… It may seem incredible that the Church’s traditional law goes out of its way to make it possible for heretics, apostates, and Freemasons, among others, to be elected to the see of Peter. Shouldn’t such enemies of the Church be the first to be excluded from participation in something so sacred?
At first sight it would certainly seem so. But a moment’s reflection shows that such legislation is necessary precisely in order to protect the papacy from the calamity that sedevacantists claim has now in fact befallen it: a Church with no visible head and therefore no visible unity, a Church whose structures lie in utter chaos.
We need to remember that some offences carrying a penalty of latae sententiae excommunication, such as heresy, can be committed in great secrecy without any public knowledge of the fact. Thus, if the Church’s law required that a cardinal be free from all ecclesiastical censure in order to be eligible for the papacy, the voters in general would have no guarantee that any given candidate was not in fact ineligible because of some secret crime by which he had incurred excommunication. The voters might unwittingly carry out an invalid election, in which case the “pope” they elected would not be true pope. The invalidity of his acts would then be a kind of spiritual cancer quietly destroying the Church’s vital structures from within. The bishops appointed by him would have no true right to govern their respective dioceses. No laws he passed would be binding on the Church. In particular, the cardinals named by him would not be valid electors of a future pope. How then, if at all, could a true pope be restored? Who would be competent to decide?
When the fact of this hidden excommunication finally came to light, the resulting chaos would be unimaginable. Nobody would know with certainty who, if anyone, still had any real authority in the Church, and schism—perhaps a series of schisms—would seem inevitable. The Church’s law therefore foresees and avoids the possibility of this catastrophic situation by allowing that even a secret heretic or apostate, if elected as pope, would ascend the chair of Peter with full juridical rights over the universal Church on earth, even though at the interior, mystical level of grace he might be separated from the mystical body of Christ.
Now, if a heretic, apostate, or Freemason can be validly elected pope, then obviously he can validly remain acting as pope until he dies. The cardinals he appoints will be true cardinals, the bishops he appoints will have true jurisdiction, the saints he canonizes will be truly guaranteed to be in heaven, and the legislation by which he binds us will have to be obeyed (insofar as it does not command us to sin or do something manifestly opposed to the common good of the Church). Thus, the continuity of the universal Church will be preserved until in God’s providence a worthier pontiff is elected.
What of the case of a hypothetical pontiff who is orthodox when elected but falls into heresy during his pontificate? Does he thereby lose the papacy?.. canon law makes it clear that such a pope will not lose his power to govern the Church validly, not even by public expressions of heretical doctrine. In the 1917 Code, we find that apostates and heretics incur latae sententiae (ipso facto) excommunication (canon 2314 §1), but we need to consider other canons in order to see how excommunication relates to loss of ecclesiastical office.
Canon 2263 states that an excommunicated person, as we would expect, “is forbidden to exercise ecclesiastical offices or duties”—the first among which is, of course, the papacy. However, the next canon (2264) affirms the following: “An act of jurisdiction carried out by an excommunicated person, whether in the internal or the external forum, is illicit; and if a condemnatory or declaratory sentence has been pronounced, it is also invalid, without prejudice to canon 2261 §3; otherwise it is valid.” (The other canon cited here, 2261 §3, makes an exception to this invalidity when it is a case of an officially excommunicated priest giving absolution to someone in danger of death.)
