Tried and found wanting: How Leo XIV chose heresy over the Church
Matthew McCuskerMay 4, 2026
By endorsing Francis's 2018 Catechism revision on capital punishment, Leo XIV has chosen a competing rule of faith over that proposed by the ordinary and universal Catholic Magisterium.
Leo XIV has publicly rejected the teaching of the Catholic Church that capital punishment is legitimate under certain conditions.
This teaching, having been proposed for our belief by the universal and ordinary magisterium, must be believed by all Catholics. The denial of this doctrine constitutes heresy.
The implications of Leo XIV’s public profession of heresy deserve careful consideration.
Leo XIV’s position on capital punishment
On April 24, in a video address commemorating the 15th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, Leo XIV said:
The Church teaches that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
The words within speech marks are from the text on capital punishment inserted into the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 by Francis.
Speaking to journalists in a plane interview on April 27, Leo XIV reiterated this position:
I condemn all actions that are unjust. I condemn the taking of people’s lives. I condemn capital punishment. I believe that human life is to be respected and that all people – from conception to natural [death] – their lives should be respected and protected.
He is on record expressing the same position on April 18, 2022, prior to his putative election as Pope. On that occasion he said:
In the Church, we teach that the death penalty is inadmissible, not even in a tragic case like this.
The teaching of the Catholic Church on capital punishment
The legitimacy of capital punishment is explicitly affirmed in the divinely revealed scriptures:
Whosoever shall shed man’s blood, his blood shall be shed: for man was made to the image of God (Gen 9:6).
Capital punishment is commanded by God Himself on numerous occasions in the Law of Moses. For example:
He that striketh a man with a will to kill him, shall be put to death. (Ex 21:12)
The Catholic Church has always upheld the legitimacy of capital punishment. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, in its treatment of the Fifth Commandment, teaches:
The power of life and death is permitted to certain civil magistrates because theirs is the responsibility under law to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. Far from being guilty of breaking this commandment, such an execution of justice is precisely an act of obedience to it. For the purpose of the law is to protect and foster human life. This purpose is fulfilled when the legitimate authority of the state is exercized by taking the guilty lives of those who have taken innocent lives.
In the Psalms we find a vindication of this right: “Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land, cutting off all evildoers from the city of the Lord” (Ps. 101:8).[1]
In 1520, Pope Leo X condemned the following proposition:
That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit. [2]
And in 1952, Pope Pius XII taught:
[I]n the case of the death penalty the state does not dispose of the individual’s right to life. Rather public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his guilt, after he, through his crime, deprived himself of his own right to life.[3]
The legitimacy of capital punishment is clearly and repeatedly made known in the inerrant scriptures, the content of which is presented for our belief by the Church. The doctrine has been explicitly and continually taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church, and the Fathers, Doctors, and theologians witness to this continued teaching down through the centuries.
The denial of this doctrine constitutes heresy.
What is heresy?
Heresy is the obstinate denial or doubt of one of the truths which must be believed by divine and Catholic faith.[4] The First Vatican Council (1870) taught:
All those things are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and are proposed by the Church either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal magisterium to be believed as divinely revealed.
(For a deeper look at how the Church proposes the doctrines to be believed by divine and Catholic faith, see here.)
Heretics refuse to take the Sacred Magisterium of the Church as their authoritative teacher. A man is not a heretic because he has a mistaken understanding about what the Catholic Church teaches, but because he chooses not to submit to her teaching authority, with regard to one or more of the truths of revelation which she proposes for our belief.
Father E. Sylvester Berry writes:
Heresy, from the Greek hairesis, signifies a choosing; therefore a heretic is one who chooses for himself in matters of faith, thereby rejecting the authority of the Church established by Christ to teach all men the truths of revelation. He rejects the authority of the Church by following his own judgment or by submitting to an authority other than that established by Christ.[5]
Cardinal Louis Billot:
According to the origin of the term and the constant sense of all tradition, someone is properly called a heretic who after receiving Christianity in the sacrament of Baptism, does not accept the rule of what must be believed from the magisterium of the Church, but chooses from somewhere else a rule of belief about matters of faith and the doctrine of Christ: whether he follow other doctors and teachers of religion, or adheres to the principle of free examination and professes a complete independence of thought, or whether finally he disbelieve even one article out of those which are proposed by the Church as dogmas of Faith.[6]
Here we must draw some important distinctions:
A person who takes the Church as their rule of faith, but has simply misunderstood something she teaches, is not a heretic. For example, on every doctrinal question Person X looks to the Church to teach him what to believe. However, he misunderstands the Church’s teaching that Jesus Christ is a divine person and concludes that Our Lord only has a divine nature, and not also a human nature. He holds an opinion that is heretical, but he is not a heretic.
