WHEN PETER SEEMS TO FAIL: Heresy, the Papacy, the una cum and the limits of private judgement
By HE ✠Jerome Lloyd
There is perhaps no question more capable of exposing the agony of contemporary Catholicism than this: what happens if a Pope becomes a heretic? For traditional Catholics, this is no longer a remote scholastic hypothesis. More than sixty years of doctrinal ambiguity, liturgical upheaval, ecumenical experimentation, moral confusion and disciplinary contradiction have forced the question upon those who would much rather never have had to ask it. Catholics have heard propositions from Rome which appear extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with previous teaching, witnessed ceremonies whose symbolism seems to compromise the unique claims of the Catholic religion, watched principles once stated with crystalline precision dissolved into the language of accompaniment and discernment, and then been assured that all of this constitutes an uninterrupted development of the same Tradition.
From such circumstances there arises a superficially compelling syllogism. If the Pope teaches heresy, then he is a heretic; if he is a heretic, he has separated himself from the Church; if he is outside the Church, he cannot remain her visible head; and if he is no longer Pope, his name should disappear from the Roman Canon and his authority may simply be disregarded. There is genuine theological authority behind part of this reasoning, particularly in St Robert Bellarmine, and it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise. Yet between identifying a proposition as heretical and declaring the Apostolic See vacant there lies an enormous theological, canonical and ecclesiological distance which no amount of private conviction can simply abolish.
The first necessity is therefore to rescue the word heresy from polemical inflation. The Church does not use the term to mean merely theological error, scandal, ambiguity, novelty, deplorable pastoral judgement or even the objective expression of a proposition contrary to revealed truth. Canon 751 defines heresy as the obstinate denial or doubt, after baptism, of a truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith.¹ Two questions must therefore be asked whenever heresy is alleged: does the proposition in question actually contradict a truth proposed by the Church as divinely revealed, and has the person concerned pertinaciously adhered to that denial?
This distinction between material and formal heresy is indispensable. A proposition may be materially heretical because its objective meaning contradicts the Catholic faith while the person who utters it is not thereby proved to be a formal heretic. Formal heresy concerns the man as well as his words; it requires knowledge, will and obstinacy. This is why warnings and corrections possess such importance in the classical theological treatment of heresy. A warning does not magically create pertinacity where none previously existed, and in an extreme case a man’s own words may make his obstinacy evident without any formal process. But where language is ambiguous, qualifications are offered, orthodox professions remain, or several interpretations are possible, correction and refusal to retract become highly relevant evidence in establishing whether the error belongs merely to the proposition or pertinaciously to the person.
This is precisely where St Robert Bellarmine must be read whole rather than converted into a slogan. In De Romano Pontifice he considers several opinions concerning a Pope who falls into heresy and ultimately defends the view that a Pope who becomes a manifest heretic ceases by himself to be Pope and head of the Church, just as he ceases to be a member of the Church.² Bellarmine’s authority deserves the greatest respect. He was a Cardinal, a Doctor of the Church and one of the outstanding defenders of papal primacy against Protestantism. His position therefore disposes at once of the facile neo-ultramontane claim that even contemplating the possibility of a heretical Pope is somehow intrinsically anti-papal.
Yet Bellarmine’s conclusion also exposes the weakness of much facile sedevacantist reasoning, because his operative expression is not merely heretic but manifest heretic. He does not say that a Pope falls from office whenever an individual priest discovers an apparent contradiction in an encyclical, when a theologian applies the censor of heresy to a proposition, or when a group of Catholics becomes morally convinced that papal conduct is incompatible with Tradition. His argument concerns a heresy whose formal character has itself become externally evident, together with a pertinacity so public and unmistakable that the man’s separation from the faith is no longer a matter of theological inference but of manifest fact.
That adjective matters enormously. It marks the difference between a proposition which may objectively contradict the faith and a man whose personal adherence to the contradiction has become so evident that his status within the Church is itself affected. Bellarmine appeals in this context to the Pauline treatment of the heretic who persists after admonition, which helps explain why externally recognisable pertinacity is central to the problem.² A Pope who says something erroneous is not thereby a manifest formal heretic; a Pope who appears to contradict Tradition is not thereby a manifest formal heretic; a Pope who governs scandalously is not thereby a manifest formal heretic. The case requires something more.
