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While the sede of St. Peter remains officially vacante for the next couple of days at least, it’s a unique moment to reflect very frankly on the painful pontificate of Francis without fear of being labeled a sedevacantist. In a recent op-ed for OnePeterFive, Danielle Heckenkamp urged Catholics not to “focus on the confusion and the errors of the past twelve years” and to instead marvel that God’s grace has moved amidst this darkness, notably in the “acceptance of orthodox Catholic teaching [that] has exploded under the pontificate of Pope Francis.” Although she is certainly correct on the second point, I would argue that, on the contrary, it is essential for Catholics to make sense of what the Church has endured for the past decade to avoid falling into the trap of another umpteen years of “recognize and resist” Francis 2.0.
This week on May 7, about 130 cardinals will vote on a successor for Francis. Within days, perhaps, a new Pope will be elected. He will assume the role of earthly head of the Catholic Church, and Catholics will be required to submit to his authority, “to acknowledge [him] as Father, Pastor, and Universal Teacher, and be united with him in mind and heart.” No amount of hype on social media about Cardinal Robert Sarah is going to change the outcome. Indeed, if the attention Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is currently receiving in the corporate press is any guide at all, the next successor of St. Peter is less likely to be an orthodox prelate from Guinea, and more likely to be the individual who, with Pope Francis, allowed disgraced former cardinal, the late Theodore McCarrick, to help hash out the infamous Vatican-China accord.
The stakes shouldn’t be this high. There is a temptation to treat the conclave as something in between a presidential campaign and a horse race, with favorites and front runners and underdogs. Catholics should shun discourse that categorizes candidates as “moderates” or “conservatives” or “liberals.” Such labels are an illusion: one is either Catholic, or one is not. One either embraces orthodoxy, or lapses into heterodoxy. One is either faithful to Catholic dogma, or is instead seduced by heresy. One either steadfastly perseveres in the faith, or apostatizes.
Unlike a change in a political administration, the election of a new pope does not – or at least, should not – herald a change in Catholic dogma. The Pope receives and safeguards the precious deposit of faith; he may need to articulate or clarify it, but he doesn’t get to overhaul, revamp, or modernize it. Hence in the normal course of events, Catholics would be approaching the next pontificate with a “business as usual” mentality: same teachings, different pope.
And yet who can honestly say that they feel that way? After Francis’ pontificate, there is understandably a desperate yearning for correction and cleansing. Anyone who follows my writing knows I’ve had plenty to say about Pope Francis over the past several years. None of it has been positive. I criticized what became over the years his trademark equivocation on human sexuality and marriage. I lamented his malicious targeting of the Tridentine Liturgy and the supercilious spurning of Traditional Catholics who prefer the orthodoxy, reverence, and rightly-ordered worship of the ancient rite, to the lukewarm preaching and liturgical calamities and abuses of the Novus Ordo. I denounced his hobnobbing with the who’s-who of pro-abortionists, globalists, depopulation junkies, transgender surgery advocates, and climate change alarmists. I mourned his treatment of honorable bishops like Joseph Strickland – and yes, I’ll go around that buoy once again – for reasons that never saw the light of day.
I reported on how serial sex abuser McCarrick had scandalously been allowed to act as unofficial wheeler and dealer for the Vatican in working out the elusive terms of the China-Vatican agreement. I amplified the eerie warnings of George Neumayr, late editor of the American Spectator, who was concerned that McCarrick, even after his fall from grace, was continuing to pull strings behind the scenes via “Teddy’s Nephews”, even to the point of influencing the next conclave.
Most of all, I rejected Francis’ embrace of religious indifferentism, and his scandalous undermining of the kingship of Christ, as expressed in the 2019 Abu Dhabi document on human fraternity, his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, and more recently in comments made during an interreligious meeting with young people in Singapore.
Yet despite my outspoken censuring of Pope Francis, I’ve struggled in private to make sense of the whole Francis dilemma. I couldn’t rationalize it for my husband when he was preparing to convert. I am at a loss to explain Francis to my Protestant friends and colleagues. I avoid the topic entirely with my children for fear of casting aspersions on the throne of Peter and undermining the papacy.
Indeed, that’s precisely what the incessant rebuking and reprimanding – mine included – have done to the papacy. Catholics who spent the twelve-year pontificate of Jorge Bergoglio paradoxically recognizing and resisting his authority, have unwittingly perpetuated an absurdity of epic proportions: How can a Catholic unquestioningly and obediently follow the Vicar of Rome, and yet disregard pretty well every word that emanates from the Pontiff’s mouth?
Catholic writers learned, of course, how to dress up the language in as charitable a manner as possible: Francis’ “un-Catholic teaching;” his “deviation from Catholic doctrine;” the Pope’s “departure from core dogma.” I know these euphemisms well because I’ve availed myself of all of them.