A person who chooses a rule of faith other than that of the Catholic Church but is not guilty of personal sin in making this choice is a material heretic. For example, Person Y believes that Our Lord has only a divine nature because she takes the teaching of the Coptic Church as her rule of what to believe, in place of that of the Catholic Church, which her bishops, priests, and parents have assured her teaches false doctrine.
A person who chooses a rule of faith other than that of the Catholic Church and is guilty of personal sin in so doing is a formal heretic. For example, Person Z professes the same doctrine as Person Y, but because of his theological and historical studies, has come to realize he ought to submit to the teaching office of the Catholic Church. Yet, fearing the personal consequences, refuses to do so.
Persons X, Y, and Z all hold the same opinion. But only Y and Z are heretics, because only they follow a rule of faith other than that of the Catholic Church.
Person X, because he is submissive to the Magisterium, will abandon his mistake as soon as the true doctrine is made clear to him. Of course, if he chooses to adhere to his own opinion in preference to the doctrine proposed by the Church, he too would become a heretic.
Heretics can be further subdivided according to how widely their heresy is known. If it is not known to others, or known only to a very restricted circle, e.g., a spouse or a confessor, heresy is occult. If it is known more widely, it is public.
Public heretics are not members of the Church
LifeSiteNews has previously published a series on the Catholic Church’s teaching on membership of the Mystical Body. […]
As explained in that series, the Catholic Church is a visible body whose members must be generally identifiable. The Church is made visible by means of four marks, which she can never lose, and which can always be discerned through the use of reasonable diligence. These marks are unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity. Hence, we refer to the divine society founded by Jesus Christ as the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
This Church’s unity consists of unity in faith and unity in government.[7] Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Satis Cognitum, “On the Unity of the Church,” teaches that:
It is of the greatest importance and indeed of absolute necessity, as to which many are deceived, that the nature and character of this unity should be recognized. And, as We have already stated, this is not to be ascertained by conjecture, but by the certain knowledge of what was done; that is by seeking for and ascertaining what kind of unity in faith has been commanded by Jesus Christ.[8]
This is of even greater importance today because the true teaching on unity of faith has been so obscured that many sincere Catholics talk about the Church being disunited in faith and believe that is possible to simultaneously recognize men as public heretics and as members of the Church and as legitimate pastors.
On the contrary, the mark of unity is perpetual. The Church is never disunited in either faith or government. If a person separates from the unity of faith or government, they cease to be united to the Church, which continues on her way with her unity intact.
Pope Leo XIII taught:
The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium.[9]
Theologian Monsignor G. Van Noort explained:
The unity of faith which Christ decreed without qualification consists in this, that everyone accepts the doctrines presented for belief by the Church’s teaching office. In fact, our Lord requires nothing other than the acceptance by all of the preaching of the apostolic college, a body which is to continue forever; or, what amounts to the same thing, of the pronouncements of the Church’s teaching office, which He Himself set up as the rule of faith. And the essential unity of faith definitely requires that everyone hold each and every doctrine clearly and distinctly presented for belief by the Church’s teaching office; and that everyone hold these truths explicitly or at least implicitly, i.e., by acknowledging the authority of the Church which teaches them.[10]
Those who are visibly disunited in faith are public heretics, and those who are visibly disunited in government are public schismatics. Public apostates are those who have openly repudiated the Christian faith itself.
These three states are incompatible with membership of the Church, as Pope Pius XII made clear in his encyclical letter Mystici Corporis Christi:
[N]ot every sin, however grave it may be, is such as of its own nature to sever a man from the Body of the Church, as does schism or heresy or apostasy.[11]
The Catechism of the Council of Trent likewise teaches:
Heretics and schismatics are excluded from the Church, because they have separated from her and belong to her only as deserters belong to the army from which they have deserted. It is not, however, to be denied that they are still subject to the jurisdiction of the Church, inasmuch as they may be called before her tribunals, punished and anathematized.[12]
As far as membership of the Church is concerned, it is of no consequence whether the heresy is formal or material. To return to our example above, neither Person Y nor Person Z are members of the Catholic Church, despite only Person Z being personally culpable of the sin of heresy. They both visibly take their rule from the Coptic Church and are visibly disunited from the Catholic Church.
