If They'd Made Me Pope: Government 101

Part II: Dealing with invasions, Antipope Joan, and a decapitation strike.

Several years ago, I visited a Dominican friend of mine who was being ordained to the transitional diaconate in Washington, D.C.. When I jokingly mentioned that either one of us could be elected pope, he laughed right in my face and said I would be a terrible pope. (He added that so would he.) My friend was right, of course, but it still got me thinking harder: what makes a good pope? What should a pope actually do?

Now we have a new pope, so, on the off chance Pope Leo XIV is browsing De Civ looking for ideas, here’s what I’d do If They’d Made Me Pope. (See also Part I: Preliminaries.)

Government 101

Even though the Vatican is a government, the Church hasn't elected a PoliSci major since the Medicis, and it shows! We must therefore begin with bare fundamentals. (Next week be sexier, I promise.)

Succession

The single most dangerous time for any government, especially a monarchy, is succession. Heck, as HBO points out, this is true even for small, non-sovereign governments, like corporations.

For that reason, it is incumbent on any government that prefers to go on existing (but especially a monarchy) to put in place absurdly robust succession laws, making it absolutely clear upon whom authority (especially executive authority) devolves when an officer’s term ends, especially in an emergency. For example, the United States has three constitutional amendments and extensive statutory provisions ironing out the finer details of presidential succession, plus the uncodified institution of the “designated survivor,” just in case. Most of us don’t know the implementation details, but we all know that this system exists, that there is always a single clear answer to the question, “Who is the President of the United States?” That’s why scenes like “Case Orange” from Battlestar Galactica work for a general audience:

You might think the Vatican, which has successfully handed on power from executive to executive for longer than any other government on Earth, probably has equally solid succession laws. Nope! Just got lucky. A decapitation strike against the Vatican just before a conclave would plunge the Church into a legitimacy crisis from which it would be difficult to recover.¹

For several hundred years, Catholic thinkers have debated what would happen if every cardinal-elector were killed. Answers include:²

• “An ecumenical council would need to elect the pope”

  • But who would call it? or ratify it? where?

• “all the bishops of the world would regain their suppressed right to elect the pope”

  • But how would they express this vote? what’s the voting procedure? who counts the votes? what’s the required majority to elect?

• “the suburbican bishops of Rome’s surrounding dioceses would need to elect the pope”

  • But what about the droid attack on the wookiees rival claims from other bishops? When the South American bishops’ conference claims their right to participate in the election, what are you going to do to stop them, or prove their actions illegitimate? (Moreover, this has all the same procedural problems as election by the bishops of the world.)

• …and of course the old favorite, “God will never let this happen to His Church”

  • The same God who let the Great Western Schism happen? that God?

Many of these arguments have merits. None of them has been ratified by papal legislation, so what would actually happen is chaos, as different bishops opted for different electoral systems.

As pope, one of my first acts would be to fix this. The papal electoral body would have designated survivors. Specific legislation would address the situation where all the electors are wiped out.

In the long run, some reforms I propose later in this series solve many of these problems as a side effect.

In the short run, I would opt for a general council of bishops, with the oldest surviving bishop under age 80 delegated to convoke and preside over the council. I would instruct him to follow the model of the papal conclave as closely as he deems practical under the circumstances, using bishops instead of cardinals and himself in lieu of the camerlengo. Without a sitting pope, this would not be a true general council, and it would be incapable of defining doctrine, but, convoked under clear (albeit posthumous) papal authority, it could uncontroversially elect a pope.

Emergency Powers

Further specific legislation would address the possibility of a critical emergency arising during a sede vacante.

Currently, the cardinals may act only by majority vote upon a submission by the camerlengo or the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary. This is appropriate for ordinary business, but suppose the reason for the sede vacante is that the Vatican has been invaded by persecutors, they’ve killed the pope, the camerlengo is a prisoner of war, and the remnants of the Swiss Guard are fighting to hold them off while the survivors evacuate. Who gives the evacuation order? Where do they convene? Who gives the Swiss Guard their orders? Does the same individual both certify that an emergency exists and assume executive power, or is there one person or body or state of affairs that establishes a legal state of emergency and another person who then takes up the emergency powers?

Above all: who ratifies the necessary changes to Universi Domenici Gregis if the cardinals themselves are unable to convene according to its norms, given that Universi Domenici Gregis absolutely forbids anyone other than the pope to modify it?

