The things I addressed cut right to the root of all of the "which pope did what" nonsense. That the pope can sin should not be shocking to anybody above the age of reason. To declare that _fill in your choice offense here_ means that _fill in the pope here_ is not a pope, at the very root of things, is to say that since the pope committed THAT sin, he is no longer the pope.
Sorry, but I must have missed the part in church teaching where it talks about the magical sin which can revoke the papacy.
If the pope tomorrow turned communistic darwinist and named himself a deity... those would be really bad sins... but the Holy Ghost is still powerful enough to keep the man from talking nonsense ex cathedra because that was His promise. I don't recall, however, the Holy Ghost promising that all popes will be saints, or that all popes will be perfect or perfectly right all of the time.
The position that "the pope is a heretic, the pope is schismatic, the pope has automatically excommunicated himself..." all stem from the idea that being a heretic or schismatic can nullify the papacy. Those are grave sins, for which the pope can probably excommunicate a Catholic, but I have not heard of the legality of the Catholics excommunicating the pope.
Please tell me in which official church docuмent is stated the conditions under which a pope automatically looses his papacy, so that I can go read it for myself if I am in error.
My position is the Catholic one. The pope is the pope, infallible in matters of faith and morals when he decides to use the papal infallibility under it's proper conditions. The rest of the time, the pope could be the villain of all time, but he is nevertheless the pope. Fortunately, as a Catholic I am only obliged to obey him in the limits of God's law, and when he speaks ex cathedra, in which case I trust the Holy Ghost will not allow him to speak error. I am not at liberty, however, to rise up in rebellion against the lawful authority of the pope, should he decide with his free will to be a villain, even a heretical, schismatic one. (Supposing the pope one speaks of actually is those things.)
But as my confessor eloquently put it (in so many words)... when I get to heaven, God will not ask me whether or not we had a pope, or who the pope was. God will only be interested in how well I lived my Catholic Faith. That is, whether or not I am a saint, like He commanded me to try to be. The sins of the pope will, I expect, be the pope's business.