Nor was Bellarmine’s answer the sole classical solution. Cajetan assigned a necessary role to the Church in the deposition of a heretical Pope, while John of St Thomas developed a more elaborate account in which an authoritative declaration by the Church precedes the loss of office. Bellarmine rejected important elements of Cajetan’s mechanism, but the existence of such disagreement among major Catholic theologians proves an inconvenient truth for anyone presenting his preferred solution as if it were itself a defined doctrine: the Church has never solemnly defined the precise juridical mechanism by which a Pope who became formally and manifestly heretical would cease to occupy the Roman See.³ Bellarmine may offer the stronger theological solution, but a highly persuasive theological opinion does not become an immediately executable universal law merely because a private individual finds its logic compelling.
History itself warns against simplistic reasoning. Pope Honorius I was posthumously anathematised in connection with the Monothelite controversy by the Third Council of Constantinople, and Pope Leo II confirmed the condemnation while describing Honorius’s fault in terms which have generated centuries of theological discussion.⁴ The episode is important precisely because Catholic theology never solved it by pretending that papal failure in relation to heresy was impossible. Yet neither did the Church conclude retrospectively that Honorius had never been Pope, that his pontificate had secretly been vacant, or that every cleric living during his lifetime should have determined for himself whether to omit him from ecclesial communion. The Honorius controversy ought therefore to make both papal maximalists and sedevacantists considerably more cautious than they sometimes are.
Vatican I likewise defined papal infallibility without defining papal impeccability, inspiration or omniscience. Pastor aeternus teaches that the Roman Pontiff enjoys infallibility when, acting as supreme pastor and teacher of all Christians, he definitively defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the universal Church.⁵ The definition neither says nor implies that every papal sermon, interview, disciplinary enactment, prudential judgement, appointment or non-definitive theological formulation is incapable of error. One may therefore profess the dogma of papal infallibility in its entirety while rejecting the modern caricature which treats every significant papal utterance as though it enjoyed the same theological weight.
The canonical tradition adds another layer of complexity. The 1917 Code stated in canon 188 §4 that an ecclesiastical office became vacant ipso facto et sine ulla declaratione where a cleric publicly defected from the Catholic faith.⁶ Sedevacantists frequently cite this as though the papal question were thereby settled, but the canon concerned public defection and did not define the disputed theological mechanism applying uniquely to the Roman Pontiff. The same Code retained the ancient principle that the First See is judged by no one. The canon is nevertheless important because it demonstrates that Catholic law can recognise circumstances in which loss of office follows an objective fact rather than a later condemnatory sentence.
The 1983 Code expresses the matter somewhat differently. Canon 194 provides that one who has publicly defected from the Catholic faith or from the communion of the Church is removed from ecclesiastical office by the law itself, but adds that the removal may be enforced only once the fact has been established by declaration of competent authority.⁷ Again, this cannot simply be transferred mechanically to the papacy, because canon 1404 retains the fundamental maxim Prima Sedes a nemine iudicatur — the First See is judged by no one.⁸ What these provisions demonstrate, however, is the continuing canonical distinction between an objective fact which may produce consequences by the law itself and the public juridical certainty by which the Church proceeds upon those consequences.
That distinction is vital. It is entirely coherent to hold, with Bellarmine, that a genuinely manifest heretic would cease to be Pope without a judicial sentence being the efficient cause of his loss of office, while simultaneously insisting that Catholics require sufficient public certainty that the condition has actually been fulfilled before they may act as though the See were vacant. A declaration may therefore be declaratory rather than constitutive: it need not make the man a non-Pope in order to establish publicly that the Church may henceforth treat him as such. The decisive question is not merely whether a declaration theoretically causes the vacancy, but how the Church comes to possess the certainty necessary to know that a vacancy exists.
