Can you explain papal infallibility?

Dear Rev. Know it all,

Can you explain papal inscrutability?

Yours,

Betty Kencownzell 

Dear Betty,

I think you mean papal infallibility, and of course I can explain it. Have you forgotten to whom you are writing?

The Oxford dictionary defines “infallible” as incapable of making mistakes or being wrong. Papal infallibility means that the Pope is never wrong when he speaks a) in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, b) in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, and c) when he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church.

When the pope, successor of St. Peter as Bishop of Rome, speaks “in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians”, he is said to speak “ex cathedra.” A “cathedra” was a straight backed chair, or throne. A cathedral is, thus, where the teaching chair of the bishop is kept. The “cathedra” in question is the teaching chair of St. Peter. There is an ancient chair kept at St. Peter’s in Rome, enshrined in the great bronze throne behind the main altar.  It was thought to be the chair from which St. Peter taught. It was probably a gift from Emperor Charles the Bald to Pope John VIII in 875. Still, it’s a nice thought.

The reason much ado is made about a chair, is that at least at the time of Christ, rabbis taught while sitting in a teaching chair. When Jesus went up the mountain with His disciples to deliver His famous sermon on the mount, He sat down to do it.  “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and opening his mouth he taught them.” (Matt 5:1) If a rabbi had something important to say, he said it sitting down; hence he spoke “ex cathedra” or “from the chair.”

 There is a swell book, a real page-turner by, a German theologian, Heinrich Denzinger (1819-1893) called the Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum. It contains the chief decrees and definitions of all church councils, along with the oldest forms of the Apostles' Creed and a list of condemned propositions. The first edition has just 128 documents. The latest editions have included the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and recent Popes, so if you want to know what some doctrine means, get what, in seminary, we fondly called “a Denzinger.”  Here is what Denzinger has to say about infallibility.

“What is claimed for the pope is infallibility merely, not impeccability or inspiration”  and that to  speak infallibly “The pontiff must teach in his public and official capacity as pastor and doctor of all Christians, not merely in his private capacity as a theologian, preacher or allocutionist, nor in his capacity as a temporal prince or as a mere ordinary of the Diocese of Rome. It must be clear that he speaks as spiritual head of the Church universal.” 

Denzinger has a lot more to say about infallibility, but why be tedious in a church bulletin? What people don’t understand about the teaching of papal infallibility taught by the first Vatican Council (1869-70) is that it limits the pope’s authority.

There have been some really wild and wacky things popes have said over the years. For instance, according to Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) “All princes should kiss the feet of the pope alone…” and “that it is lawful for him to depose emperors …” and in 1302 Pope Boniface VIII said in the papal bull Unam Sanctam, “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff. And how about the unpleasantness with Galileo? Didn’t the church infallibly declare that the earth was the center of the solar system?  No, what Cardinal Bellarmine, a really nice guy, said was that “treating heliocentrism as a real phenomenon would be a very dangerous thing, irritating philosophers and theologians, and harming the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture as false.”  The Cardinal was thinking about the wars of religion north of the Alps in which Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in the millions and he thought, “We don’t need that down here right now.”  The problem was that Galileo was directly saying that the Bible was wrong, and in so doing he was laying the groundwork for a social upheaval that was dangerous. If Galileo had said it differently, there wouldn’t have been a problem.

In fact Galileo was wrong. His theory didn’t fit the number. The planets don’t travel; around the sun in circles as he claimed — they travel in ellipses. Why get thousands killed over a theory that didn’t work mathematically. Galileo declared himself far more infallible than any pope. The Church is not capable of speaking infallibly about science. Neither are scientists and that was the point!  

As for the statements of Boniface and Gregory, they were political in nature, and thus couldn’t be called infallible. That is why there is not a lot of foot kissing going on in the Vatican these days.  (By the way “papal bull” refers to the Latin word “bulla” or “seal” in English by which the pope applies his personal seal to the letter to guarantee its authenticity. Don’t get any silly ideas.) So you see, the First Vatican Council reminded popes that they were not infallible when they spoke about politics, cosmology, ecology, and most other -ologies. They were infallible only when they spoke about faith and morals, and it has to be clear that they are doing so. Furthermore, the pope has infallibility, not impeccability or inspiration. Lack of impeccability means that he can sin and the lack of inspiration means that he cannot come up with new doctrine. He can only illuminate and declare what the Church has always held and believed. We Catholics are not Mormons.  We have no chief “Prophet, Seer, or Revelator, “as do the Mormons. The “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” is the title of the supreme Mormon authority. A Mormon revelator “makes known, with the Lord’s help, something before unknown. It may be new or forgotten truth, or a new or forgotten application of known truth to man’s need.”