As Ludwig Ott states:
Public heretics, even those who err in good faith (material heretics), do not belong to the body of the Church, that is, the legal commonwealth of the Church.[13]
And Van Noort explains why:
[I]f public material heretics remained members of the Church, the visibility and unity of Christ’s Church would perish. If these purely material heretics were considered members of the Catholic Church in the strict sense of the term, how would one ever locate the “Catholic Church?” How would the Church be one body? How would it profess one faith? Where would be its visibility? Where its unity? For these and other reasons we find it difficult to see any intrinsic probability to the opinion which would allow for public heretics, in good faith, remaining members of the Church.[14]
Van Noort is explaining that if public material heretics remained members of the Church, the Church would cease to be a society united in the one faith proposed by the Magisterium and would simply become the body of those who could not be proven to have made a culpable choice to reject it, which is a different thing altogether.
Such a society would no longer be a visible Church, recognized by the mark of unity, but would instead become an invisible body, which could no longer be discerned by objective criteria. One would need to know a person’s subjective dispositions in order to know whether they were a member of the Church, and thus no clear boundary could exist between the Catholic Church and those hundreds of millions of baptized people who do not profess the faith taught by the Magisterium.
Therefore, the only sound conclusion must be to affirm that all public heretics are excluded from the body of the Church because of their objective state of taking their rule of faith from something other than the Magisterium, and without regard for the subjective disposition of their conscience.
Public heretics cannot hold the papal office
The papacy is an ecclesiastical office and, in common with all other such offices, may only be held by a member of the Catholic Church.
The Church teaches that only male members of the Church, who have the use of reason, can be elected to the Roman Pontificate. […]
Therefore, the canonists Wernz and Vidal write:
Excluded as incapable of valid election, however, are all women, children who have not yet arrived at the age of discretion, those afflicted with habitual insanity, heretics and schismatics.
The attempted election of a public heretic to the papacy would be invalid.
Many theologians have held that once a man has been elected pope, he is preserved from falling into public heresy. Other theologians have argued that a true pope can fall into public heresy but would immediately lose the papal office if he did so. Both schools agree that a man can never simultaneously be both pope and a public heretic.
According to these theologians “a heretical Pope, ipso facto, ceases to be Pope by reason of his heresy.”[15] It is not because of any human action, other than his own heresy.
The opinion that a heretical pope is not deposed automatically but must be deposed by the action of the College of Cardinals, or a council of bishops, is false, as it necessarily entails a subordinate ecclesiastical authority judging the pope, the supreme authority in the Church. This is contrary to Catholic dogma.
The notion that a “declaration” of some kind by cardinals or bishops is required before clergy and laity can notice a vacancy must be rejected as theologically and philosophically incoherent. Neither bishops nor cardinals have jurisdiction to judge the pope. They are however able to recognize that he has left the Catholic Church, and thus fallen from the papacy, by noticing a contradiction between his public profession and the doctrine taught by the Catholic Church.
This is a judgement of the intellect of a kind which may be made by any human being. To restrict recognition of a vacancy to cardinals and bishops is manifestly absurd. If a cardinal or bishop can notice a man is contradicting Catholic doctrine, so can a priest, or a layman, or even a little child. Indeed, perhaps it will sometimes be easier for the “simple” to recognize such a reality than those who know how to construct complex arguments to help them deny the obvious. In the story it was a child who had the courage and connection to his own senses to proclaim that the emperor had no clothes.
Any declaration would be limited in its significance to the confirmation of a vacancy by those with the authority to proceed to the election of a new pope – the College of Cardinals, an imperfect council, or the clergy of Rome – but would not bring the vacancy of the Holy See about or be required before other Catholics could recognize it.
The position that a pope could fall into public heresy and remain pope has very little support in the theological tradition, and, though not explicitly condemned by the Church, seems impossible to reconcile with her doctrine on the visible unity of faith and on membership of the Church. Bishop Athanasius Schneider has recourse to this approach to defend Francis’s claim. Professor John Lamont responded to Schneider by noting that there is:
[A] moral unanimity among Catholic theologians on the thesis that a pope guilty of the public crime of heresy cannot remain as pope. Cardinal Billot is one witness to this; “When it is supposed that a pope has made a profession of heresy as a private person, all accept that the bond of communion and obedience to him is broken, on account of the divine authority that expressly commands separation from heretics; Titus 3:1, 2 John 1, etc.”
Lamont argues that “only one solitary exception” can be found to support Schneider’s view, a 19th century French canonist called Marie-Dominique Bouix.[16]
We are all aware of the difficulty that conservative-minded cardinals and bishops face in addressing the question of papal heresy, but it’s time for them to treat the moral unanimity among Catholic theologians seriously.
I have further explored the question of public heresy and the papacy […]
The status of Leo XIV
Leo XIV publicly professed heresy both before and after his putative election by openly repudiating a doctrine proposed for our belief by the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church.