Papal legislation can and should answer these questions. We may all reasonably hope that these provisions need never be exercised, but if, God forbid, the day comes when they are needed, it will be too late to legislate them.

This is doubly important for the Church. Most civil states can say, “Ah, well, if the capitol falls to an invading force and our entire leadership is killed off, we’re probably about cooked anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.” The Church must persist until the end of the world and expects to be violently persecuted in the interim, so the Church doesn’t have that excuse.

To be fair to the Vatican, I don’t think its current law is totally unsuitable for this. Universi Domenici Gregis 17 and Praedicate Evangelium Art. 236 tell us that, during a sede vacante, the camerlengo “has the duty of safeguarding and administering the goods and temporal rights of the Holy See,” which means that, if the seat is vacant, urgent action is necessary, and the College of Cardinals is unable to act due to artillery fire, “actual invasion” is arguably his portfolio. Cardinal Kevin Farrell is the current camerlengo.

If the camerlengo is captured, as my hypothetical assumed, Art. 236 says his powers and duties fall to the vice-camerlengo, currently Archbishop Ilson de Jesus Montanari.

On the other hand, there’s also a case to be made that, under the Fundamental Law of the Vatican City-State,³ Article 15, executive power passes instead to the President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, currently Sister Raffaella Petrini. Article 11 gives her the authority to issue “decrees having the force of law,” temporarily, “in cases of urgent necessity,” which is much more explicit than any powers given to the camerlengo.⁴ Moreover, Article 20 gives her explicit command over the Gendarmie Corps and, in case of necessity, the Swiss Guard. In case of absolute emergency, then, I would be more likely to follow orders from the President than the Camerlengo.⁵

Wouldn’t that be something? The Catholic Church, in its darkest hour, popeless, fleeing an invading army in disarray, suddenly ruled, for the first time in its history, by a woman? (I call dibs on the movie rights!)

If she’s captured, though, power over the Pontifical Commission (probably)⁶ passes to the Secretary General (per Article 16), then to the Deputy Secretary General (per Article 17), then (?) to the most-senior cardinal on the Commission (Article 8).

This is a pretty cromulent chain of executive power… except that Pope Francis bafflingly appointed two Secretaries General to the Pontifical Commission earlier this year (Archbishop Emilio Nappa and lay lawyer Giuseppi Puglisi Alibrandi), and it’s at least not obvious who would take on the mantle of Article 15 executive authority in a crisis. Nappa, probably, because the Church has always held that the power of ecclesial governance belongs more properly to clergy than lay.

So the Vatican is not wholly unprepared for a crisis. Indeed, I’m no expert in Vatican law, so it’s entirely possible that I missed some relevant legislation that further clarifies all this. Nevertheless, there appear to be significant ambiguities. I would sort out exactly who holds supreme executive power in a state of profound emergency in a nice, clear, codified law.

Ooo, that’s another thing!

Codify the Law of the Vatican City-State

When a bill becomes a law, what happens to it? One traditional answer is that new laws simply go into a big pile with all the other laws. This is a simple answer, but it creates problems: over time, the laws start amending and repealing one another, sometimes in really weird and technical ways. If “the law” is just the sum of all those amendments and repeals, you end up having to piece together the actual current wording of the law from a bunch of different documents, sometimes decades apart, almost always difficult to find.

A large body of Pennsylvania Law, the “Unconsolidated Statutes,” works like this. The one time I had to do a really thorough search of Pennsylvania law, I got so frustrated I rewrote large portions of the article, at great loss of time, efficiency, and persuasiveness, to be about Michigan instead.

The other option is to organize all your existing statutes into a single Code, printing the official final text of the law (as amended by all your individual statutes) in a single document, organized into sensible categories, with related laws next to one another. Once you’ve got your existing laws sorted out, any new laws you make afterward are written as amendments to the Code.⁷ Then you just print the Code, and you know all the laws in force. Codification was all the rage a little more than a century ago. Minnesotans who followed my coverage of the legislature’s legitimacy crisis earlier this year will recall that we codified our existing laws in 1866, and again in 1894, but we didn’t fully commit to writing new laws into the Minnesota Code until 1905, and our modern Code is gorgeous.

As far as I can tell, which is not very far, the laws of the Vatican City-State are uncodified. (If they are codified, the Code doesn’t seem to be online.) The law of the universal Church—the 1983 Code of Canon Law—is codified, which was an enormously difficult project that took something like twenty years. I suspect the Vatican City-State law will be much easier to codify. I hope so, anyway!

