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 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 Sonny Liston.

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.