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Catholic Knight,

I agree with you that manifest formal heresy separates the heretic from the Church. I think Sean agrees with you on this point also.

Formal heresy requires demonstration of pertinacity, as has been adequately discussed. This requires demonstration that the culprit understands that he is contradicting a dogma of the Faith and in spite of this knowledge remains obstinate in his heresy.

Where is the evidence that this Pope or any of his predecessors are formal heretics?

"Formality" is a tricky term because it's morphed somewhat over the years into a subjective meaning.  But what it simply means is that it entails a rejection of the rule of faith, which then entails an undermining of the formal motive of faith.  It's become way too subjective, though, to the point that it could never be discerned in the external forum, where it means that the heretic needs to know something is revealed by God and reject it anyway.  It's like that absurd definition of EENS, where you can't be saved if you know that the Catholic Church is the True Church of God and refuse to join it anyway ... therefore making all but the most obdurate Satanist capable of being saved.  Which heretic isn't convinced he's right and that he's the one being faithful to God's revealed truth?  Even after being rebuked by the Church and condemned, they continue insisting that they're right.  Arius and Nestorius were both convinced they were right, and so were Luther and Calvin.

But one can lack the formal motive of faith by simply being a Modernist, which these men all have been.  Why?  Because they don't believe that there IS an objective rule of faith that must be adhered to, since for them dogma progresses and changes, and people come to a "fuller understanding" that invalidates previous doctrinal "expressions".  So they have a different rule of faith, which is a blend of objective and subjective, and, like the Protestants, make themselves the ultimate rule of faith.  That is why Modernism is the synthesis of all heresy, because just as with the other heresies, they replace the objective rule of faith, the Deposit of Revelation, as determined by the Church's Magisterium, with their own subjective interpretation thereof, and their current interpretation leads to the evolution of doctrine.  As a result, they lack the formal rule of faith, and the mere absence of the formal motive/rule of faith suffices to make one be a non-Catholic.

For these Modernists, there is no such thing as, "Church taught this dogmatic proposition, so I assent to this proposition."  For them a proposition is just an imperfect window into the fuller truth that becomes clearer over time.  They don't consider themselves bound by prior "formulations" of the truth, and so they have no objective rule as a set of dogmatic propositions that they feel they must adhere to as they were defined.

They pay lip service to "Tradition", but for them this does not mean adhering to the past doctrinal definitions, but as Bergoglio recently re-defined it, Tradition means the "progress" of doctrine.

Bergoglio:

A church that does not develop its thinking in an ecclesial sense is a church that is going backward.  This is today’s problem, and of many who call themselves traditional. No, no, they are not traditional, they are people looking to the past, going backward.

So adhering to Church dogma as once defined is not "Traditionalism" but "backwardism" (a term he used later in the same interview).  For him, to be Traditional means to constantly have dogma evolving.  So they REDEFINE Tradition.  Bergoglio actually cited St. Vincent of Lerins, whom Traditionalists cite in support of their position.

Bergoglio and the other Modernists don't believe in a "static" set of propositions to which they must assent as defined, and so they lack the formal motive of faith, and they have manifested this.

Here is +Vigano's very recent anti-Modernist definition of Tradition:

Let me point out this important aspect: just as the human body develops antibodies when disease arises, so that it can be defeated when it is infected; so too the ecclesial body defends itself from the contagion of error when it occurs, affirming with greater incisiveness those aspects of dogma threatened by heresy. For this reason, with great wisdom, the Church proclaimed Truths of the Faith at certain times and not before, since those Truths were hitherto believed by the faithful in a less explicit and articulated form and it was not yet necessary to specify them.

Nevertheless, demonstrating pertinacious manifest heresy can be problematic.  And that's why for years I have argued that it is the wrong question.

We see a new religion established, a new Modernistic theological system taught by the Conciliar "Magisterium," a new Public Worship that displeases God and harms souls, and corruption of the Church's moral teaching.  We see a religion that lacks the marks of the One True Church founded by Christ, and would not be reconizable to a St. Pius X or St. Pius V ... were these saints to have been time-warped forward to our day.  It is incompatible with the promises of Our Lord, and with the protection of the Holy Spirit over the Papacy, that the free exercise of legitimate papal authority could yield such corruption.  This is something that Archbishop Lefebvre also believed.  But as to HOW and WHY and WHO and WHAT, as to the details of how this could have come about, we do not have dogmatic certainty.  Could these men have been blackmailed and were therefore not acting freely?  I personally believe that the See was impeded by Cardinal Siri (Pope Gregory XVII) until his death in 1989, and thus the elections of Roncalli, Montini, Luciani, and Wojtyla were not legitimate.  After that, Ratzinger and Bergoglio haven't been valid bishops, and thus they cannot fully exercise the papal office, especially the teaching authority, as only bishops are part of the Ecclesia Docens, and the Pope must be "Bishop of Rome".  Others argue that there have been doubles, or that the V2 popes were drugged.  Or they're just plain heretics.  Really, the WHY doesn't matter so much as upholding the principle that this destruction could not have bee wrought by the legitimate Papal Authority freely exercised.  Period.

Archbishop Lefebvre prescinded from making the determination about the how and the why, but he repeatedly affirmed that it is not possible for this to happen given the protection of the Holy Spirit over the Papacy, something which subsequent generations of R&R have rejected.

+Lefebvre:

…a grave problem confronts the conscience and the faith of all Catholics since the beginning of Paul VI’s pontificate: how can a pope who is truly successor of Peter, to whom the assistance of the Holy Ghost has been promised, preside over the most radical and far-reaching destruction of the Church ever known, in so short a time, beyond what any heresiarch has ever achieved? This question must one day be answered…

This is a rhetorical question, which he answered elsewhere by agreeing with the sedevacantists that it's not possible, given the assistance of the Holy Ghost, and said that SVism is a possible solution.  But he never had enough certainty regarding the details to definitively declare the See vacant.  I have elsewhere on CI posted the Youtube audio of his talk, which Father Ringrose posted upon becoming a sedevacantist.