An extreme hypothetical exposes the distinction. Suppose a reigning Pope were publicly to announce that he knowingly rejected the divinity of Christ, expressly acknowledge that the Council of Nicaea and the Catholic Church taught the contrary, declare that he rejected their teaching precisely because he believed it false, persist repeatedly when challenged, and thereafter profess a religion incompatible with Christianity. One would hardly require a canonical tribunal merely to discover what he meant. His apostasy or formal heresy would be manifest in the act itself. Important ecclesiological questions concerning recognition of the vacancy and the subsequent election would remain, but it would be absurd to claim that Catholics could not know the objective fact until some official document had eventually appeared.
That hypothetical also reveals why no post-conciliar Pope can simply be placed in the same category. The controversies of the post-conciliar period are serious precisely because they involve teachings and practices which frequently appear to contradict or undermine what the Church previously taught, while the same Popes simultaneously continue to profess the Catholic Creed, invoke previous doctrine and deny that they are changing the faith. That combination may be profoundly destabilising, intellectually incoherent and pastorally catastrophic, but it is not identical to the imagined Pope who explicitly tells the Church that he knows a revealed dogma and rejects it precisely as false.
John Paul II’s Assisi gathering in 1986 remains one of the starkest examples of post-conciliar religious confusion. Representatives of numerous religions were invited to Assisi for prayer for peace and permitted to pray according to their own rites in separate places before gathering together.⁹ The spectacle could scarcely avoid suggesting a practical equivalence among religions and therefore occasioned entirely legitimate traditional Catholic criticism. Yet John Paul II simultaneously professed faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour and subsequently continued to teach explicitly the unique and universal salvific mediation of Christ. One may condemn the event as scandalous, unprecedented and conducive to indifferentism without pretending that it supplied an explicit and pertinacious denial by John Paul II that Jesus Christ is the unique Saviour.
The pontificate of Francis presents considerably harder cases, and any argument against sedevacantism which survives only by sanitising them is not worth making. The Abu Dhabi Document on Human Fraternity declared that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions” are willed by God in His wisdom, placing religious plurality in the same sentence as colour, sex, race and language.¹⁰ In the natural sense of the words, the formulation is extremely grave. God may permissively will the existence of religious error within His providential government of a fallen world, but He cannot positively will false religion as false religion in the same way that He positively wills created human diversity. To collapse that distinction is at least to express a proposition capable of an objectively heterodox, and arguably materially heretical, meaning.
Yet the relevant question for the papal office does not end once that theological criticism has been made. Did Francis thereby make manifest that he knowingly rejected a dogma of divine and Catholic faith and pertinaciously adhered to its contradiction? The case is complicated by subsequent resort to the distinction between God’s positive and permissive will and by Francis’s continued public profession of Christianity. One may reasonably judge the original wording intolerable and its clarification inadequate without thereby proving that the man had externally manifested the formal pertinacity demanded by the canonical definition of heresy. The gravity of a proposition and the juridical certainty of the author’s formal heresy are related questions, but they are not identical.
Amoris laetitia creates another formidable difficulty. The bishops of the Buenos Aires pastoral region interpreted chapter eight as permitting, in certain cases, sacramental access for divorced-and-remarried persons who continued in a relationship more uxorio, and Francis replied that their criteria fully explained the meaning of the chapter and that there were no other interpretations.¹¹ This generated a conflict not invented by traditionalists but inherent in the practical implications of the teaching. The perennial principles concerning adultery, repentance, absolution, worthy reception of Holy Communion and the impossibility of treating intrinsically evil acts as morally acceptable cannot be altered by pastoral discernment.
Here again, however, precision matters. Francis did not formally proclaim that adultery is good, that grave sin is compatible with sanctifying grace regardless of repentance, or that God commands what His law forbids. The mechanism operates instead through subjective culpability, mitigating circumstances and individual discernment. One may contend that this mechanism effectively hollows out the objective moral law while verbally retaining it, and that criticism deserves serious theological consideration. It still does not render formal heresy manifest in the uncomplicated Bellarminian sense, because the disputed proposition must be extracted through theological reasoning from a system which simultaneously denies abandoning the traditional moral doctrine.
