Frankly, I'm not sure it's ever been done. Do you know of any cases where a bishop has been laicized? This alone would be enough to stop the Pope from doing anything to them.
However, he could remove them from their sees, and I sure wish he would. But there is always the question of whether they would then set up their own church, which wouldn't surprise me in the least; and in that case, their heresy would be perpetuated.
“Frankly, I'm not sure it's ever been done. Do you know of any cases where a bishop has been laicized?”
I really don't know.
I'm merely following the path of speculation as to whether or not it can be done.
A little googling comes up with this article:
http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~james.p.burns/chroma/penance/pentill.html
Here's the money quote:
“However, after the Decian persecution, many clergy were seeking readmittance, including some born and/or ordained in schism.(2) Given their numbers, geographic spread and leadership positions, the old methods were inadequate and the practices of the Novatianists, ‘no reentry’ or ‘reentry by rebaptism’, were being marginalized. The common answer for the laity was admission after a protracted penance.(3) In general, readmitted clergy were reduced to the lay state.(4)
“The problem was not the readmission of clergy per se, but the anomalous state of the bishop during and after penance. There are two ways to understand this situation. One is a focus on form and the other on function. In terms of form, the member of the clergy had already received a ritual gesture of the presence of the Spirit in ordination. Would the repetition of the gesture in penance give the lie to the first administration and somehow retroactively proclaim it invalid?(5) With regard to function, the bishop was supposed to be the minister of reconciliation. However, as a penitent, he was himself in a liminal state, and therefore unable to minister to others. In fact, a bishop who was doing penance would have been able to exercise very few episcopal duties, certainly not liturgical ones.(6) An occasional alternative was the exclusion of the bishop from penance, leaving his judgment to God, but the usual practice was degradation. The degraded cleric would not do penance; degradation was considered penance enough.(7)”
According to this article, during the whole Donatist mess, bishops were sometimes degraded to the lay state.
Don't ask me to vouch for this assertion. ;-)
As well, I have bouncing around in the very recesses of the back of my mind snippets of quotations from degradation ceremonies that once were used, and I do vaguely recall degradation rites that specifically applied to bishops.
But that's dependent on my feeble memory.
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