In repudiating the teaching of the Catholic Church, Leo XIV made it explicit that he was following the rule of faith proposed by Francis, by quoting the text the latter inserted into the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 on capital punishment.
I have previously argued that by this act Francis deliberately set aside the Catholic rule of faith and proposed a new rule of his own. Regarding this “substitution of a new doctrine of capital punishment in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in place of what the Church has always taught,” I wrote:
It is not possible at one and the same time to (i) propose the rule of faith handed down by the magisterium – that under certain conditions the state can have recourse to capital punishment, and (ii) profess a different rule of faith – that under no circumstances can the state have recourse to capital punishment. There is a direct contradiction between (i) and (ii).
We know that Francis knew what the magisterium proposed because he had to deliberately remove it from the Catechism in order to propose the new doctrine. Unlike [a confused Catholic], who might not be aware of what the Church taught, Francis could not possibly have explicitly substituted one doctrine for another without being aware both of the previous doctrine and the new doctrine. The very nature of his act gives us the certainty that he knew that he was substituting the doctrine proposed by the Church with another which contradicted it.
At the time of this amendment to the Catechism, Leo XIV was the Bishop of Chiclayo, Peru. In being presented with the amended Catechism he was presented with a choice: accept the rule of faith proposed by Francis, or refuse it and remain faithful to the prior rule proposed by the Magisterium.
A number of bishops did indeed take this opportunity to publicly express their adherence to the traditional doctrine. Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal Jānis Pujats, Archbishop Tomasz Peta, Archbishop Jan Paweł Lenga, and Bishop Schneider signed a “Declaration of Truths” on May 31, 2019, which states:
In accordance with Holy Scripture and the constant tradition of the ordinary and universal Magisterium, the Church did not err in teaching that the civil power may lawfully exercise capital punishment on malefactors where this is truly necessary to preserve the existence or just order of societies.
Bishop Robert Prevost made the opposing choice. He chose to publicly adhere to the heretical doctrine proposed by Francis and he has repeated that adherence at least twice since his putative election.
In publicly manifesting his adherence to the rule proposed by Francis, rather than that proposed by the Catholic Church, it is difficult to draw any other conclusion than that Leo XIV separated himself from the Church’s public profession of faith, with all that this implies for his membership of the Church and his capacity to hold the papal office.
And of course, while this article has focused on the doctrine of capital punishment, Leo XIV’s refusal to adhere to the Catholic rule of faith has been manifested in a myriad of other ways, many of them documented on LifeSiteNews. They include his commitment to follow the path set out in Amoris Laetitia, a document which contains numerous heresies, his expressed desire for a “Synodal Church”, and his public participation in the rites of a pagan goddess.
Leo XIV’s clear and public refusal to adhere to the Catholic rule of faith means it is simply not tenable for conservative-minded cardinals and bishops to continue to assert that it is certain that Leo XIV is the pope, and that all the faithful must accept him as such.
Leo’s own words and actions, carefully examined in the light of the Catholic theology, lead us to conclude otherwise.
References
1 Catechism of the Council of Trent, (1566), Part III, 5, n. 4.
2 Pope Leo X, Exsurge Domine, Condemned proposition 33.
3 Pope Pius XII, Address on September 14, 1952.
4 Joachim Salaverri S.J., Sacrae Theologiae Summa IB, (1956; translated by Kenneth Baker S.J., 2015), p422.
5 Rev E. Sylvester Berry, The Church of Christ: An Apologetic and Dogmatic Treatise, (Mount St Mary’s Seminary, 1955), p128.
6 Louis Cardinal Billot, De Ecclesia, Question 7: The Members of the Church, (extracts translated by Fr. Julian Larrabee).
7 Sometimes a third is spoken of – worship – though this is reducible to the other two.
8 Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, No. 6.
9 Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum, No. 6.
10 Mgr G. Van Noort, Dogmatic Theology Volume II: Christ’s Church, (6th edition, 1957, trans. Castelot & Murphy), p xxvi.
11 Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, No. 23.
12 Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part I, Article IX.
13 Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, (English edition, ed. James Bastible), p309-11.
14 Van Noort, Christ’s Church, p242.
15 John Henry Newman, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, (1875).
16 Professor Lamont quotes the judgement of the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) on Bouix: “he falls short of being a great canonist; he is too often a compiler rather than a genuine author, and he too frequently betrays a lack of that juridical sense which comes more from practice than from theory, and which begets the ability to pronounce justly on the lawfulness and unlawfulness of existing practices.”
Source:
Tried and found wanting: How Leo XIV chose …