Heresy in the Catholic Church

Heresy is contrasted with apostasy – "the total repudiation of the Christian faith" –, and with schism – " the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him".

Good faith in an erring man is a prudent judgment whereby the one in error thinks that he does not err, but on the contrary, that he is in possession of the truth".

b) That merely material heretics, even if manifest, are members of the Church, is argued by Franzelin, De Groot [nl], D'Herbigny, Caperan [Wikidata], Terrien, and a few others.

In the thirteenth century heresy was defined by Robert Grosseteste as "an opinion chosen by human preference contrary to holy scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately held", a conscious intellectual choice not a private doubt.

[14] Then-Catholic priest Martin Luther made comments that were later summarized in the 1520 bull Exsurge Domine as: "Haereticos comburi est contra voluntatem Spiritus" ("It is contrary to the Spirit to burn heretics").

[citation needed] Jansenism was an early modern theological movement popular in France in the mid-seventeenth century, that held that only a certain portion of humanity was predestined to be saved.

The last case of a heretic being executed was that of the schoolmaster Cayetano Ripoll, denounced for teaching deism by the local Board of Faith Junta de Fe, then tried by the state and hanged to death 26 July 1826 in Valencia after a two-year trial.

In his book The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:The difficulty in the way of giving an answer is a profound one.

Ultimately it is due to the fact that there is no appropriate category in Catholic thought for the phenomenon of Protestantism today (one could say the same of the relationship to the separated churches of the East).

Something that was once rightly condemned as heresy cannot later simply become true, but it can gradually develop its own positive ecclesial nature, with which the individual is presented as his church and in which he lives as a believer, not as a heretic.

The conclusion is inescapable, then: Protestantism today is something different from heresy in the traditional sense, a phenomenon whose true theological place has not yet been determined.