Church teaching says you can’t be excommunicated by a heretic
The tradition of the Church is clear: Someone in Leo XIV's position cannot excommunicate the SSPX.
Three of the four new
bishops of the SSPX (left to right): Pascal Schreiber, Michael Goldade, and
Michel Poinsinet de SivrySociety of Saint Pius X
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Wed Jul 1, 2026 - 3:14 pm EDT
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(LifeSiteNews) – After the Society of Saint Pius X’s episcopal consecrations on July 1, the Vatican is expected to issue a declaration of excommunication soon.
These expectations were strengthened the day before, after Leo XIV’s June 29 letter to Father Davide Pagliarani, the SSPX’s superior general. The letter urged Pagliarani not to proceed with what it described as a “schismatic act” and stated that “to tear the seamless garment of Christ is a sin of extreme gravity.”
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Today’s episcopal consecrations may result in a different situation: In April, SSPX Bishop Bernard Fellay stated that Vatican sources had revealed the intention was to excommunicate the entire SSPX (i.e., all priests and official members), and even the lay faithful attending their chapels.
However, it is impossible that the excommunications would be valid or binding. This article will explain how Catholic theology holds that those who preach heresy are incapable of excommunicating others.
Merely unjust excommunications still bind
The SSPX’s 1988 episcopal consecrations without pontifical mandate resulted in a declaration that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the five other bishops involved had incurred automatic (latae sententiae) excommunications.
The SSPX contested the validity of the excommunications on a variety of grounds, and in 2009, the Vatican rendered the point moot by stating that the penalties were being lifted.
But if these excommunications were simply unjust, should they have been treated as null and void? And what about excommunications for today’s consecrations?
Once again, the problem with any excommunications issued by Leo XIV’s Vatican will not be that they are unjust but that they are coming from someone who preaches heresy.
The problem is on the side of those issuing the excommunications and not on the injustice of the penalty or the righteousness of those unjustly excommunicated.
This is because unjust excommunications remain, in general, binding. In 1337, several propositions of the English heretic John Wycliffe were condemned. They included the following:
A curse or excommunication does not bind absolutely except when it is given against an opponent of the law of Christ.[1]
The same document condemned the following:
Excommunication by the pope or by any prelate is not to be feared, because it is the censure of the Antichrist. [2]
These statements are close to what is argued on behalf of the SSPX. However, like many Protestants, Wycliffe believed the papacy itself to be “Antichrist” – and notwithstanding certain comments made by Archbishop Lefebvre about the post-conciliar claimants, this is not what the SSPX believes.
However, the following propositions, condemned by Pope Clement XI in the bull Unigenitus, are more relevant:
91. The fear of an unjust excommunication should never hinder us from fulfilling our duty; never are we separated from the Church, even when by the wickedness of men we seem to be expelled from her, as long we are attached to God, to Jesus Christ, and to the Church herself by charity. — Jn 9:22-23.
92. To suffer in peace an excommunication and an unjust anathema rather than betray truth is to imitate St. Paul; it is far from rebelling against authority or destroying unity. —Rom 9:3 [3]
Pope Pius IX later referred to the condemned errors in his 1873 encyclical Quartus Supra:
They argue that the sentence of schism and excommunication pronounced against them by the Archbishop of Tyana, the Apostolic Delegate in Constantinople, was unjust, and consequently void of strength and influence. They have claimed also that they are unable to accept the sentence because the faithful might desert to the heretics if deprived of their ministration. (…)
The Jansenist heretics dared to teach such doctrines as that an excommunication pronounced by a lawful prelate could be ignored on a pretext of injustice. Each person should perform, as they said, his own particular duty despite an excommunication. Our predecessor of happy memory Clement XI in his constitution Unigenitus against the errors of Quesnell forbade and condemned statements of this kind. These statements were scarcely in any way different from some of John Wyclif’s which had previously been condemned by the Council of Constance and Martin V. [4]
The Pope continues, teaching that even unjust excommunications are to be feared:
Through human weakness a person could be unjustly punished with censure by his prelate. But it is still necessary, as Our predecessor St. Gregory the Great warned, ‘for a bishop’s subordinates to fear even an unjust condemnation and not to blame the judgment of the bishop rashly in case the fault which did not exist, since the condemnation was unjust, develops out of the pride of heated reproof.’
But if one should be afraid even of an unjust condemnation by one’s bishop, what must be said of those men who have been condemned for rebelling against their bishop and this Apostolic See and tearing to pieces as they are now doing by a new schism the seamless garment of Christ, which is the Church? [5]
In the face of such magisterial teaching, how could it be possible for the SSPX to disregard excommunications inflicted or declared by the Vatican?
Heretics cannot excommunicate
In the 420s AD, Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, preached the first of his sermons against the term Theotokos, or Mother of God – denying its legitimacy in reference to Our Lady. These sermons caused an outcry, notably from the layman Eusebius, who denounced Nestorius in the church. Eusebius later became a bishop, and a saint.
St. Hypatius also ceased naming Nestorius in the diptychs of the Mass – while maintaining communion with Bishop Eulalius, who disagreed with this course of action. [6]
Nestorius proceeded to excommunicate and depose those who opposed him (as well as use physical violence against them). Monks of Constantinople reported to the emperors that the populace had come to exclaim:
We have an emperor, but we do not have a bishop. [7]
Nestorius was later condemned by the Council of Ephesus. In response to the excommunications and depositions, Pope St. Celestine was reported as teaching, on more than one occasion, that “from the time (Nestorius and his allies) began to preach (their errors),” they were unable to excommunicate or depose anyone.
