May a Catholic Ask Who Is Pope?

A Question That Sounds Like Rebellion

For most Catholics, the question in our title sounds less like a question than an accusation. To ask whether the man in white is truly pope seems to set oneself above him, to sit in judgment on the Vicar of Christ. And the Church is clear that no one may do that. Canon 1404 states it in five Latin words that reach back to the first millennium: Prima Sedes a nemine iudicatur, “the First See is judged by no one¹.”

So before this series argues anything about Benedict XVI, Francis, or Leo XIV, it has to answer a prior question. Is it even lawful for a Catholic to ask who is pope? If the answer is no, every essay that follows is an act of disobedience, however well meant, and the reader should stop here. If the answer is yes, we need to know why, and on what terms.

Our answer is yes, with conditions. The Church’s own tradition, in her theologians, her canonists, and her history, distinguishes between judging a pope and asking whether a man is the pope. The first is forbidden. The second has been asked before, by saints, and settled before, by the Church herself. This essay sets out that distinction, the history behind it, the limits that govern it, and the strongest reason to think the question has already been closed.

I. Judging a Pope and Identifying One

Begin with the rule itself, as the classical canonists understood it. Franz Xaver Wernz, the Jesuit canonist whose manual, later revised by Pedro Vidal, formed generations of Roman students, states it without qualification. Apart from heresy, no crime causes a true pope to lose his office, and no human authority can depose him, because the Roman Pontiff, by virtue of his primacy, “can be judged by no human authority, but by God alone.” Councils, cardinals, and emperors have each claimed such a right at one time or another, and the Church has refused it to all of them. Against a wicked pope, Wernz says, the faithful have prayer, admonition, and lawful self-defense, and nothing more².

Notice the qualifier, though, which Wernz repeats twice in the same paragraph: a true and undoubted pope, verus et indubitatus Papa. The rule protects the man who holds the office. It does not tell us how to know who holds it, and it was never meant to. A rule that forbids anyone to judge the king cannot be used to forbid anyone from asking whether the man on the throne is the king. If it could, every usurper in history would have been untouchable.

The theologians drew the same distinction. John of St. Thomas, the seventeenth-century Dominican still read as one of the most faithful interpreters of Aquinas, wrote at length in defense of the certainty Catholics have about the reigning pope. Yet he opened that defense by granting that an election can be “doubtful or defective” even when the cardinals themselves make it. Grave fear, failure to reach the required two-thirds, simony, or the election of a manifest heretic could each, he said, render an election void or doubtful. And he observed that the Council of Constance had decreed that judging a doubtful election belongs to a general council: “therefore it supposes that a doubtful or defective election can occur, about which it can judge³.” Later in the same article he says it simply: if the cardinals elect doubtfully, “the Church can correct their election⁴.”

Wernz drew the consequence that matters most for us. When bishops gathered in council examine a genuinely doubtful case, he wrote, they “do not judge a true pope,” since a man whose title is doubtful has not been shown to possess papal jurisdiction at all⁵. The prohibition on judging the pope, in other words, does not even come into play until we know who the pope is. Asking that question is not a breach of the rule. It is the question the rule presupposes.

II. The Church Has Asked Before

If this were a merely theoretical distinction, it would not deserve much space. But the Church has lived it. The list of popes in the Vatican’s own yearbook includes, alongside the true successors of Peter, some three dozen men known to history as antipopes: claimants who were accepted, sometimes for years and by large parts of the Church, and who were later recognized never to have held the office.

The great test came in the fourteenth century. In April 1378 the cardinals, meeting in Rome while a crowd outside demanded a Roman, or at least an Italian, pope, elected the Archbishop of Bari, who took the name Urban VI. Within months most of the same cardinals declared that they had voted under fear, that the election was therefore void, and chose Robert of Geneva, who took the name Clement VII and withdrew to Avignon. For nearly forty years Christendom was divided into two obediences, and after a council at Pisa in 1409 tried to end the division by electing a third claimant, into three.

