The Problem of a Heretical Pope: a Reply to John Lamont

That a Pope can be a heretic is a historical fact (John XXIII comes to mind), but what to do about it is far above my pay grade. I'll let the experts like Drs Shaw and Lamont work it out.

From One Peter Five

By the Hon. Joseph Shaw, DipTheol, DPhil (Oxon), FRSA, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce

I am in debt to Dr John Lamont for his thorough discussion of the question of papal heresy. It is a problem that does not have a definitive explanation in magisterial texts, but as many important theologians and canonists of past centuries agree, it is one that has to be faced. Contrary to a naïve ultramontanism, it is not impossible for a pope to espouse heretical opinions, and indeed it has happened more than once in the past. The question is, what happens then?

This possibility is in itself not a challenge to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Papal infallibility has been very carefully defined at the First Vatican Council, and naturally it was defined very narrowly. The Pope’s public teaching on matters of faith and morals is guaranteed free from error (not, be it noted, inspired, like Scripture, only preserved from error) when he teaches the whole Church in the most solemn manner. Such teaching is not at issue here. A heretic is a heretic even if he never teaches anything solemnly. I might be a heretic even if I never express my heresy to another human being – although, in that case, no-one would know. The most likely case of papal heresy would be a pope harboring heretical opinions which are expressed in a private capacity, or at least in a less solemn mode of teaching, such as (on the usual historical reading) Pope John XXII teaching from the pulpit against the Particular Judgement in the 14th century.

Dr Lamont’s particular target is the much-followed view of Cajetan and John of St Thomas, that can be summarized rather simply as follows. They accept that a heretic cannot hold office in the Church, since the rejection of the Faith implies self-expulsion from the Church. (This is a theological notion of membership of the Church.) However, except in the most extreme emergencies, members of the Church should be able to rely on apparent office-holders wielding genuine authority, since this has implications for the salvation of souls. So bishops and others in the Church can continue to exercise their offices until such time as they are legally convicted of heresy: that is, denounced by their superiors, perhaps in the context of a canonical trial.

So, suppose you have apostatized or been dabbling in the occult, repent, and go to your local parish priest for absolution. Your priest’s right to hear confessions derives from the jurisdiction of the bishop, and at certain times in the history of the Church these sins would also be ‘reserved’ to the bishop, so the priest would have to go to the bishop to receive authorization before giving you absolution. Suppose this is the 18th century and your bishop is one of those French atheist bishops who took the salary and spent his time with his mistresses in Paris. This being so his long-suffering Vicar General would receive the priest’s request and send him back with the necessary authorization. This process would not be impeded by the bishop’s rejection of the Faith, because legally speaking he is the bishop, and this process is a legal process. Only in the (sadly, unlikely) case of the bishop’s being denounced by the Pope or some other properly constituted superior (such as the judge of a Church court), would the bishop be removed from office for heresy or apostacy.

If we try to apply this way of thinking to the Pope, we have the problem that popes have no human legal superior. They may harbor heresy, like bishops: they are given graces of office and divine guidance, but there have been very wicked popes, and there have been very misguided popes, and there have been popes who denied certain articles of the Faith. A heretical pope would, like the atheist bishop, leave the Church in a theological sense, but not in a legal sense. A heretical pope is harmful to the Church, but there doesn’t seem to be any ‘remedy’ (in the legal sense), no way to remove him.

Cajetan and John of St Thomas suggested the following solution: that some kind of council of bishops or the college of cardinals should denounce the pope’s heresy. They would not be a properly constituted Church court with authority over the pope, but the idea is that what they need to do is not, exactly, to judge the pope, but to point out that he is a heretic: to make it (in the terms used by Dr Lamont), ‘notorious’. This kind of ‘notoriety’ would be sufficient to bring about its legal consequences. If everyone knows, in a somewhat formalized way, then the pope would fall from office.

It is difficult to imagine such a council taking place today, though there are partial precedents from past centuries. But Dr Lamont raises a more fundamental objection. This is that no council or group of Cardinals would have the necessary authority in the absence of the pope himself. Unless the pope cooperated in this process, we are back to the general principle that the Pope can be judged by no-one.

I have not attempted to express this argument in watertight way, because I think Dr Lamont has done so admirably. I was myself attracted to the John of St Thomas position, but I find Dr Lamont’s argument very compelling. Where we diverge is in what Dr Lamont says next. He is strongly motivated by what drove John of St Thomas and others in this debate: that since we are commanded to ‘shun the heretic’ in many scriptural texts, there must be a way of carrying out this command, even when the heretic is pope, and shunning is incompatible with recognizing him as pope.

What he proposes, then, is that the kind of ‘notoriety’ of the heresy that John of St Thomas hoped to establish from some kind of council or assembly of cardinals can actually be established even more easily: not ‘notoriety of law’ but ‘notoriety of fact’, established simply by the matter being sufficiently obvious to well-informed and orthodox Catholics.

There is a lot of theological stuff I don’t need to say about this because my objection is a practical one. If some kind of council or gang of cardinals denounced a pope, then at least the same people would presumably organize a conclave to elect a new pope. This council would in some way, on the John of St Thomas theory, represent a sufficient kind of legal authority in the Church. If Dr Lamont is correct and this attribution of the necessary authority to such a council is impossible (and I agree, it does seem dubious), what is going to happen next?

If, instead, on Dr Lamont’s preferred view, a large body of Catholics agreed that a pope was a heretic and shunned him, and if that was (as he argues) sufficient to establish publicly, legally, that this pope had fallen from office, and if the Pope refused to accept this, what then? A stubborn, heretical pope would very probably be able to reign over a large majority of the Church thanks to timeserving functionaries, people who shared his errors, and the cooperation of secular authorities. As for the rest of the Church, there would be no coherent body of prelates (as per John of St Thomas’ council) who could offer an institutional alternative. This being so, the pope would continue to appoint cardinals and bishops, to pass laws, and do all the things popes do. The next pope would be elected by a mixed body of valid and invalid cardinals. The election itself might be run on the basis of rules which are not validly promulgated. The next person elected might well share the heresy of the previous one. It is not difficult to imagine the Church’s descent into an irretrievable state of confusion, in which the institution of the Papacy would effectively cease to function.

This failure of the papacy as a legal reality in the Church is surely impossible on the Catholic understanding of the indefectibility of the Church, and it is because the classic sede vacantist position implies that this has already happened, that the rest of us reject it. What Dr Lamont’s argument suggests is that it could become the reality, if it ever happened that a sufficient body of Catholics recognized that a pope was a heretic. This solution seems worse than the problem to be solved.

My own solution to the conundrum is this. ‘Shun the heretic’, Dr Lamont points out, is an obligation of divine law. He understands it as the obligation to cease ‘treating him as the legitimate ruler of the Church’: a kind of rebellion. We can always carry out negative obligations such as not killing the innocent, but carrying out positive obligations such as this requires resources which we are not guaranteed to have. As the father of a family, I am obliged to feed my children, but if there is literally no food to be had, I would not be to blame if I failed to do so. There are, in short, some problems that cannot be solved: or that can only be solved by God.

We can have confidence, however, that while God’s wrath may permit our human families to perish, as described so movingly in Jeremiah’s Lamentations, God will not abandon His Church.