“Since the Church can declare the Pontiff a person to be avoided, she can induce in that person a disposition without which the pontificate cannot stand” (John of St Thomas)
In part one we saw the long-standing consensus that a pope can lose the papacy on account of heresy. As St Robert Bellarmine says: “The Church’s condition would be wretched, were she forced to take a manifest prowling wolf as her shepherd.” However, there is not perfect agreement about how the loss of the papacy takes place. We must put aside the theory toyed with by certain late mediaeval theologians, that an ecumenical council is superior to a pope and therefore can depose him. This is incompatible with Vatican I’s definition of the pope’s universal jurisdiction. There is no power in the Church on earth superior to the pope’s. We are therefore left with two main theories.
The first is that of Bellarmine and of modern sedevacantists. Bellarmine argued that a pope ceases to be pope by the mere fact of being a public heretic. It is of divine law, he argues, that a public heretic automatically loses any right to govern the Church. He supports this view partly from reason, partly from patristic quotations. By reason he argues that a public heretic is not a Christian, therefore not a member of the Church, therefore not its head. From the Fathers, he cites, for example, St Cyprian’s declaration that Novatian lost jurisdiction from the mere fact of his schism, and Pope St Celestine’s declaration that the excommunications carried out by Nestorius after he had started preaching Nestorianism were of no effect.
The second opinion is that of Cajetan, John of St Thomas, Banez, St Alphonsus, Billuart and Journet. This holds that a manifestly heretical pope is not automatically deposed but should be deposed, if he remains incorrigible after two admonitions. John of St Thomas argues that Bellarmine’s position would lead to intolerable disorder. He writes:
A heretic must be avoided after two corrections, that is, after corrections that have been juridically made by the authority of the Church, and not according to private judgement. For great confusion would follow in the Church, if it sufficed that a correction be performed by a private person – without the declaration by the Church of the manifest heresy and without her indicating to everyone that they should avoid this pope – for everyone to be obliged to avoid him. For the heresy of a pope could not be made known to all the faithful except by the report of others; but such reports would not create any juridical obligation that everyone should believe them and avoid him. Therefore, it is necessary that just as the Church juridically proposes the pope to everyone by electing him, so also must she depose him by declaring him and indicating him to be a heretic who must be avoided (Cursus Theologicus, De auct. Summ. Pont. disp. 2 art. 3, XXVI).
He thus forestalls the modern sedevacantist enterprise. To Bellarmine’s arguments, he says, first, that while a heretical pope is not a Christian with respect to himself, he is with respect to us. We could perhaps say that whether or not we call such a man a Christian, he can still have jurisdiction over Christians since this comes to him from Christ independently of his own spiritual state. To the argument from the Fathers, John replies that they simply intended to say that heresy by itself was sufficient without any further crime to deprive a man of jurisdiction, but not that no kind of declaration by the Church was necessary. We can add that in the case of a man like Novatian who actually founds another church, the simple refusal of Catholic bishops to communicate with such a man is an adequate declaration of his loss of jurisdiction. As for Nestorius’s excommunications of his opponents, these were presumably invalid not because he had lost jurisdiction automatically from his heresy, but because the people whom he excommunicated, being orthodox, had not committed a crime for which they could be excommunicated.
But this still leaves two questions: (a) how is it possible for ‘the Church’ to depose a pope, when the pope is the head of the Church on earth; and (b) whom do we mean by ‘the Church’ here?
The difficulty of (a) is probably what causes Bellarmine to speak of an automatic self-deposition. But as John of St Thomas points out, that would lead to great confusion. So John makes a subtle distinction. No one earth directly removes the papacy from a pope, as the pope may directly remove episcopal jurisdiction from a bishop. Rather, ‘the Church’, by the official declaration of incorrigible heresy, causes the man who is the pope to have a certain property, namely the property of ‘having to be avoided’, which is by divine law incompatible with possessing the papacy. Therefore, when the man who is the pope comes to have this property, then Christ, as the pope’s superior, removes the papacy from him. For Christ commands us not to avoid the pope; but divine law, promulgated in Titus 3, commands us to avoid an incorrigible heretic, duly declared; therefore, since Christ cannot contradict Himself, He will remove the papacy from an incorrigible heretic. ‘The Church’ therefore deposes the heretical pope not directly but indirectly. John says that the Church does it ‘dispositively’, meaning that it introduces into the man who is the pope a disposition with which the papacy cannot stand.
