PAPAL INFALLIBILITY IS OVERTHROWN IF A POPE CAN BE SHOWN TO HAVE PROPOSED HERESY TO THE ENTIRE CHURCH

Pope Honorius undermined the core Catholic doctrine that Jesus was properly human or man.  He set this teaching for the whole church.  This disproves the Catholic doctrine that a pope will not be allowed by Jesus who said hell would never win over his church to teach such error.  It is presupposed that if you are Christian and you fall away from core doctrine that you lose your salvation and thus go to everlasting damnation.

The Catholic excuse is often, "Honorius was not writing as pope but as a private theologian so he was not infallible but erred." Catholics teach that the pope can sin and make mistakes but cannot err when he uses his infallibility which Honorius was not using. The pope can err as a private theologian. Pope Fiction page 162 however admits that his letter was official. He was trying to answer a query for Sergius and his part of the Church which was a big part for the Constantinople Patriarch was a major leader in the Church. He was not teaching as a private theologian.

The Church says that Honorius just thought it didn’t matter if Jesus had one will or two. “And Honorius, so far from pronouncing an infallible opinion in the Monothelite controversy, was ‘quite extraordinarily not’ (as Gore used to say) pronouncing a decision at all. To the best of his human wisdom, he thought the controversy ought to be left unsettled, for the greater peace of the Church. In fact, he was an inopportunist. We, wise after the event, say that he was wrong. But nobody, I think, has ever claimed that the Pope is infallible in not defining a doctrine” (Difficulties, page 126-7). But in fact Honorius was making a dogma of the doctrine that we can believe that Jesus had one will or the orthodox doctrine that he had two. He proclaimed this to the whole Church for in his letter he told Sergius but this is heresy too. Honorius ignored those who wrote to him trying to correct him and in response to them he called his dogma a dogma of the Church meaning an infallible teaching to be accepted by the whole Church and addressed to the whole Church so again papal infallibility is refuted (page 196, A Handbook on the Papacy).

Honorius used the words, “We confess,” which means the Church and faith he is speaking for and himself meaning the right Church were declaring these things about Jesus that he had one will. He did make a decision and it agreed with that of Sergius. He agreed with the heresy of Sergius.
 
Honorius was posthumously condemned by the Sixth General Council which took place in Constantinople in 681 AD. In its Acts of the Thirteenth Session, it condemned his letters to Sergius as harmful to the soul. The letters were official statements of doctrine and meant to steer the Church towards the Monothelite heresy when they got that huge amount of attention. Why worry much about the statements of a private theologian or a dead Church leader or a few personal letters? Only very serious and authoritative documents could get such treatment. His letters were burned at the Session. At Session 16, the Council declared “ Accursed to the extreme be that heretic Honorius.” The Church found him guilty of heresy in his letters and excommunicated and cursed him.

Pope Leo 2 brought out a statement that the Council was right about Honorius and he too excommunicated and cursed him. Leo invoked the anathema against Honorius which is always a statement against heretics. It is a blatant lie that Leo interpreted the Council as not accusing Honorius as a Monothelite but as a person who wouldn’t do anything about the heresy. The lie is based on taking Leo’s words, “permitted her who is totally pure to be corrupted by polluted doctrine” to mean Leo condemned him for negligence and nothing else. But this wording could be used against somebody who taught explicit heresy too. Also if Honorius was simply negligent, he wasn’t the only pope who let heretics win the day and so why was he so severely attacked? Why was he singled out? Why did it matter so much though he was dead? Because he was an outward heretic not just a fence-sitter.
 
Leo wrote that he accepted the Sixth Session which condemned Honorius as a heretic. A heretical Church man to spread his heresy must first permit the heresy so the quote does not support the Catholic cause. Pope Leo II placed Honorius under the deepest excommunication of the Church the one that makes one “aeterna damnatione mulctati”. Leo accused Honorius of being a traitor who subverted the faith as did the Sixth Council of Constantinople (page 292, Vicars of Christ). 
 
The Council declared, “Having learned that the letters of Honorius are in total disagreement with the doctrines of the apostles and the definitions of the sacred councils and of all the fathers that are approved and that on the contrary they lean to the false teachings of the heretics we absolutely reject and condemn these letters. They are poison for the soul. We also state that Honorius who was once pope of the old Rome had also been rejected from God’s holy Church and is being accursed on account of the letters he sent to Sergius and in which he accepted Sergius’s beliefs in all things and reaffirmed his unholy doctrines”.
 
The Church today says that Leo II clarified this condemnation which was never approved by any pope (page 160, Pope Fiction) to say that Honorius was excommunicated and condemned for neglect not heresy. Leo is quoted as writing that Honorius didn’t do his job but fostered heresy by negligence (ibid page 160). But the Church is unable to quote anything that proves that Leo meant that when Honorius
 
The Church should agree with the original decree for it says ecumenical councils make binding decisions under the help of infallibility. Now would how could the Church have the right to excommunicate and condemn any dead pope for neglect? Would it do such a thing, of course not! Any pope can be accused of criminal neglect in many things. The Church is making out that Leo II was a lying rascal. Ecumenical councils and popes are infallible and here we have a pope denying that ecumenical councils are infallible and even correcting their decisions after they were made. Not even an infallible pope can have that right. The infallible cannot correct the infallible and if the Church isn’t infallible how can the pope be? If the council was right to excommunicate and condemn the pope as even Leo says though he denied Honorius was a heretic how can the pope really be the head of the Church and if the pope is not the head how can he be infallible? The popes then didn’t think they were the rocks the Church was built on and infallible. Nobody did.
 
Suppose Honorius was not expelled for heresy but for agreeing with Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, that the orthodox Christians and the heretics who believed that Jesus had only one will should stop quarrelling and get on with it. Catholics think this gets them off the hook because he did not define anything. But he defined that the Church can hold faith with heretics. It is not good enough to say that he was not declaring to the whole Church for he only wrote to Sergius. He was making a decision for the whole Church to embrace heretics as brothers for his decision makes no sense if it was not directed to the whole Church.  
 
Honorius made a decision to bind the Church and said it was the true faith so he was a true example of papal fallibility. He fulfilled all the conditions for making an infallible statement that were spelled out at Vatican 1 yet he was not infallible. The fact that the Church at the time of the Sixth Council did not descend into chaos and speculation that Honorius was a fake pope and a massive debate and schism from the papacy proves that papal infallibility was not recognised or believed in. If today’s pope used his infallibility to make Mary the incarnation of the Holy Spirit there would be a huge break from the Vatican and such a huge debate that everybody would be writing about it. There would be attempts to put the “true” pope in his place.

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