And this is precisely the sin that ONLY the church can judge. All that laymen or priests can “judge” is simply that something is not true or anti-catholic or that someone is acting like a heretic and should be avoided/ignored. Everything else, legally and definitively, is handled by Church authorities.
Well, if you're talking about the internal forum, even the Church doesn't do that. But these same "Church authorities" are the ones who gave us Vatican II and the Novus Ordo "Mass", so the only thing they're "handling" is spreading error, heresy, sacrilege, and blasphemy.
I don't quite understand the contradiction of claiming that we can judge an alleged Ecuмenical Council and the Church's Mass, but somehow we can't "judge" Bergoglio to be a heretic. If Bergoglio isn't a manifest heretic, there's no such thing. When people say that, they're confounding internal forum judgment with judgment of fact, but even the Church doesn't judge the internal forum.
St. Robert Bellarmine:
…men are not bound, or able to read hearts; but when they see that someone is a heretic by his external works, they judge him to be a heretic pure and simple, and condemn him as a heretic
"Pure and simple" here is their translation of
simpliciter in Latin, but that's a much more loaded term in scholastic theology. Basically it means without making distinctions, and is opposed to
secundum quid, which means in this respect or another. So what he's saying is that not only don't we but we can't make the distinctions of whether he's a formal heretic, material heretic, culpable, inculpable, etc. We just say, "Yep. Heretic." and treat him as such. There's too much handwringing here that comes from the inability to "judge" what kind of heretic Jorge is, but it's all in vain, as we can never get to the bottom of it. We see Jorge putting non-Catholics into the Roman Martyrology, declaring them saints, condemning the Tridentine Mass as being incompatible with their new theology, etc. He's a heretic. As to how culpable he is, only God can judge that and it's a useless question.