Also, the current default language of the Vatican City-State’s legal documents appears to be Italian. This is probably because much of their law is adopted directly from Italian law. For many years, new Italian laws were automatically adopted into Vatican law. Heck with that. If I’m pope, the laws are all getting written and published in Latin, with Italian as a translation. A worldwide Church should have a worldwide language in which all its officers are reasonably fluent. (For political reasons, that language can’t be English, especially not at the behest of an American pope.)

Legitimacy

You knew I was going to write about my favorite subject, legitimacy crises.

Like other governments, the papacy has undergone periodic legitimacy crises.

It is in the midst of a minor century-long legitimacy crisis right now! Sedevacantists are self-identified, baptized, and confirmed Catholics who are extremely annoying if you make them mad on Twitter my gosh believe there has been no pope since (usually) the late 1950s or early 1960s, and so they maintain their own lines of bishops and priests in the Apostolic succession. They give various justifications, but most of them boil down to, “We think the Second Vatican Council was heretical, and that popes who follow it are deposed by their heresy.”⁸

The Church has had far worse legitimacy crises in its day. The worst was the Great Western Schism, a 39-year period (1378-1417) when a group of French cardinals contended that the election of Pope Urban VI had been invalid (due to fear of the Roman mob), so they elected Antipope Clement VII—only he didn’t call himself “Antipope” because he and his supporters considered him the actual pope! After this had gone on for a few decades and several popes/antipopes (because the two papacies maintained separate colleges of cardinals), a group of frustrated cardinals illegally convened the Council of Pisa (illegal because a pope must agree to the convocation of a general council), examined the case, ruled that both popes were deposed from office, and elected a third pope, Alexander V.⁹ So then we had three popes.

Finally, the Council of Constance was convened both by Antipope John XXIII (the Pisan claimant) and by Pope Gregory XII (the Roman claimant). Both carefully avoided acknowledging that the other was there, or had any legitimacy whatsoever… but, as long as you recognize either the Pisan claim or the Roman claim to the papacy, Constance was a legit council, unlike Pisa.¹⁰ At Pisa, Gregory voluntarily resigned (since no council can actually depose a valid pope), which allowed the council to elect Pope Martin V. The other claimaints, John XXIII and Avignon claimant Benedict XIII, remained defiant, but the council’s decision deflated their perceived legitimacy. John was convicted of simony and imprisoned; he bent the knee to Pope Martin a year later and was made a cardinal. Benedict’s college of cardinals splintered after his death, and his successor finally submitted to Pope Martin in 1429 in exchange for being made bishop of Majorca.

One more example, a fictional one: suppose the conclave elected a pope who later turned out to be a woman. I’m not talking about an apparent man with an XX intersex condition like Cardinal Benitez in Conclave. I’m talking a full-blown Pope Joan situation. The conclave elects a perfectly healthy, anatomically normal woman (thinking she is a man), and the way the world finds out is when, eight months after the election, she secretly gives birth to a son—and the tabloids get pictures! In Catholicism, only a male can be ordained a cleric, including bishop of Rome. (Jesus did not give the Church express authority to ordain anyone else.¹¹) Therefore, Antipope Joan’s papacy would be utterly null and void, and this would be manifestly clear to the entire Catholic world.¹²

However, what office or body would be capable of authoritatively establishing that Joan’s papacy is null? Joan is, by this point, safely ensconced in office. She controls the Curia in every way that matters, including as their paymaster. There is no rival claimant to her throne, and no way to create one: only the college of cardinals elects a pope, it convenes only when called by the pope, and it only addresses items on the pope’s agenda. The papal camerlengo ordinarily declares sede vacante upon the death of the pope to convene the college, but Joan isn’t dead, continues to publicly maintain the legal fiction that she is a man, and, just for safety, has taken the camerlengo as her lover to ensure he doesn’t try anything to create a legal vacancy in her office.

In the United States, there are several mechanisms for blocking or removing an non-president who has usurped the office (although they don’t work too well at the moment). Those mechanisms flow through our independent, co-equal branches: Congress (which has the power to deny electoral certification and, subsequently, to impeach) and the Supreme Court (which tends to resolve all the hottest legal disputes). Should those mechanisms fail, we have the de facto officer doctrine, which generally treats the valid acts of an invalid president as legally binding anyway, because anything else would be dangerously unstable.

