As to those Sedes who hold to the Cassiascuм thesis, they have actual popes and bishops with no real jurisdiction, no power to rule and govern - popes and bishops who you can tell to go pound sand, get lost when they issue an order - just like the R & R many of them impugn. It's ridiculous.
They're not "actual" popes, to use your term. They're more "potential" popes. ... if you want to start using those types of terms. They're the equivalent of popes-elect. This is a perfectly valid distinction between the election/designation and the actual authority of the papacy. Take the analogy of a layman who had been elected pope. Once he accepts, the Church can't withdraw the election. But he also cannot fully exercise papal authority yet, since the Pope has to be the Bishop of Rome. He can likely start making appointments and other administrative types of decisions right away. But he cannot exercise full papal authority until he's ordained a priest and consecrated a bishop. He can't write an Encyclical because as a layman he's not even part of the
Ecclesia Docens or otherwise teach the Church.
Let's say this layman refuses to be consecrated. Theologians have dealt with such a scenario and conclude that this could be construed as tacit resignation, and the Church can then proceed to elect someone else. That's where the
vitium consensus angle comes in that's been held by Bishop Sanborn and others.
But let's say this layman is elected, refuses to be ordained / consecrated, and some world war erupts making it impossible for the College of Cardinals to reconvene and elect someone else. This man would remain in some limbo state, where he still was the last one elected, but cannot fully function as Pope, at least with regard to teaching the Church or establishing universal discipline ... because he's not a bishop.
We find the principles for sedeprivationism in Bellarmine, who in turn is citing Pope St. Celestine. Pope St. Celestine declared that Nestorius had lost authority from the moment he began to "preach" heresy (i.e. became a pertinacious manifest heretic) ... even before his actual removal from office, and was in a state of
excommunicandus. This state of
excommunicandus is analogus to Father Chazal's notion of a Pope who's been "suspended".
There's absolutely nothing "ridiculous" about this, and with this comment we have yet another armchair poster here deriding the work of arguably the top theologian in the Church before Vatican II based on a gross oversimplification of it.
Whatever you think of it, it's far preferable to your heretical assertion that "actual" papal authority can corrupt the Magisterium, the Mass, the cult of the saints, and everything else those scoundrels have corrupted. I'd rather be a sedeprivationist than a purveyor of some variation on Protestantism, Old Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. This is precisely what the Prots claimed, that the Church had become corrupt, and what the Old Catholics claim, that the Church had departed from Tradition, and what the Eastern Orthodox claim, that the Pope has some "primacy of honor," i.e. that it suffices to pay lip service to him.
Of course, while I agree with sedeprivationism being the most rational position, I don't believe that's the actual explanation for what's happened to the Church. I believe that these men have not been material popes either, that Cardinal Siri had been elected the legitimate pope and remained thus until his death in 1989. By then there were few Cardinals left who had been appointed by Pius XII, the last legitimate pope to appoint Cardinals, and also that it's highly doubtful that Ratzinger and Bergoglio were valid bishops.
Topic: Conte Declares +Vigano Excommunicated (Read 20303 times)