximalism Meets Papal Minimalism

Pope Leo XIII said it flatly in Satis Cognitum:

“There is no other Catholic Church than that which is built upon the one man, Peter.”

And yet Lofton, who spends his days peddling papal maximalism against Traditionalists, now has to become a papal minimalist whenever the Pope talks to heretics. His job requires him to affirm that the Pope has universal jurisdiction and the fullness of magisterial authority… but that he somehow didn’t mean it when he forgot to mention any of that to the Lutherans he’s hugging in the Apostolic Palace.

This isn’t theology. It’s improv comedy. And it’s long past time we stopped pretending otherwise.

The Real Scandal

The real scandal isn’t that some people noticed Leo XIV’s words sound like a denial of Vatican I. The scandal is that every Vatican II pope, including Ratzinger, has given Protestants and Orthodox the clear impression that Vatican I is optional, if not obsolete. Lofton’s meltdown just proves they have no coherent answer for it.

Closing Advice to the Shipwrecked

The only “fake news” here is pretending Ratzinger never said the quiet part out loud; that Vatican I was no longer a dealbreaker.

And for those still clutching to Lofton’s apologetic life raft, here’s some free advice: when your defense of papal authority requires pretending the Pope didn’t mean what he said, you’ve already lost.