Category: Canon Law

No lay Catholic has any busi­ness what­ev­er to say that any­one is a heretic. Only trained the­olo­gians at a for­mal canon­i­cal tri­al can deter­mine that any­one is guilty of heresy. The Church alone decides this. We do not sit and judge our lay broth­ers and sis­ters. We can, how­ev­er, say what heresy is, and the rea­son we can is that the Church defines it—very specifically—in canon law. I thought it would be help­ful to dis­cuss that def­i­n­i­tion, both as a cor­rec­tion to mis­use of the term, as well as because the sub­ject of heresy is going to come up in a post or two I plan on writ­ing soon.

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I don’t know any­thing about Fr. Greg Bram­lage oth­er than that he’s the chair­man of some­thing called Mis­sion­ar­ies of the New Evan­ge­liza­tion and he’s prone to say wild things on Face­book that now and then make their way into my News Feed. Once he called the Unit­ed Nations “the right arm of Freema­son­ry.” Anoth­er time he said that the very future of Chris­tian­i­ty depends upon Don­ald Trump. Now he wants to excom­mu­ni­cate Melin­da Gates; I’m not sure why. The title of the arti­cle he shares is “‘Real­ly good qual­i­ty sex edu­ca­tion starts very, very ear­ly’: Melin­da Gates.” Is that why? Bram­lage thinks this war­rants anoth­er Exsurge Domine?

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“If it hap­pens,” the canon says, “that the Roman Pon­tiff resigns his office, it is required for valid­i­ty that the res­ig­na­tion is made freely and prop­er­ly man­i­fest­ed.” If the pope resigns under the pres­sure of a pub­lic cam­paign in the media, he does not act freely. Con­se­quent­ly the res­ig­na­tion is not valid. Con­se­quent­ly any one elect­ed by a con­clave is an antipope. Remem­ber when a num­ber of reac­tionar­ies claimed that Bene­dict XVI’s res­ig­na­tion was not valid because of pri­vate pres­sure? I do. Good times. Fake Site News was eager to pro­mote these claims.

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A read­er points to Canon 194 as a pos­si­ble open­ing for depos­ing a hereti­cal pope. The canon lists cer­tain con­di­tions under which a per­son is “removed from an eccle­si­as­ti­cal office by the law itself.” These are: (1) A per­son who has lost the cler­i­cal state; (2) A per­son who has pub­licly defect­ed from the Catholic faith or from the com­mu­nion of the Church; (3) A cler­ic who has attempt­ed mar­riage even if only civil­ly. The canon adds an impor­tant qual­i­fi­ca­tion. “The removal men­tioned in nn. 2 and 3 can be enforced only if it is estab­lished by …”

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