The Church, which, as a monarchy, has no independent branches, has nothing of this sort.¹³

It is an ancient maxim that “no one can judge the Pope.” That’s true. A valid pope answers to nobody but God. However, someone needs to be able judge whether someone claiming to be the pope actually is the pope. If he’s not the pope, then it’s okay to judge him! If someone only might be the pope, then, for the good of the Church, it’s necessary to judge his claim! (Judgment need not extend further than that.) The various crises surrounding the various antipopes across various centuries suggest that some formal method for adjudicating antipopes is overdue.

I suggest legislation that makes the patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Churches¹⁴ the judges of the validity of claims to the papacy. The patriarchs are the highest authorities in the Church not directly appointed by the Pope, and the Pope’s relationship to them is first-among-equals, so this seems fitting. Legislation could have them meet by common consent at a place of their choosing, or compel them to meet in Alexandria (or another suitable location, by common consent) upon petition by, say, 25% of the world’s Catholic bishops (even excluding those elevated by the disputed pope). The same legislation could demand that all the faithful accept the patriarchs’ conclusion as binding upon all Catholic consciences as an exercise of delegated Petrine authority.

I also suggest that the pope terminate centuries of speculation about “heretic popes” by defining that a pope is protected by the Holy Spirit when he teaches ex cathedra, but not otherwise, and that a pope who espouses heresy privately or even publicly (but not ex cathedra) is not automatically excommunicated and does retain his office.

This is obviously true, when you think about it. The central purpose of the papacy as a worldwide office is to resolve doctrinal disputes and call all sides back to the Faith. If anyone can just disregard every pope who teaches a doctrine they happen to disagree with by labeling him a heretic and withdrawing obedience, the papacy can no longer perform that function. When you think about it, then, the “popes are deprived of office by the very fact of embracing heresy, which cuts them off from the church” theory is just Protestantism through the back door. It’s broadly similar to arguments Protestants used to reject Exsurge Domine and the Council of Trent! To accept the Church’s teaching authority (instead of your own), then, is to accept its authority to definitively tell you when you’re wrong.¹⁵

With the “heresy” avenue closed off, the “patriarchs’ tribunal” would only be there to judge whether a putative pope followed proper election procedures and was validly consecrated. It would resolve Pope Joan and Great Western Schism-type questions, without putting anyone in a position to judge the faith of a sitting pope, validly installed. It would not resolve the current sedevacantist schism (since they won’t recognize the validity of this procedure), but it would help head off the Church’s next legitimacy crisis in a century or two.

Security

The Vatican is riddled with leaks, gossip, and outside manipulation. It strikes me as a safe assumption that every other sovereign state in the world with even a passing interest in the Church has every room in the place bugged, with a well-bribed high-ranking official filling in the blanks for them. This includes the United States. It definitely includes China.

I don’t think there’s anything the pope can do about this in the early days of his papacy. Building a robust security infrastructure takes time (and cash, which the Vatican doesn’t have), and the Vatican is such a small, porous state that it’s surely an easier target than most. It’s just something to keep in mind while having “private” conversations in and around the papal apartments: Xi Jinping is definitely listening!

Of course, the new pope is American, so he’s already used to the fact that the NSA listens to all his phone calls. (Also, he’s been in Rome for much of the past forty years.)

I am also concerned about mafia influence at the Vatican. As recently as 50 years ago, the mafia had enough power in Italy and the Vatican that, when stories circulated that Pope John Paul I had been assassinated by the mafia, it was widely considered plausible. That power seems to have receded. It’s been more than 40 years since the mafia had Roberto Calvi killed, and the Vatican now has commissions for excommunicating mafiosi. Still, I suspect the greatest physical threat to a reforming pope remains Italian organized crime, and I suspect that any attempt to reform the Vatican Bank will provoke a reaction. I’d love to be wrong about this, but it’s all the more reason for an incoming pope to immediately secure his succession.

The specter of corruption brings us to the next section: Constitutional Matters. There, I’m afraid, things are going to get pretty spicy, as we take a look at what I consider necessary reforms to the constitution of the Catholic Church as a whole. Parts of the Church’s constitution are divinely instituted, but other parts are just cruft we picked up in the middle ages, and hoo boy do a lot of people get those parts mixed up!

Next Week: Part III: Constitutional Reform.

h/t: I am indebted to Christopher Russo for asking me several incisive questions about papal legitimacy-resolution mechanism that got me thinking more seriously about succession and legitimacy.