The same phenomenon appears in Fiducia supplicans. The declaration expressly permits blessings of “couples in irregular situations” and “couples of the same sex,” while at the same time insisting that the Church’s perennial doctrine of marriage remains unchanged and that such blessings neither legitimate the relationship nor approximate to a marriage rite.¹² There is an obvious conceptual problem here: persons are identified as a couple precisely through the relationship joining them, and therefore blessing the couple while professing not to bless the relationship appears to depend upon a distinction without an adequate difference. The resulting practice is capable of giving enormous scandal and communicating an ecclesial acceptance which the formal doctrinal disclaimers deny.
Nevertheless, even such glaring contradiction does not automatically answer the separate question of formal heresy and loss of office. A document may be pastorally disastrous, theologically incoherent and destructive in practical effect while continuing to contain propositions by which its authors formally deny the very doctrinal conclusion their policy appears to encourage. That paradox is not a reason to excuse the document; it is precisely why the contemporary crisis is harder than the neat categories favoured by both neo-ultramontanists and sedevacantists.
Nor should the seriousness of unanswered corrections be ignored. Formal questions, dubia and theological criticisms directed to Francis increased rather than diminished the gravity of the crisis, because continued ambiguity after correction can become relevant evidence in assessing pertinacity. Yet even here theological discipline is required. Pertinacity concerns obstinate adherence to a proposition known to contradict a truth of divine and Catholic faith; it is not established merely because a Pope refuses to answer critics, declines to resolve an ambiguity, or persists with a policy whose theological consequences his opponents regard as obvious. Such behaviour may be culpable, reckless and gravely scandalous without supplying the same evidence as an explicit declaration that a defined dogma is known and rejected.
With Pope Leo XIV the argument must become more restrained still. His pontificate may properly be scrutinised for its continuation of synodality, its treatment of the traditional liturgy, its handling of the legacy of Francis and its fidelity or otherwise to the perennial Magisterium. Yet he also publicly professes the central mysteries of the Catholic faith and speaks of Christ as the fulfilment of divine revelation. Whatever criticisms may arise concerning particular acts of his government, there is presently no serious basis for asserting that Leo XIV has become a manifest formal heretic, still less a manifest apostate. To transfer automatically to him the most radical conclusions drawn against his predecessor would itself exemplify the substitution of presumption for evidence which this discussion must resist.
This brings us to the una cum, where abstract theological speculation becomes concrete liturgical action. In the Roman Canon the celebrant prays una cum famulo tuo Papa nostro N., naming the reigning Roman Pontiff; when the Holy See is vacant, the papal reference is omitted.¹³ The Pope’s name is not included because the celebrant admires him, agrees with his policies, regards every papal judgement as prudent or treats every non-infallible statement as irreformable. It is included because this is the man publicly recognised as Roman Pontiff with whom the Church remains in visible hierarchical communion.
To remove the Pope’s name from the Canon is therefore qualitatively different from criticising, resisting or even accusing him of grave doctrinal error. The priest who deliberately omits the universally recognised Pontiff because he has concluded that heresy has deprived him of office is liturgically acting upon a judgement that the Apostolic See is vacant. He is no longer saying merely, “the Pope is wrong,” but effectively, “this man is not Pope.” Such a conclusion may conceivably be true in the hypothetical case discussed by Bellarmine, but its magnitude demands something more than a theological inference which remains disputed among Catholics of good faith.
This is the weakness at the heart of much contemporary sedevacantism. It begins with an entirely legitimate refusal to call contradiction truth, but too easily concludes by transferring to the private theologian the authority which it rightly refuses to attribute absolutely to the Pope. The neo-ultramontane says that if Rome has said something, the Catholic must somehow discover why it is orthodox; the radical sedevacantist says that if he has demonstrated Rome to be wrong, he may conclude that Rome is vacant. The former risks making papal authority superior to Tradition; the latter risks making private judgement superior to the visible constitution of the Church.