We might draw an analogy from the ‘Law of Jealousy’ in the Old Testament. According to Numbers 5, a husband who suspects his wife of adultery has the right to bring her before a priest and oblige her to drink ritually cursed water. If she is innocent, nothing will happen, but if she is guilty, her belly will swell and her thigh rot. It is a unique law, I think: a standing promise of a miracle.
Let us suppose that a husband gives his wife the water to drink and her belly swells and her thigh rots. Can we say that he had the power to take her health from her? Strictly, no, since his action was not the cause of, but only the occasion for, the swelling and the putrescence. God alone was the cause of it. Even though no other created cause intervenes between the giving of the water and the departure of the woman’s good health, the husband is only an indirect and dispositive cause of what happens to her.
So with the deposition of a pope. The Church, after two fruitless corrections, can declare a pope to be an incorrigible heretic. This is equivalent to the giving of the water to the adulteress. Then, not by the Church’s power but by God’s, the papacy would fall from that man. The Church’s declaration is only the occasion and not strictly the cause of the loss of the papal office.
But that still leaves question (b): who exactly counts as ‘the Church’, in such a case. I’ll consider that in part III.
(to be continued)
September 18, 2016 at 2:55 pm
Very important post, I look forward to the final part.
September 18, 2016 at 4:37 pm
I do believe the crux of the matter lies in the definition of membership in the Church, where John of St. Thomas, Billuart, Garrigou-Lagrange et alia take up the position of Suarez (revived in the 19th century by Franzelin) against Bellarmin … and surely, to even the odds, one might add scholars like Billot, Tromp or Fenton to the modern Bellarmin-team. This might all be well, hadn’t Pius XII. not be so specific in adopting the Bellarminian definition in Mystici Corporis. As membership in the Church, being a juridical society, depends upon publicly professing the true faith … one leaves the Church ipso facto be professing not to believe those things proposed by the Church, to paraphrase Billot contra Cajetan here. It matters not whether one is an occult heretic, as membership doesn’t depend on the internal virtue of faith, as the Suarezians would have it (and were therefore forced to find a solution there).
(Being myself a die hard Thomist of the strict observance, I had a hard time to face the facts here, but who knows, maybe you’ll re-convert me).
September 23, 2016 at 5:49 pm
What do you think of the theological opinion that the pope can still possess jurisdiction even though he has ceased to be a member of the Church?
September 26, 2016 at 12:03 pm
Well, at first I’d ask where that idea is coming from. If it is, like Cajetan argues, that you’ve lost your membership card already through merely internal heresy, a sin against the virtue of faith … (which I don’t think is tenable after Mystici Corporis) … then I’ll say: sure, it is like Garrigou-Lagrange says in commenting on the gratia capitis: “his [i.e., the pope’s] headship of the visible Church by jurisdiction and power is compatible with private heresy.” But as you can see, and this is also what Billot proves in his ecclesiological tract, the whole Cajetanian premise rests on the assumption that we are dealing with a sin against the virtue of faith in the internal forum. One might say that the Bellarminian position isn’t even strictly opposed to Cajetan/John of St. Thomas, as they hardly even touch the same subject.
For all other matters, I’d go with what Bellarmin describes as the position of all the ancient fathers, namely, that jurisdiction is radically incompatible with manifest heresy.
September 26, 2016 at 4:42 pm
There is an analogy for the non-Catholic priest who hears confessions validly; he has jurisdiction even though he is not a member of the Church. He could even be an apostate. Modern canon law seems to support John’s position v. Bellarmine’s here, as it says that loss of office requires that the heresy be declared.
September 23, 2016 at 12:14 pm
[…] is a well-established theological opinion that a pope can lose his office because of heresy, and next, that this loss of office could be authoritatively declared without implying that anyone in the […]
September 28, 2016 at 2:12 pm
An analogy is an analogy, but there still is quite a gap between jurisdiction habitual and ordinary and jurisdiction supplied and transitory. But one might, of course, say that for each “pontifical act” of said heretical Roman Pontiff, jurisdiction is supplied. A rather strange idea, though.
It certainly is true that modern canon law does not supports Bellarmin view, at least prima facie. Da Silveira provides a good solution to that problem.