Update for readers who don’t care about the Catholic stuff: I spent most of today (June 9) working on the next installment of Some Constitutional Amendments, this time finally dealing with the Senate. Whereas I have proposed making the House raucously democratic, my recommendation will be to take the Senate in the opposite direction.

1. If Rome were erased by a multi-megaton nuclear detonation just before a conclave, governance of the Church would technically devolve on any cardinals who did not attend. Universi Domenici Gregis clearly does not contemplate this possibility, but nevertheless would give such cardinals some limited authority to govern the Church. However, cardinals usually miss the conclave due to illness, age, or infamy. These are not the people you want running the Church.

For example, if the 2025 conclave had been nuked on Wednesday, May 7, the sole surviving cardinal-electors would have been Cardinals Antonio Cañizares, Vinko Puljić (both homebound due to grave infirmity), and Giovanni Becciu (excluded from the conclave due to his conviction by a Vatican court for embezzlement and other white-collar crimes). Scandal-ridden non-elector Óscar Maradiaga was also out of Rome at the time, having reportedly stormed out of the pre-conclave meetings because of what he perceived as insufficient support for his preferred candidate, Cardinal Robert Prevost. Other very old cardinals may also have stayed home, but this would, again, be due to great age and sickness.

2. I am grateful to The WM Review, a schismatic Catholic newsletter, for assaying several possibilities, unearthed from the Catholic tradition, in its fascinating 5-part series, “Papal elections without the cardinals?” covering St. Robert Bellarmine, Journet & Cajetan, Gaspar Hurtado SJ, Francisco de Victoria OP, and Cardinal Billot.

3. An English translation of the 2000 version of the Fundamental Law, which is slightly different, is available at Advocate Tanmoy, inexplicably. My English translation of the current Fundamental Law, from 2023, was a GPT translation, although I double-checked the key passages I cited to confirm GPT wasn’t hallucinating. (I read a little Italian.)

4. This also seems to give her executive authority if the pope is alive but incapable of action due to, say, late-stage Parkinson’s Disease or senility, as sometimes happens.

5. One could argue, quite plausibly, that, under the law, the camerlengo would be the head of the global Catholic Church, while the president of the Pontifical Commission would be head of the Vatican City-State. I’m not sure how that cashes out in practice, and I’m not sure it’s clear enough to be practical in an emergency, but maybe the Curia is really well-practiced with this sort of thing and intuitively knows how it’s all supposed to work.

6. What the law actually says is that the Pontifical Commission is “presided over” by “thie first of the Cardinal Members with seniority” in the case of “absence or impediment of the President.” (Article 8)

Meanwhile, the Secretary General’s apparently concomitant power to replace the President in case of absence or impediment does not extend to situations “regarding the issuance of provisions having the force of law.” (Article 16)

This suggests that the President can wield executive power and limited legislative power in the form of emergency decrees, but, if the President is incapacitated, her executive powers go to the Secretary General and her legislative / presiding powers go to the senior cardinal on the Commission? It all seems very muddy to me. But, then, I can’t read Italian very well.

7. Mostly. There are exceptions, largely for laws of temporary effect. You don’t codify annual budgets, for example.

8. While doing tangentially related research in this thread, I came across the sedeprivationist website (a separate but distinct movement within sedevacantism) TheThesis.us, which not only concisely lays out the various sede/radtrad movements on its first page, but has already updated its website to say that:

Leo XIV is not the pope, he has no authority of the Church… [and w]e should not submit to his teaching, his laws, or the liturgy he promulgates. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

A few weeks ago, this page said “Francis” sixteen times. Now it says “Leo XIV,” and, yes, they only needed ten seconds to dismiss him as a heretic wolf in sheep’s clothing, too. You’ve gotta admire their commitment to the bit. They appear to cite no specific acts by Leo that mark him out as a heretic, just his general acceptance of the Second Council of the Vatican, so they did a find-and-replace.

Needless to say, these guys at TheThesis are the heretics, setting themselves outside the Church through their rejection of Vatican II just as surely as Luther set himself outside the Church by his rejection of Exsurge Domine. However, I appreciate clear writing and they seem well-meaning. Like most heretics, they know their subject quite well, and, like most heretics, they get quite a lot correct. I’ll probably even make use of some of their citations in other articles someday.

Nevertheless, I find them very amusing.