The recognise-and-resist position is harder precisely because it refuses both simplifications. It insists that papal authority is real while denying that it is absolute, that obedience is a Catholic virtue while denying that obedience requires cooperation with error or sin, and that the Roman Pontiff must be recognised while refusing to transform recognition into theological servility. A Pope may govern badly, promote dangerous men, speak ambiguously, issue defective disciplinary measures and even utter propositions requiring theological correction without thereby ceasing automatically and demonstrably to occupy his office. Conversely, Catholics do not acquire a duty to assent to contradiction merely because it proceeds from a man who truly occupies the Chair of Peter.
This distinction accords better with the Catholic understanding of authority than either extreme. Authority derives from God and is therefore ordered towards truth and the common good; it does not possess the metaphysical capacity to make falsehood true. At the same time, authority remains objective rather than dependent upon the continuing approval of each subject. A father does not cease to be a father because he behaves badly, a bishop does not cease to be bishop whenever one of his priests judges his policies destructive, and a Pope does not cease to be Pope merely because Catholics can demonstrate grave failures in his government. Loss of office may occur under the conditions established by divine or ecclesiastical law, but the individual subject does not create that loss by becoming convinced that it has occurred.
The post-conciliar crisis therefore presents traditional Catholics with a more difficult trial than either papolatry or sedevacantism admits. The trial is not merely to preserve the faith against obvious enemies, but to remain faithful when those holding legitimate authority themselves appear to obscure what they are bound to defend. It demands the intellectual honesty to call error error without acquiring the presumption to settle unresolved questions of ecclesiastical fact by private authority. It requires us to distinguish between an indefectible Church and indefectible churchmen, between an infallible charism and an impeccable pontificate, between communion and agreement, between obedience and servility, between resistance and rebellion.
The Passion ought to make such a possibility less psychologically impossible for Christians than it sometimes appears. Peter could deny Christ; the Apostles could flee; Judas could remain numbered among the Twelve until his betrayal; Caiaphas could prophesy by virtue of an office he was simultaneously abusing. Sacred office and personal fidelity have never been synonyms. The divine constitution of the Church is not disproved because those entrusted with its offices can fail catastrophically in the exercise of them.
For that reason traditional Catholics should resist every attempt to silence legitimate criticism by invoking the papacy, but they should resist with equal firmness the temptation to solve the crisis simply by declaring the papacy absent. If a proposition contradicts Catholic doctrine, it should be exposed by comparison with Revelation and the perennial Magisterium. If a practice encourages sacrilege, it should be opposed. If an ecumenical gesture obscures the uniqueness of the Catholic religion, its danger should be named. If pastoral policy makes mortal sin appear compatible with Christian discipleship, the moral law should be proclaimed without apology. If Rome persecutes the traditional Roman liturgy, that injustice should be documented and resisted. None of these duties requires the Catholic to pretend that he possesses jurisdiction to decide on behalf of the universal Church who is and is not the Roman Pontiff.
Here res sunt quod sunt becomes more than a useful maxim. Things are what they are, and reality cannot be manipulated to save a preferred ecclesiology. A materially heretical proposition does not become orthodox because a Pope says it, but neither does it become proof of formal pertinacity merely because a traditionalist condemns it. A scandalous ceremony does not become harmless because Vatican officials supply an explanation, but neither does it become apostasy simply because photographs of it are shocking. A disastrous pontificate does not become good because the Church is indefectible, but neither does an indefectible Church become sedevacant because a pontificate is disastrous.
The conclusion is therefore neither evasive nor comfortable. A Pope could, in principle, become so manifestly and pertinaciously heretical that, according to Bellarmine’s highly authoritative theological opinion, he would cease to be Pope before a subsequent declaration formally recognised the fact. A condemnatory sentence is therefore not necessarily what causes the loss of office. But no post-conciliar Pope has yet manifested formal heresy with such uncontested public certainty that individual priests may safely convert that conclusion into an ecclesial fact, strike the recognised Pontiff from the una cum, and proceed as though the universal Church were demonstrably without a Pope.
