#peccatum of heresy

[ultramontanism]

Can a heretic be pope?

From: "Sedevacantism Refuted? Some Common Objections" by Fr. Anthony Cekada, 2004:

Because he is the supreme legislator and therefore not subject to canon law, a pope cannot commit a true delictum of heresy or incur an excommunication. He is subject only to the divine law.

It is by violating the divine law through the sin (peccatum) of heresy that a heretical pope loses his authority — “having be- come an unbeliever [factus infidelis],” as Cardinal Billot says, “he would by his own will be cast outside the body of the Church.” (De Ecclesia, 5th ed. [1927] 632.)

The canonist Coronata explains: “If indeed such a situation would happen, he [the Roman Pontiff] would, by divine law, fall from office without any sentence, indeed, without even a declaratory one.” (Institutiones Iuris Canonici [1950] 1:316.)

So, all the canonical requirements governing the delictum of heresy need not be fulfilled for a heretical pope to lose his authority — his public sin against divine law (infidelity) suffices."

[une-sanz-pluis]

The legal records of Oldcastle's trial drew on the chivalric model of treason but to a large extent this was subsumed by judicial constructions of treason as a crime against the people and nation of England. As with the Percys, the understanding of treason as a personal betrayal was represented by fears that corrupt homosocial affinities had subverted natural masculine bonds between political subjects and the king. In the indictment arising from a commission of oyer and terminer of 10 January 1414, Oldcastle, the lollard chaplain Walter Blake and Sir John Acton were charged with planning a Privatim insurgerent to advance their nephando propositio. The term 'private insurgency' distinguished this as unsanctioned aggression and pre-empted any defence that Oldcastle's actions were a legitimate performance of dififidatio. The term privatim, when linked to the term nephando, suggested that Oldcastle and his followers had formed a secret confederacy against the king. As discussed earlier, nephando invoked the most extreme form of perverse male attachment, the sin of sodomy, which was characteristically referred to in late medieval theological tracts and legal texts as nephandum peccatum or 'unspeakable sin'. Canon and civil law connected sodomy to lèse-majesté and heresy in a triumvirate of hidden crimes that were rooted in unnatural deviance. Invoking a universally understood legal and intellectual framework in which gender inversion signalled wilful rebellion against divinely-ordained natural order, the traitor, the heretic and the sodomite all stood as existential threats to the integrity of the masculine body politic. Echoing the gendered rhetoric of nephandum in the Oldcastle indictment, the idea of unnatural bonds also surfaced in the April 1414 statute, which targeted 'those belonging to the heretical sect called lollardy as well as others of their confederacy'. The discursive link between lollardy as a sect and the forming of dangerous confederacies deliberately seeded the idea that the problem was not lone malcontents but a well-organised cabal. For the Lancastrian regime, it must have seemed that in Oldcastles betrayal and rebellion, their deepest forebodings about perverse homosocial affinities had been fully realised.

E. Amanda McVitty, Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (The Boydell Press 2020)