Cardinal Müller: Pope would ‘automatically’ lose his office by teaching heresy
Cardinal Müller: Pope would ‘automatically’ lose his office by teaching heresy
‘The pope is the perennial principle and foundation of the unity of the Church,’ Cardinal Müller writes in a new essay for First Things. ‘But the Church is not centralized in him, as if he were the supreme leader of a totalitarian party.’
(LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Gerhard Müller has stated that a pope who teaches heresy would automatically lose his office.
“To teach contrary to the apostolic faith would automatically deprive the pope of his office,” he wrote in an opinion piece published on Friday in the religious journal First Things. “We must all pray and work courageously to spare the Church such an ordeal.”
“The pope is the perennial principle and foundation of the unity of the Church,” he said. “But the Church is not centralized in him, as if he were the supreme leader of a totalitarian party.”
Cardinal Müller stated this position before in an interview in November 2022, in which he said, “In an extreme case, a pope could become a heretic as a private person and thus automatically lose his office if the contradiction to the revelation and the dogmatic teaching of the Church is evident.”
The opinion that a pope could become a heretic and lose his office was expressed by Cardinal St. Robert Bellarmine, a Doctor of the Church, who wrote about the issue in the second book of his work De Romano Pontifice (On the Roman Pontiff). According to Cardinal Bellarmine, “the Pope who is manifestly a heretic ceases by himself to be Pope and head, in the same way as he ceases to be a Christian and a member of the body of the Church; and for this reason he can be judged and punished by the Church.” (De Romano Pontifice, Book II, Chapter 30).
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