Here is an example of one such letter:
The authority of our See, has openly decreed that no bishop, nor cleric, nor anyone of any Christian profession, who has been cast down from communion or from his position by Nestorius or those like him, from the time they began to preach such things, is to be regarded as having been cast out or excommunicated; but all of these continue to this day in our communion, because one who wavered in preaching such things could not cast down or remove anyone.
Do you understand, Emperor, from the above-mentioned authorities, that those who had themselves long since been removed could not remove – I will not say their own superior – but anyone at all; nor could those already prostrate cast down anyone else?
This teaching was later reaffirmed specifically by Pope St. Nicholas the Great and incorporated into Gratian’s Decretum, one of the major medieval collections of canon law. In the Decretum, it formed part of the evidence in a wider discussion proving “that someone cannot be deposed or excommunicated by a heretic.”
Gratian and the others mentioned placed great stress on “the moment” in which the heretic “began to preach.” Merely misspeaking or erring in good faith is evidently not sufficient for this, or for the man to become unable to excommunicate. But provided the preacher is not simply misspeaking or speaking under correction, this “moment” when he “begins to preach” is when the heresy is externalized in a public fashion, and thus the moment at which the previously secretly heretical member of the Church becomes a non-Catholic and loses his office.
Gratian himself states the following in relation to these texts:
(H)e cannot curse a Catholic, since the Catholic is his superior; nor can he pass sentence upon one estranged from the faith, as upon one equal to himself.
And:
C. XXXI. We say that absolutely all heretics and schismatics possess nothing of power or right.
Later theologians
Pope St. Celestine’s texts – and others from Causa XXIV of the Decretum – were also cited and explained by theologians such as St. Robert Bellarmine, a Doctor of the Church, and Cardinal Juan de Turrecremata (Torquemada). Bellarmine cited Pope St. Celestine’s texts in support of his thesis:
(T)he Holy Fathers teach unanimously not only that heretics are outside of the Church, but also that they are “ipso facto” deprived of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction and dignity. [8]
He cites other parts of the same Causa in order to show the same point:
(A) secret heretic, if he might be a Bishop, or even the Supreme Pontiff, does not lose jurisdiction, nor dignity, or the name of the head in the Church, until either he separates himself publicly from the Church, or being convicted of heresy is separated against his will; for this reason, Celestine and Nicholas say (loc. cit.) that a heretical Bishop, to the extent that he began to preach heresy, could bind and loose no one although without a doubt if he had already conceived the error, were it before he began to preach publicly, he could still bind and loose.
The fact is likewise confirmed from the canon Audivimus, 24, quaest. 1, where we read: ‘But if he will have devised a new heresy in their heart, to the extent that he begins to preach such things, he can condemn no man.’[9]
Turrecremata makes a similar point, presenting these texts and concluding:
Whence, properly speaking, a pope is not deposed by a council on account of heresy, but rather is declared not to be pope, when it is shown that he has fallen into heresy and perseveres in it obstinately and incorrigibly (…)
(O)ne who has pertinaciously fallen into heretical depravity is deprived ipso iureof all ecclesiastical power (…) [10]
In short, for these two theologians – and others – the heretic’s inability to excommunicate a Catholic rests on the fact that he is not the superior of the Catholic. He is deprived of the jurisdiction needed to excommunicate.
Applied to the SSPX and Leo XIV
It is very easy to establish that Leo XIV is a heretic and preaching heresy. He did so before the May 2025 conclave (along with taking part in Pachamama worship), and the period afterward has featured a constant series of denials of the Catholic faith, including:
· Alleging that a unity of faith exists with heretics, and communion with Muslims
· Denying the legitimacy of the death penalty (which he also did on several occasions prior to his election)
· Praising the interreligious prayer meeting of Assisi in 1986, and the Abu Dhabi declaration
· Denying the dogma Outside the Church there is no salvation through his endorsement of his predecessor’s error of the “ecumenism of blood”
· Praising Fiducia Supplicans and Amoris Laetitia
· Denying the immutability of Catholic dogma, by countenancing the possibility of changes if “attitudes” change
· Presenting a naturalistic vision for world politics, along with errors condemned by previous Popes
· Preaching the undiluted doctrine of modernism very soon after his election, with what appear to be many deliberate allusions to Pope St. Pius X’s condemnation of the heresy.
Further, the SSPX themselves recently released a 154-point Profession of Faith, which contains points denied by Leo XIV and his recent predecessors.
It is, in short, not difficult to establish the heresy of Leo XIV, and thus to appeal to the doctrine presented in this article.
Thus, if the Vatican issues a declaratory sentence of an automatic excommunication against the bishops – or a condemnatory sentence inflicting an excommunication against anyone else – the heresy that Leo XIV “began to preach” long before the May 2025 conclave is sufficient to render such acts invalid.
But it is impossible to have recourse to such an argument without stating clearly that Leo XIV both is preaching heresy and is a heretic; it is also impossible to have recourse to it with consistency without accepting the practical and theological consequences of the conclusion.
Notwithstanding Fr. Pagliarani continuing with the consecrations, it remains to be seen whether he pursues such a line of argument, given the otherwise irenic and “filial” tone that he has adopted toward Leo XIV.
This is a summary of a longer article published here.