What makes the Great Western Schism so instructive is not the scandal but the sanctity on both sides of it. St. Catherine of Siena spent the last of her strength defending Urban VI. St. Vincent Ferrer, one of the greatest preachers in the Church’s history, adhered for years to the Avignon line and withdrew his obedience only near the end. Neither was a rebel. Each was trying, in good faith and amid real confusion, to answer exactly the question in our title. The Church has raised both to her altars.

The schism ended at the Council of Constance, and how it ended matters. The Roman claimant, Gregory XII, whom later historians and canonists came to regard as the legitimate pope, formally convoked the council by his own authority and then freely resigned in 1415. The council deposed the other two claimants, and in November 1417 it elected Martin V, whom the whole Church received⁶. The question “Who is pope?” was asked openly, argued for decades, and finally answered by the Church herself, not by any faction within her.

One lesson follows at once. Asking the question did not make Catherine or Vincent schismatics, and the Church’s canonists said so explicitly. Wernz and Vidal, defining the crime of schism, list those who do not commit it: those “who refuse to obey the Roman Pontiff because they hold his person suspect, or doubtfully elected on account of rumors spread about, as happened after the election of Urban VI⁷.” Schism, they explain, is a pertinacious refusal of subjection to one whom the person himself acknowledges to be the true pastor of the universal Church. A man who withholds obedience because he sincerely doubts the claimant’s title is not in that position.

III. “A Doubtful Pope Is No Pope”

Out of the Great Schism came a maxim that every student of this subject eventually meets: papa dubius, papa nullus, “a doubtful pope is no pope.” It is often quoted carelessly, so it is worth seeing how the canonists actually received it.

Wernz treats it at the close of his discussion of how papal power ends. The maxim, he says, can be taken in two senses, and he accepts one while rejecting the other⁸.

The sense he accepts concerns a man whose election is positively doubtful: a man about whom, “after a diligent examination of the facts,” competent men in the Church must say, “It is not established that the canonical election of this Roman Pontiff was valid.” Such a man, Wernz holds, never received papal jurisdiction from Christ, and he calls this “entirely sound doctrine.” His reasoning is worth following, because it is the reasoning of law rather than of suspicion. Jurisdiction is a relation between one who has the right to command and one who has the duty to obey; take away one term and the other falls. A law binds only if it is certain, and the law “obey the successor of Peter” cannot bind with respect to a man whose succession is itself unproven. Indeed, Wernz says, “it would be rash to obey such a man, who has not proved the title of his right.” Nor may such a man appeal to the principle that the one in possession is presumed to hold rightfully, because he “is not yet in peaceful possession.”

The sense Wernz rejects is just as important, and we will not hide it. He refuses to apply the maxim to a pope “hitherto certain and undoubted and received by the universal Church,” about whose election difficulties are raised only later. To say that such a man loses his office because doubts have arisen afterward, Wernz writes, “seems to be rejected, since the whole Church cannot entirely fall away from a legitimately elected Roman Pontiff, because of the unity Christ promised to His Church.”

Readers who already suspect where this series is going will see the difficulty at once. Francis was received in March 2013 without visible dissent, and serious doubts were raised in public only years later. Does Wernz’s rejected sense describe him exactly? We think the answer turns on whether he was ever “in peaceful possession” to begin with, while his predecessor remained in white, in the Vatican, keeping the papal name. That is the question of a later essay, and we will give it all the space it deserves. For now it is enough to establish the principle: the Church’s canonists did not treat a positively doubtful claim as settled merely because someone sat in the chair.

IV. The Limits on the Question

To say that a Catholic may ask who is pope is not to say that he may ask in any way he likes. The same authorities who permit the question surround it with limits, and a series that claims their support must accept their limits too.

The presumption favors the man in the chair

In ordinary matters, doubt does not excuse disobedience. Wernz and Vidal, treating the crime of refusing obedience to lawful authority, say that a superior’s legitimacy and competence are presumed in his favor “even in a doubtful case⁹.” That rule governs the everyday relation of a subject to a superior whose title no one seriously contests. It does not cancel the passage on schism quoted above, which concerns a doubt about the title itself. But it does mean that the burden of proof lies with the one who doubts. Vague unease, bad decisions, or even grave errors in governance do not make a pope doubtful. Only a demonstrable defect in his title does.

