Does a Heretical Pope Lose His Office?

Despite his many material heresies, the cardinal said in an interview last year that Francis
 has not committed formal heresy and that, even if his election was flawed,
acceptance of Francis as pope has made up for it. 

There's been quite the disagreement about whether or not Pope Francis is really pope. Lots of people say he's not for varying reasons, especially the sedevacantists. Here are some of those reasons:

• His election was invalid.
• He's made some heretical statements.
• St. Robert Bellarmine says a heretic can't be the pope and he's a heretic.
• He pals around with those who embrace intrinsic moral evils.
• He's mean and nasty.
• Whatever.....

I've never jumped on the "Jorge isn't the pope!" bandwagon because that declaration is above my pay grade. I believe the pope has made some heretical statements as Cardinal Müller says. Nevertheless, I simply do not have the competence to use that opinion to endow myself with the authority to remove a man, elected by a conclave of the cardinals, from the chair of Peter. If others feel confident about doing that, let them follow their own consciences as I do mine. I will continue to respect the office of the papacy while I ignore the man sitting in the chair.

Roberto de Mattei has an interesting article relating to this subject in The Voice of the Family Digest. He writes in The Problem of the Heretical Pope:

There is a distinction here, implicit but fundamental, between the legal and the spiritual separation of heretics from the Mystical Body, which reflects the difference between the soul and body of the Church. The pope explains that, while heresy by its nature separates the person spiritually from the Church, legal separation occurs only when the person voluntarily leaves the Church or is separated from it by an ecclesiastical sentence.

One must not confuse the sin and the crime of heresy. The former belongs to the moral sphere, the latter to the juridical. Heresy, by its nature, constitutes a sin and separates us spiritually from the Church, also predisposing us to a juridical separation. But the spiritual bond is distinct from the juridical.

A number of theologians say that no one can depose the pope except God. The cardinals can declare the pope a heretic but according to these theologians they don't have the authority to remove him juridically and canonically.

De Mattei goes on: 

The pope can separate himself from the Church, but only by means of a widely known heresy, manifest to the Catholic people and professed with obstinacy. The loss of the pontificate, in this case, would be the result not of a dismissal by someone else, but of an act of the pope himself, who in becoming a formal and widely known heretic would have excluded himself from the visible Church, tacitly resigning from the pontificate.

But an outwardly professed heresy can be defined as public without necessarily being widely known. The famous canonist Franz Xaver Wernz, in his Ius Decretalium (volume VI, 1913, pp 19–23), makes an important distinction between a public crime and a widely known crime. A crime is publicum when, although common knowledge, it is not recognised as a crime by all people. “Widely known” means moreover that the crime is recognised as evident by all: “Widely known facts do not need proof” (can 1747). Its being widely known presupposes the awareness, on the part of the one who hears heretical words, of the intrinsic malice of the one who speaks them. If the one who speaks them is a pontiff, as long as this realisation is lacking and the pope is tolerated and accepted by the universal Church, the heretic will remain a true pope and, in principle, his acts will be valid.

It's all very confusing to me, but I have to admit that most of the cardinals and bishops accept the pope as pope. And I certainly don't think a majority of Catholics believe he is a heretic and imposter. Plenty of people came out to the events during his recent trip to Singapore. In fact, Cardinal William Goh, Archbishop of Singapore said that the pope's visit "revived the faith of our poeple." 

We can argue at this point that most Catholics have very little understanding of their faith. I'm not sure how that impacts the argument. At any rate, I'm just presenting this for consideration and I'm not interested in another big debate with the sedevacantists who visit the blog, so I'm shutting off the comments for this post. 

Let's all pray for the pope and the hierarchy. I think we can agree about that.