This conclusion does not acquit the post-conciliar papacy of its failures; it makes the indictment more credible because it refuses to claim more than the evidence proves. Assisi remains Assisi, Abu Dhabi remains Abu Dhabi, Amoris laetitia remains what its text and authorised interpretation say, and Fiducia supplicans remains the scandal that it is. Catholics need no exaggeration to demonstrate the enormity of the present crisis. Exaggeration ultimately serves the defenders of the status quo by allowing them to dismiss legitimate traditional criticism as the product of ecclesiological extremism.
The Catholic course is therefore more severe than blind obedience and more disciplined than sedevacantism. We must recognise legitimate authority without divinising it, resist error without appointing ourselves judges of the Apostolic See, preserve Tradition without converting Tradition into private judgement, and pray for Peter even when Peter causes us grief. Should the unimaginable day come when a Roman Pontiff openly rejects defined Catholic dogma, acknowledges that he is rejecting it and persists so manifestly that his separation from the faith is no longer reasonably disputable, the Church will face the terrible question foreseen by Bellarmine and the other classical theologians. Until that day, theological possibility must not be mistaken for established ecclesiastical fact.
The Chair of Peter is not defended by pretending that its occupants cannot fail, and it is not defended by declaring the Chair empty whenever they do. The harder fidelity is to hold both truths simultaneously: Peter possesses real authority, and Peter is bound by the faith he received. When authority is abused, we resist the abuse; when doctrine is obscured, we profess the doctrine; when novelty contradicts Tradition, we remain with Tradition; but where the Church has not acquired the public certainty necessary to recognise a vacancy, we do not manufacture one for ourselves.
In an age in which private judgement has become sovereign in almost every sphere of human life, traditional Catholics must take particular care not to imitate the revolution they oppose merely by reversing its conclusions. The progressive makes himself judge of Catholic doctrine and retains only what he finds acceptable; the sedevacantist temptation is to make oneself judge of ecclesiastical office and retain only those authorities whose claims survive one’s private tribunal. Catholic resistance must be of another kind: reverent without being servile, courageous without being presumptuous, intellectually exact without becoming rationalistic, and rooted in the conviction that truth requires neither denial nor exaggeration.
Our duty in this extraordinary crisis is therefore neither to surrender reason nor to exceed authority. It is to hold the faith, expose contradiction, resist error, refuse sacrilege, pray for the Roman Pontiff, and await the judgement of the Church where an ecclesial judgement is required. That may be less emotionally satisfying than declaring the entire problem solved by an empty chair, but Catholic fidelity has never been measured by the psychological relief afforded by its conclusions. It is measured by fidelity to truth, to order and to the Church as Christ constituted her, even when bearing that fidelity becomes a cross.
¹ Code of Canon Law (1983), can. 751.
² St Robert Bellarmine SJ, De Romano Pontifice, Book II, ch. 30.
³ Thomas de Vio Cajetan, De Comparatione Auctoritatis Papae et Concilii; St Robert Bellarmine SJ, De Romano Pontifice, II.30; John of St Thomas, Cursus Theologicus, II-II, q. 1, disp. 2, art. 3.
⁴ Third Council of Constantinople, Session XIII and subsequent conciliar acts concerning Pope Honorius I; confirmation under Pope Leo II.
⁵ First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus, ch. IV, 18 July 1870.
⁶ Code of Canon Law (1917), can. 188 §4.
⁷ Code of Canon Law (1983), can. 194 §§1–2.
⁸ Code of Canon Law (1983), can. 1404.
⁹ John Paul II, Addresses at the World Day of Prayer for Peace, Assisi, 27 October 1986.
¹⁰ Francis and Ahmad al-Tayyeb, Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, Abu Dhabi, 4 February 2019.
¹¹ Francis, Letter concerning the Buenos Aires interpretation of Amoris laetitia, 5 September 2016; Acta Apostolicae Sedis 108 (2016), 1071–1074.
¹² Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Fiducia supplicans, 18 December 2023.
¹³ Missale Romanum, Ritus servandus in celebratione Missae, VIII, 2.
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