Private judgment does not settle it

John of St. Thomas insists that when a reasonable doubt about an election exists, it belongs to the Church to resolve it, “either by universal peaceful acceptance, or by the definition of a council.” A man whose election is “reasonably doubtful,” he adds, cannot settle the doubt himself, since while it stands he cannot bind anyone to accept his decisions¹⁰. The individual Catholic may conclude that a claim is doubtful. He may say so, and give his reasons. What he may not do is appoint himself the tribunal that decides the case for the whole Church. That is why this series will make arguments, weigh objections, and state conclusions, but will never pretend that its conclusions bind anyone. We are witnesses offering evidence, not judges handing down a sentence.

Doubt is not a license to leave

Finally, the question must be asked from inside the Church, not from outside her. John of St. Thomas warns that a man who denies a pope “after he has been peacefully and canonically accepted” is not only a schismatic but a heretic, because he refuses the rule of faith the Church has received. He contrasts that case with the case of rival claimants “about whom it is not known which is the true pontiff,” where the division is a schism but not a heresy¹¹. Everything turns on the words “peacefully and canonically.” A Catholic who doubts a claim must be prepared to show why those words do not apply. And while he does so, he does not abandon the sacraments, desert his parish, or declare himself and a few friends the remnant Church. The final essay of this series will take up how a Catholic lives faithfully while such a question is open, including the Church’s ancient provision that she supplies jurisdiction in cases of common error and of positive and probable doubt, so that the sacraments of the faithful are not left at the mercy of disputes they did not create¹².

V. Has the Question Already Been Answered?

There remains the strongest reason to think this whole essay beside the point. Many serious theologians hold that the Church’s acceptance of a pope settles his legitimacy beyond appeal. Cardinal Louis Billot stated it with characteristic force. God may permit the See to remain vacant for a long time, and He may permit doubt to arise about the legitimacy of one or another man elected, but He cannot permit the whole Church to accept as pope someone who is not. Once a pope is received by the Church as head to body, Billot says, the question of any defect in his election, or of the lack of any condition necessary for his legitimacy, may no longer be raised¹³. John of St. Thomas teaches the same, and adds that this acceptance takes place almost at once, by the simple fact that the Church, wherever the election becomes known, does not contradict it¹⁴.

If that argument applies to the events of 2013 without remainder, this series has no case, and we will say so in the plainest terms. We do not dismiss it. We take it seriously enough to give it an essay of its own. But we note here, for honesty’s sake and by way of anticipation, one feature shared by every classical statement of the principle. Billot’s thesis speaks of the peaceful adherence of the universal Church, pacificam adhaesionem¹⁵. John of St. Thomas speaks of an election “peacefully concluded,” and of a Church that has its head “determinately and peacefully according to law¹⁶.” Wernz, as we have seen, speaks of “peaceful possession.” The principle, as its own defenders formulated it, is not that whoever is accepted is pope. It is that God will not allow the whole Church to accept, peacefully, one who is not. Whether the acceptance of 2013 meets that description is precisely what this series exists to examine.

So: May a Catholic Ask?

Yes. The Church forbids anyone to judge a true pope, and we accept that rule without reservation. But the rule itself presupposes that we can know who the true pope is, and the Church’s own tradition teaches that this can, on occasion, be genuinely doubtful. Her theologians acknowledged that an election can be defective. Her canonists held that a positively doubtful claimant has no right to be obeyed, and that those who withhold obedience for that reason are not schismatics. Her history includes saints on both sides of a forty-year dispute about exactly this question, and a council that settled it.

But the question must be asked as a Catholic asks it: with the presumption in favor of the man in the chair, with the burden of proof on the one who doubts, with arguments drawn from the Church’s law rather than from rumor or resentment, without usurping a judgment that belongs to the Church, and without leaving the Church while the question is asked. Those are the terms on which this series proceeds.

The essays that follow apply those terms to the renunciation of February 11, 2013. We begin, as any honest inquiry must, with the act itself, and with the words of the man who made it.