Yet the point of the flowery language is to mask the malodor of papal heresy. Now we come to the material point, which was succinctly encapsulated in a syllogism formulated in a recent objection to Dr. John Lamont’s essay on the consequences of Francis’ theology:
No true pope is a notorious heretic.
But Francis is a notorious heretic.
Therefore, Francis is not the true pope.
I applaud the use of formal logic to attempt to reason through the Francis fiasco, but it was a shame that neither the article nor Dr. Lamont’s subsequent response adequately analyzed the syllogism in question. Instead, the anonymous author, in a futile effort to counter the Lamont argument, proffered a range of competing syllogisms, whose validity in all but one case was questionable. For the Lamont argument to be proven unsound, it must be shown to be invalid and/or untrue in itself. Now, according to the rules of formal logic, this syllogism certainly is valid, so the only way to reject the argument as unsound is for one or both of the premises to be proven false. If this cannot be done, then the conclusion must be true as it necessarily follows from the premises.
So can the premises in the aforementioned syllogism be proven untrue? Is the major premise “no Pope is a heretic” false? Here’s where Catholics usually appeal to St. Robert Bellarmine or trot out the flawed example of Pope John XXII, whose incorrect musings on the beatific vision did not expressly contradict doctrine as dogma on the matter was only later settled in a papal bull by Benedict XII. In any case, the sermons were expressed as private opinion, were not intended to contradict scripture, and were retracted before the pope’s death.
The superior and peculiarly overlooked authority is Pope Paul IV’s 1559 Papal Bull Cum ex apostolatus, issued during the reformation to counter false prophets “disseminat[ing] error from positions of authority” and to guard against the manifestation of “the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by the prophet Daniel, in the holy place.”
This document, intended to “remain valid in perpetuity,” provides that “the Roman Pontiff, who is the representative upon earth of God …. who may judge all and be judged by none in this world, may nonetheless be contradicted if he be found to have deviated from the Faith.” The elevation or promotion of any bishop, including the Roman Pontiff, who falls into heresy, even if that elevation shall have been uncontested and by the unanimous assent of all the Cardinals, “shall be null, void and worthless” and “each and all of their words, deeds, actions and enactments, howsoever made, and anything whatsoever to which these may give rise, shall be without force.”
What about the minor premise? Is the statement “Francis is a heretic” untrue? This is typically the point where the popesplainers bleat about mistranslations and context, while the tradsplainers split hairs about material versus formal heresy, and ex cathedra statements. Yet if one were to only consider Francis’ position on the apparently God-willed plurality of religions, without even touching on his dubious record on human sexuality and adultery, the conclusion would be inexorable; for the Gospels are crystal clear on this point. When in John 6:28 the Jews ask Jesus what they shall do “that [they] may work the works of God,” Jesus answers unequivocally: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he hath sent.” Everything else flows from this point. If you omit Christ, you omit God. Or as Our Lord himself warned in John 5:23, “he who honoreth not the Son, honoreth not the Father, who hath sent him.” Hence to oppose the scriptural basis underpinning this pivotal teaching of the universal Church is not simply anti-Catholic; it’s literally anti-Christic.
Understandably, this is an uncomfortable place for Catholics. They are far more at ease pointing out the speck of heresy in the eye of their Protestant neighbors, and even other lay Catholics, than they are hauling away the rotting log of apostasy festering away in the marshes of their own hierarchy. In 2023, Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois gingerly waded into these waters when in an op-ed for First Things he floated the possibility, entirely consistent with Paul IV, “that prelates holding the office of diocesan bishop in the Catholic Church may be separated or not in full communion because of heresy.”
Time is slipping away. If the question of Francis’ alleged heresy is not thoroughly investigated by competent authorities, as Austrian philosopher Dr. Josef Seifert urged in last week’s open letter to the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Dean Gian Battista Re, the forthcoming papal conclave, 80 percent of which are Francis-appointed cardinals, risks the stain of invalidity or illegitimacy. This question is ultimately for the Church authorities to decide, and no member of the laity can claim it has been decided even in the case of such a dubium. Nevertheless, we must as the question.
For my part, I don’t know that I can hit reset and spend the next ten or fifteen or twenty years ludicrously explaining to my children, to would-be converts, to the public at large, how Catholics are bound to unquestioningly submit to the Pope, but only if he’s an orthodox one. This is exhausting and self-defeating. The question of Papal heresy must be addressed. This situation is poisoning the papacy, weakening the authority of the Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church, bewildering and dividing the laity, reducing the upcoming conclave to a grubby campaign rally, and setting the stage for another rinse-and-repeat, recognize and resist rebellion.