9. The Papal Yearbook listed Alexander V as a legitimate pope in the early 20th century, but switched his title to antipope after Pope Angelo Roncalli took the name John XXIII. +Roncalli took the number 23 because there were “twenty-two Johns of indisputable legitimacy,” which makes it sound (to me) like he wasn’t so much trashing the legitimacy of the Pisan popes as acknowledging doubt over them. However, the editors of Annuario Pontificio took it as an edict and duly renumbered the popes descended from the Council of Pisa as antipopes.

For what it’s worth, I think it is correct that the Pisan popes were antipopes; I’m just not sure the Papal Yearbook switched historical allegiances for the right reasons. See also my earlier footnote about the funniest papal names.

10. If you are really invested in the Catholic claim that ecumenical councils are capable of teaching infallibly, the Council of Constance is a nightmare to navigate. It puts every rule of conciliar infallibility to the test. Just one example to illustrate:

The Council of Constance was originally convoked by the Pisan pope (John XXIII Cossa) and finished thirteen sessions before it was received the official convocation of the Roman pope (Gregory VII). Therefore, if you think the Pisan pope was the legitimate claimant, then the first thirteen sessions of Constance are the acts of a valid ecumenical council and may contain infallible definitions.

If, on the other hand, you think the Roman pope was the legitimate claimant, then the first thirteen sessions of Constance were just a pre-conciliar gathering that happened to mistakenly think of itself as an ecumenical council, with no binding authority… probably. I say “probably” because, later, after the council, undisputed Pope Martin V conditionally ratified the council’s acts, so does that ratification retroactively sanate the defective early sessions?

The Church’s current official position is that the Roman pope was the legitimate claimant, but this position has changed in the past and could again, and there is no undisputed resolution to the questions, “When did the Council of Constance become ecumenical in character?” and “What putative acts of the Council did Pope Martin V (or, later on, Pope Eugene IV) actually ratify?” The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia suggests that the answer to the first is (depending on who you ask) during the fourteenth, thirty-fifth, or forty-second sessions; and that the answer to the second is “the ones that didn’t undermine the papacy, natch! No further questions” (not a direct quote).

11. Further details are given in Pope St. John Paul II’s 1994 document Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

12. There are lots of checks in place that should theoretically prevent this from happening. Foremost among them is the medical testing seminarians must undergo prior to ordination. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine this happening.

It is much, much easier to imagine a pope being elected with an unknown complex intersex condition, which leaves him apparently male but with XX chromosomes and/or non-functional internal female anatomy. I have strenuously argued that anyone capable of performing the male role in sexual intercourse is canonically male, but this is not universally accepted. Even if it were, there are gray areas where someone might not be capable of performing either sex’s role in sexual intercourse. These situations could give rise to intense dispute across the Church, with some arguing for the putative pope’s validity and others against it, all of them making fairly good points. This situation, too, might require resolution by a review of the pope’s legitimacy.

13. St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine once suggested, hypothetically, that, in the hypothetical case of a heretic pope (which he believed impossible), a general council could authoritatively determine that the pope had deposed himself by his heresy. However, since he didn’t take this possibility very seriously, he did not answer the question of how on Earth a general council could be called in the first place under such circumstances, since (as he himself argued) a general council may be convoked and presided over solely by a valid pope!

14. That is, the heads of the Coptic, Syrian, Melkite, Maronite, Chaldean, and Armenian Catholic Churches, all of which are in communion with Rome. There are other Eastern Catholic Churches, but they do not have patriarchs. If, by privileging the six patriarchal churches over the other sixteen, I am committing some gross Eastern Catholic faux pas, then I apologize. I’m not married to the exact details of this proposal.

15. Suppose, hypothetically, that some future valid pope did stand up and say, “By my apostolic authority, I declare, pronounce, and define ex cathedra as a matter of faith to be believed firmly by all the faithful, that Jesus was not raised from the dead and was not the Son of God, but just a swell guy who wanted people to be nice to one another.”

This declaration, directly contradicting core Catholic beliefs, would not prove the pope is no longer the pope. Instead, it would prove that the Holy Spirit’s promises to the Church had failed, that the gates of Hell had prevailed against Peter, that Catholicism was false, and that it always had been. Either you believe in papal and conciliar infallibility and accept the consequences, such as the teaching on religious freedom at Vatican II, or you don’t, in which case Catholicism is false—Trent included—and you should convert to Eastern Orthodoxy.