Editor’s Note: In other words, the Cardinal is accusing Pope Francis of being a pertinacious heretic. The qualities of heresy by which a man can be sentenced with excommunication for heresy are several. All must be present to be canonically guilty of the crime:

• Interior denial of a truth of the faith with one’s heart and mind – formal heresy
• manifest denials of the truth in spoken or written words — manifest heresy
• refusal to accept correction by peers and/or superiors — pertinacious heresy

When these three qualities are present, the competent Church authority, which in this case would be a provincial council in the Ecclesiastical Province of Rome can declare the man a public heretic, after asking him to recant his errors, interiorly and exteriorly with spoken or written signed confession and promise never to return to them. If he refuse after 3 corrections, then he is a public heretic. And the Church can declare his separation from Her ipso facto de jure of Canon 1364.

Individual writers or social media personalities, clergy or laity or religious have no authority to declare anyone a public heretic. If a man is any sort of heretic, short of being a public heretic, he can be so denounced but no one has the right to say he is separated from the Church, until the Church declares it.

This is what distinguishes the proper procedure as practiced by Catholics and the improper method, as malpracticed by sedevacantists, protestants and schismatics, which rests solely upon the individual’s claim to authority in the Church and his personal demands that other accept his judgement that this or that other person is a heretic.

Moreover, if you know a person is a heretic and has the capacity to endanger the salvation of others you are obliged to denounce him to the competent authority, if he holds an office in the Church, and ask that his heresy be investigated and if proven that he be removed from office. This is what the brave and noble hearted Catholics who joined the Sutri Initiative have and are doing since October of 2023.

The fact that no sedevacantist nor any of those who have publicly called Pope Francis a heretic have participated in the Sutri Initiative in the last year strongly argues that they are grifting on the extreme crisis in the Catholic Church and not really interested in removing Pope Francis from office nor in obtaining his repentance by the most solemn and effective means possible: being reproved to one’s face in a Church council by one’s peers.