The Dominican is one of 19 academics and clergy calling on the world’s bishops to admonish the Pope and publicly reject heresy or face losing the papacy.


The well-known and respected Dominican theologian Father Aidan Nichols has put his name to an historic open letter to bishops claiming Pope Francis is guilty of heresy and calling on them to formally correct him.
The letter, released on April 30, the feast day in the traditional calendar of St. Catherine of Siena — the 14th century saint famous for her criticism of Pope Gregory XI — states that Francis has on occasions “knowingly and persistently” denied what he knows is divinely revealed Church teaching. 
Such words and actions, the signatories continue, “amount to a comprehensive rejection of Catholic teaching on marriage and sexual activity, on the moral law, and on grace and the forgiveness of sins.” 
They add that they have taken this measure “as a last resort to respond to the accumulating harm caused by Pope Francis’s words and actions over several years, which have given rise to one of the worst crises in the history of the Catholic Church.” 
The signatories call on bishops to investigate the claims they put forth, and then correct Pope Francis by calling on him “to reject these heresies.” 
If he should “persistently refuse,” they call on the bishops to declare that Francis has “freely deprived himself of the papacy.”
“A heretical papacy may not be tolerated or dissimulated to avoid a worse evil,” the authors write. “It strikes at the basic good of the Church and must be corrected.”
They also link his purported rejection of some Church teachings with his favour shown to bishops and cardinals found guilty of abuse or covering up for abuse and corruption, such as Cardinals Theodore McCarrick, Godfried Danneels, Donald Wuerl and Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga. 
They explain that the open letter marks the “third stage” of a process that began in the summer of 2016 when a group of Catholic clergy and scholars wrote a private letter to cardinals and Eastern patriarchs pointing out heresies that they said were in the Pope’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia.
This was followed by a “filial correction” the following year which expressed grave concern about various papal pronouncements but stopped short of accusing the Pope of knowingly spreading heresy.
Father Nichols, author of many books on a wide range of theological topics including the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, is joined by, among others, the renowned patristics scholar Professor John Rist.
The letter has also been published in French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch.