Pope and Russian Orthodox Church

[Anastasios]

It's my understanding that if the Pope becomes a heretic they are the ones who declare the see vacant. Can someone check Ott?

anastasios

[Joe Zollars]

I threw away my Code of Canon Law, but somehow I doupt that it would be anyone who would publically make the decleration that the see is vacant. As Mor said they only have power in sofar as the "pope" gives it to 'em. He can take it away anytime he wants and then play the cult of the pope element against the CDF and teh Curia and be done with it.

Perhaps this says something about the romanist church alltogether, but I am not inteligent enough to expound it here.

Joe Zollars

[Mor Ephrem]

It's my understanding that if the Pope becomes a heretic they are the ones who declare the see vacant. Can someone check Ott?

anastasios

Dear Anastasios,

I can check Ott this weekend when I go home, but, while I could be wrong, I doubt he'll say something like this. In order for the Cardinals to declare the Roman See vacant in the above example, they would have to be able to judge the occupant of that See. But the occupant of that See is the highest spiritual and legal authority in the Roman Catholic Church, and no one has the authority in the RC system to judge a Pope but God--not the Cardinals, not the Synod of Bishops, no one.

This sets up a problem. Bellarmine and others seem to admit the possibility that a Pope can become a heretic, and they provide provisions for such a case [contrary to what I originally thought (that they provide for the deposition of such a Pope), it seems that none of these guys actually allowed for that, but merely for a form of non-cooperation, a type of civil disobedience if you will]. I personally don't see how a Pope can become a heretic now that papal infallibility has been dogmatised. If one is a heretic only privately, without revealing heresy publically, no one would ever know, so the heresy involved must be made public by the Pope. Granted, such heresy may not be proclaimed ex cathedra when it's revealed, but there is a line of argument that says that because of PI being dogmatised as it is, the only logical conclusion is that a Pope can never become a heretic, ex cathedra or not. I think Bulgakov covers this in Vatican Dogma, but I can't remember exactly what he said right now, my brain is fried.

Interestingly, the Code of Canon Law doesn't provide for the vacancy of the Roman See for anything other than the death of a Pope. In other circumstances, there is mention of the "special laws" laid down for emergency circumstances. I'd like to see these laws myself, but there is no reason to suspect from the Canons that they deal with heresy as much as they deal with, for example, how the Cardinals are to govern the Church in the event that a Pope is kidnapped and cannot exercise his duty.

I'll check Ott ASAP.

[Seraphim Reeves]

The key problem with trying to examine the possibility in Catholicism of a Pope becoming a "heretic" (from their perspective) and what could be done about it, etc., is that it is a dillema (for Roman Catholics) complicated by their 1000 year history of incredible innovation.

Simply put, the Papacy has grown (both in practice and as a matter of Latin dogma) in power throughout the centuries, so some of the "old contingencies" that may even be on the books somewhere are undoubtedly "no longer valid" from an RC perspective.

For example, the RCC had a crisis in the centuries following it's schism with the Church of Christ, in which there were multiple rival claimants (at any given time) to the Papal office. Besides the apologetical implications for the validity of Papism (what good is an "infallible super Bishop" when you cannot be certain who he in fact is?) as a "quick fix" for ecclessiastical problems, there is the issue of how this problem was ultimatly solved. It was solved by a Latin council, in which the council (with a heavy hand from the Holy Roman Emperor) decided who the "real Pope" was.

The irony is, this same "Pope" would go onto declare that the principle of "concilliarism" (as being the ultimate "magisterium" of the Latin church) is heretical, re-asserting the "hard won" new powers of the "See of Peter" - powers which, oddly enough (of themself) were impotent to solve the "anti-Pope" problem.

This implicit negation of the whole notion of objective, timeless truth, smacks of what we now call "legal positivism" (whatever the given "authority" at the moment says, is "our truth"); which should show anyone (particularly RC traditionalists, for whom I have a lot of sympathy) that "modernism" and "the spirit of innovation" did not begin with Vatican II, but underlies the whole reason why the Papacy (and those who submit to her) is a schism in the first place.

Even in the 20th century, the "trend" of increasing liberalization did not begin with John XXIII, but earlier. For example, it was Pius XII, not a Vatican II Pope, who got rid of the "from the midnight before communion" fast. Still earlier than this (by centuries), it was under very "pre-Vat II" Popes that the ordinary form of baptism was altered (from immersion to pouring), and earlier still, that leavened bread was traded for azymes in the Mass. If one is truly a "traditionalist", then these too have to be recognized as major abbherations in praxis, not just the more recent changes.

Given all of these things, expecting Papism to have some consistant principle by which it can examine itself, including it's "supreme pontiff" is an excercise in futility. In practice and principle, what the Pope says, goes, and he is allegely above the judgement of men (which would include his curial underlings.)

Seraphim

[LatinTrad]

Regarding declaring the see vacant:

Code: Select all

NO ONE can do so.

It's all in Ott--but, plainly and simply, the Pope is judged by no one on this earth.  

Bellarmine and others were simply speculating.

No authority on earth can judge the sovereign Pontiff.

Even those who [i]rebuked[/i] Popes (St. Paul, St. Catherine of Siena) kept that in mind.

LatinTrad

[尼古拉前执事]

Here we see a major flaw in the modern development of the Papacy. After all an Ecumenical Council, which the Latin church holds as infallible declared a Pope a heretic.

As for Saint Paul, he quite plainly judged Peter wrong. Peter accepted that Paul was right and he was in error.

[Lounger]

The RCC says that the Ecumenical Councils are infaliable, but what about when the Pope decrees something that is the opposite of what an infaliable Ecumenical Council teaches?