For sedevacantists, it is Katie bar the door at the next conclave.

A stubborn refrain from a subset of Catholic traditionalists accompanied the press’s bedside vigil during Pope Francis’s hospitalization. The narrative was elementary: Francis is in error. He has signaled heretical attitudes. Moreover, the Saint Gallen Gang short-circuited divine guidance by lobbying the 2013 conclave for Francis’s benefit. Thus, he is not really the pope. The Chair of Peter stands empty. It follows, then, that all of Francis’s appointments to the cardinalate are invalid.

Jorge Bergoglio is not a man to my taste. His ideological temper galls and saddens me at the same time. But my dismay does not translate into a brief for denying that he is, indeed, my pope.

Heresy-spotting is rousing but hazardous. It rules out of court inconvenient historical facts and discrepancies. Arguments, paradoxes, and canonical knots go away. We are left with the tropes of a theology annexed for the purposes of ecclesiastic politics. Truth is bruised in the process.

Denial of Francis’s legitimacy calls to mind the ninth century Cadaver Synod. In 897, the corpse of Pope Formosus was dug up and put on trial by his successor, Stephen VI, who accused Formosus of having usurped the papacy. Consequently, all his papal acts were declared invalid. All appointments, dedications, and ordinations were rendered non-binding.

Formoso’s trial and conviction was postmortem. The bizarrarie of it was inextricable from—and incomprehensible apart from—power struggles between factions of the Holy Roman Empire. Fast forward to 2025. The spectacle of Francis’s trial-by-Catholic-media as a pretender is antemortem. The inversion has much to do with gradually swelling assertions of papal jurisdiction and authority that reached an apogee in nineteenth century ultramontanism. And still persist.

Ultramontanism is a devotional attitude toward the papacy that is kissing-cousin to idolatry. Disappointment over the distance between the Bergoglian pontificate and evangelical eminence fuels nostalgia for the flawed confidence of 1870. It favors an exaggerated piety that erases distinctions between an office and the nature of the man who fulfills it.

Historical record tells against glorifying popes as exalted beings. The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2, examines the papacy in the 8th and 9th centuries during the Frankish-dominated Carolingian Empire. Later known as the Holy Roman Empire, the political tumult of the period throws a gloomy shadow on the lingering fervor of ultramontanism.

The rapid succession of popes in the era is dizzying. Between 872 and 965 there were two dozen popes. The years between 896 and 904 saw, on average, a new pope every year. As one writer for JSTOR phrased it: “In this era, being elected pope was a little like being diagnosed with a deadly disease.” Adroit gamesmanship might keep a pontificate intact for a stretch, but prognosis was grim.

Stephen VI, Formosus’s posthumous nemesis, was imprisoned and strangled to death in little more than a year after the macabre trial. His successor, Pope Romanus, was deposed after three months: August to November 897. Next was Theodore II who died of unknown causes after twenty days in December —just long enough to call a synod of his own to rehabilitate the legacy of Formosus and annul Stephen’s Cadaver Synod.

Following Theodore II came Pope John IX and Sergius, a rival claimant to the papal throne. Though Sergius was excommunicated and ejected from Rome, he later achieved the papacy as Sergius III in 904. John IX reaffirmed the work of Theodore II. In turn, Sergius III annulled the synods of Theodore II and John IX, and reinstated the validity of the Cadaver Synod. Between John IX’s death in 900 and Sergius III’s consecration in 904, came Benedict IV, Leo V, and Christopher.

In sum, popes were made and unmade in the power struggles of princes and barons. No amount of hermeneutical agility can reconcile the treacheries and contradictions of Church politics over the longue durée with the exalted characteristics too easily ascribed to occupants of the Chair of Peter.

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Deference to a pope comes readily to Catholics. We are groomed for it. Within legitimate bounds there is grace in that. But the boundaries are not totalizing. Outside of them obeisance falls prey to forces that do not serve the Church. Neither do they serve a civilization painfully wrought from endemic tyrannies and now defending itself against new ones. [e.g., climate change mania among other global ideologies]

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Ultramontanism encourages the subjective fantasy that we are thinking with God if we think with the pope. The mindset is crystalized in De la vie et des vertus chrétiennes . . . (On Christian Life and Virtues Considered in the Religious State), a widely read devotional text written in 1874 by French priest and theologian Charles-Louis Gay.

Msgr. Gay took part in Vatican I as advisor to Bishop Louis-Édouard Pie of Poitiers, a key participant in the ultramontane movement. The tenor of that ethos is profiled in this passage from Gay’s writing that was included in De la Dévotion au Pape, a pamphlet believed to have been published early in Pius X’s pontificate, and bearing the Imprimatur of René François Renou, Archbishop of Tours.):

All the devotion to Jesus as Priest, Shepherd, and Father . . . is summed up practically and effectively in devotion to the Pope.

. . . If one is devout to the Angels, the Pope is the visible Angel of the whole Church. If we are devout to the saints, the Pope is on earth the source of sanctity, and is called ‘his Holiness.’ If one would have a devotion to the sacred Scriptures, the Pope is on earth the source of sanctity, and is called ‘his Holiness.’ If one would have a devotion to the sacred Scriptures, the Pope is the living and speaking Bible. If it is a duty to be devout to the Sacraments, is not the Pope the sacrament of Jesus by the mere fact that he is His Victor?

Is not the Pope the sacrament of Jesus. Such wording commends the pope as an object of devotion parallel to—even equivalent to—the Eucharist. We are to live in spirit with the pope in the same way, if to a somewhat lesser degree, that we enter into communion with Jesus. Adoration of Christ in the Eucharist slides into adoration of the pope. The ultramontane cause suggests that the papacy is more than a role to which a particular man is elected. Rather, it glorifies the papacy as a kind of transubstantiation in a minor key.

In reality, a chasm separates sacred office from mortal office-holder. No beatific metamorphosis occurs in the man on the Petrine chair. To believe otherwise is papalotry, not Catholicism. When Catholics pray the Our Father, we are not praying to a pope.