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1.  Laymen aren't part of the Church, in the sense of Canon Law, which was made by and for ecclesiastics to rule.

2.  The Church isn't a democracy; it's a monarchy.  The laity don't have "rights" in the same sense as a democracy.
3.  A layman's affirmation or non-affirmation is meaningless.  Just like in a regular court room...judge, lawyers, jury...everyone else's opinion is moot.

Your affirmation carries no legal weight, nor any authority, nor is binding on anyone else.  So it's meaningless.  No one has to pay attention to what you affirm or don't affirm.  You aren't the Church. 


1.  All of this is a legal act, done by legal authorities.  It can't be done by any layman.
2.  First it must be proved that person A said heresy x.
3.  Then it must be proved that heresy x was said 'publicly' (as canon law defines it, not according to Webster's dictionary).
4.  Then it must be proved that person A knew, or should have known, that heresy x was in fact a heresy.
5.  Then it must be determined if the 'public sin of heresy' was committed and the penalty, according to law.

None of this is in the authority, education, or training of any layman (excepting someone who has a canon law degree...but then they still have no authority).
I reject such because i'm legally allowed to, since they aren't binding under pain of sin for me to attend/accept.  Even +Benedict said in 2007's motu that Quo Primum was still legally in effect and this law a) binds me to the Old rite, b) prevents me from attending any other rite, and c) disallows any new rites.  No post-V2 law has ever made the new mass obligatory, in any degree.

We can judge SIN.





And it is the public SIN of heresy that per se separates the heretic from the Church.  The automatic excommunication resulting from the canonical delict of heresy is a punishment of the Church.  But regardless of whether the Church defines heresy as a delict, the effect (i.e., separation from the Church) of the public SIN of heresy remains.

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.