Someone buy some anti-inflammatories for Ryan Grant, because this exquisite rhetorical beating by Chris Jackson has GOT to hurt.

Good grief, this is positively ARTISTIC. Please, Sweet Jesus, let this Chris Jackson (a pen name), be a normal, decent, non- trainwreck, genuine, believing Catholic man.

The topic is: does Pope Paul IV’s bull of ARSH 1558 declaring that a heretic cannot hold ecclesiastical office still apply to the Church today?

Jackson writes:

“No one seriously denies that Cum ex has been overtaken by later legislation. But Grant’s deeper claim is that this fact somehow erases the principle behind it: that because a sixteenth-century penal mechanism was later streamlined, the theological axiom it expressed has evaporated too. That leap is untenable.”

I have to stop quoting or else I’ll just end up cross-posting the entire piece. It’s short, and every paragraph is a beatdown like Cassius Clay standing over a helplessly supine Joe Frazier.

Wait. One more. Jackson again:

“The question that matters is not whether Paul IV’s document is laminated in canon law, but whether the divine law it presupposes still applies: Can a public non-Catholic be the visible head of the Catholic Church?

That question remains. And Cum ex remains relevant; not as a talisman of legalism, but as a historical witness to an unchanging truth: membership in the Church precedes jurisdiction. The bull may have gathered dust in the Vatican archives, but the principle it articulates did not.”

Just click over and read it.