This article is a companion piece to an earlier one from 2017, about Pope Honorius I; and one from last year, about Pope John XXII. These are the three popes people will often cite to prove that popes can be heretics. Sometimes anti-Catholic Protestants are looking for an example of why infallibility can’t be true and the papacy is a tradition of men. Other times, anti-Catholic Catholics (for they too exist) are looking for a precedent as they seek to justify themselves in their belief that Pope Francis is a heretic.
Did Pope Liberius teach heresy about Arianism?
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • June 9, 2020 • Apologetics; Church History
This is a companion piece to an earlier one about Honorius and a later one about Liberius. In the case of Pope John XXII, it is clear that his statements on the Beatific Vision were false. He had said, both prior to his papacy and in homilies during his papacy, that the Beatific Vision was delayed until the Final Judgment. But the matter, as Mr. Sammons himself admits, was not defined until after John XXII’s death. His successor, Benedict XII, defined the doctrine three years later — in 1336. Only then did the Church define the truth about the Beatific Vision being immediate.
Ye olde debate over Limbo has been resurrected because Fr. Richard Heilman shared this article of mine from the National Catholic Register. “Four Reasons I Don’t Believe in the Limbo of Infants” — that was the title. I can’t remember whether the title was mine or the Register chose it; it doesn’t matter. Immediately the Limbo apologists crawled like spiders over Fr.‘s post, and one declaimed that it was a scandal indeed to share my article on this, since the INFALLIBLE Council of Florence had declared otherwise. Uh. No. It did not. 
Exsurge Domine was the bull excommunicating Martin Luther; and the pope lists forty-one “errors,” but takes care to point that the errors fall into different categories. “Some of these,” he says, “have already been condemned by councils and the constitutions of our predecessors, and expressly contain even the heresy of the Greeks and Bohemians. Other errors are either heretical, false, scandalous, or offensive to pious ears, as seductive of simple minds, originating with false exponents of the faith who in their proud curiosity yearn for the world’s glory …” 
Cardinal Müller claims women’s ordination is impossible. He has Amazon Synod Derangement Syndrome, and has called it a “wrecking ball” bent on “restructuring the Universal Church.” We learn from this that the cardinal is very inept with metaphor, since wrecking balls don’t “restructure” anything. Maybe this is a minor problem. The bigger issue with Müller is that he says no pope, no synod, no council “could make possible the ordination of women as bishop, priest, or deacon.” “It would be invalid,” Müller says. 
This myth is peculiarly intractable despite the fact that it is also peculiarly easy to refute. The claim is an anachronism. If we can find an instance of the Church referring to itself as “the Catholic Church” before Constantine lived, we can disprove the claim. And so we do. To mention just one place, we find it in Ignatius of Antioch. In his Letter to the Smyrnaeans, he writes: “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” This letter was written around the year 110 A.D. 
