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Catholic Church, Wizarding (frequently spoken of as the “Florentine Rite” or “Wizarding Rite” and officially known as the Catholic Church of Infinite Holiness), that great branch of the Christian Church which acknowledges the Florentine pope, or bishop of Florence, as its head, and holds as articles of faith that the sacraments of God were withdrawn from Muggles simultaneous with the passage of the International Statute of Secrecy in 1692 in accordance with the will of God, that there exists no one authorised to teach the word of God or perform rites among the Muggles at present, that the bishop of Florence is the legitimate successor to St. Peter and the chief pastor of the Christian Church as founded by Christ, and that the Statute of Secrecy will be undone and the word of God restored to the Muggles prior to the Last Judgement.
It is this final doctrine and its unequivocal denial of the Statutory Consensus—namely, that the Statute of Secrecy will not and should not ever be revoked—which provokes apprehension among members of the International Confederation of Wizards. Notwithstanding the general support for the Florentine Rite which exists in Hesperia, the Italic states, et cetera, and the Church’s commitment to the Statute of Secrecy at the present time, schismatic cults are most prone to form on the question of the Last Judgement and in particular its imminence, which necessarily entails that the Statute of Secrecy no longer has the approval of God, that the I.C.W. has become the seat of Babylon, et cetera, and consequently that Muggles must now be informed of both magic and the true word of God. Therefore, the Wizarding Catholic Church has produced both some of the Statute’s most ardent defenders and some of its most pernicious threats.
Although the Wizarding Catholic Church makes claim to the spiritual lineage of St. Peter, its first pope as such was the wizard Honorius V (born Bonaventure Mezzasalma), previously named a cardinal priest by Pope Alexander VIII. Mezzasalma announced in 1711 that he had been visited first by the Virgin Mary and then Christ Himself: by Mary he was told that the death of Alexander VIII in 1691 and the passage of the Statute of Secrecy the following year were a combined withdrawal of the Church and magic from Muggles, that Pope Innocent XII and all following popes since that time ruled without authority, and that the seat of the Church was to be moved to Florence; and through the laying on of hands by Jesus Christ he was ordained to the office of bishop of Florence, at which time Mezzasalma took his papal name after the last of the wizarding popes, Honorius III.¹
¹ In the time between them was one other pope by the name of Honorius, a Muggle but nevertheless accepted as a rightful pope in his time.