Before 1978, anyone with African ancestry could not be priest in the Mormon Church, and could not participate in most temple ordinances, including celestial marriage. That meant that they could not go to the highest heaven. But, Glory Be! In 1978, the prophet seer and revelator said that God had changed His mind and now blacks would be allowed into the highest heaven.  A pope could only dream about such infallibility. Our poor pontiff is stuck with what we have held and taught from the beginning, things like marriage being a relationship between a man and a woman since Jesus said that, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Matt. 19.5)

For Catholics, Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the only sources of revelation. The magisterium (teaching authority of the Church) is not a source of revelation. It can only bring forward and restate what we have believed from the first. The last words my boyhood pastor said to me were “Keep that faith handed down to us from the apostles Peter and Paul.”

 Lord knows I’m trying, Monsignor O’Brien, Lord knows I’m trying.

Rev. Know-it-all

RKIA's Guide to Reading the Bible... part 2

YOU SHOULDN’T JUDGE A BIBLE BY ITS COVER!

Many years ago my mother, one of the finest, kindest and wisest people I have ever known, decided to read the Bible cover to cover. Somewhere around the story of Lot and his daughters, she called me and asked, “Have you any idea what’s in this book!?!!”

Never try to read the bible cover to cover. If you do, it will make less sense than before you started the project. That’s because the Bible isn’t a book. It’s a library. How often have you heard people say that the Bible isn’t true? To say the Bible isn’t true is like walking into the lobby of a library and shouting, “This library is wrong!” Which section is wrong? The history section? The science section? The poetry section? The Bible is a library of 73 books - only 66 if you’re a Protestant. It contains poetry, ancient history, law, prophecy, and much, much more! If you go into the poetry section of a library and say that this isn’t very good science, you would be right, but by the same token if you go into the science section you wouldn’t expect much poetry. Therein lies the problem with treating the Bible like a book. If you think it is somehow a continuous narrative whose purpose is primarily historical you are going to be very confused.

In the Books of the Bible, the Holy Spirit tells us the truth about God and the way He has related to humanity over a 2000-year period from about 2000 BC to about 65AD. How can you tell what’s poetry and what’s history and what’s prophecy? Simple. Listen to those that God has made authoritative teachers, namely the apostles. But the Apostles are dead, aren’t they? Some are, some aren’t.

First of all what do we mean by “apostle?” If you think apostles are those twelve guys who followed Jesus around you are only partly right. Luke 6:13 “When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles”. The noun apostle” is used just short of a hundred times in the new Testament. It has a verb form also that is used almost 200 times. (PAY ATTENTION! GRAMMAR IS IMPORTANT, YOU MIND-NUMBED COUCH POTATO!)

The noun in Greek is “apostolos,” which means missionary or delegate, someone who is sent out with authority to represent the sender) the verb is “apostello” which means “I delegate,” “I send out.” The phrase “twelve apostles” appears only a few times. More commonly, one sees the phrase “the twelve.” Whenever you see the word “twelve” in the Bible you can bet your lunch money that it refers to government. The Bible has lots of numbers that repeat and have a special meaning, 3 (Divinity or heavenly perfection), 7 (covenant), 12 (government), 40 (testing) and so on.

That Jesus named twelve special disciples (a word which itself means “students”) shows He intended to form a government for His followers. The first Christians insisted that Jesus had commanded His followers to continue the government that He Himself had established. In about 80AD,Clement of Rome who had most probably known Peter and Paul said, “Through countryside and city (the apostles) preached, and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers."

Nor was this a novelty, for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier...

Our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry. (St. Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians)

A century later, Irenaeus was the bishop of Lyon in France. He was a Greek who had been taught by Polycarp, who himself had been a disciple of John the Evangelist, one of the twelve. He wrote around 180 AD what he had learned from the students of the first apostles themselves.

It is possible, then, for everyone in every church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the apostles which has been made known to us throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the apostles and their successors down to our own times, men who neither knew nor taught anything like what these heretics rave about....Since, however, it would be tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; (we do this, I say,) by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul; as also (by pointing out) the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those (faithful men) who exist everywhere. (Against Heresies )

Okay, this is unpleasant. But it seems that the first Christians believed in what we now call apostolic succession. In other words, when someone comes up and says the end of the world is next Saturday, we have the perfect right, nay, we have the duty, to ask them where they got the authority to say that. They will answer, “From the Bible. I added up all the dates and the genealogies and this is surely the exact day!!!” “Well,” you might counter, “have you read the numbers in the poetic books, or just the historical books or just the prophetic books? Or have you just mixed them up like a stew of leftovers in a cheap restaurant?”

How can one tell what is poetry, or prophesy or history? That is precisely my point! You can’t, unless you have an unbroken connection to the people who first chose those books to be part of the library that we call the Bible. Just because you read it and it seems to mean something perfectly clear to you, doesn’t mean you’ve gotten it right. If you take it on yourself to interpret the books, or worse, leave it to some loon with a Swiss bank account and a mail order doctorate to do the interpreting, you are going to end up selling all your stuff, writing a big check to some weirdo who tells you to climb a hill and wait for the Lord who is surely going to show up next Saturday at 6PM. It’s certainly going to happen because he read it in the Bible.

We’ve been reading the Bible very carefully for two thousand years, guided by the delegates (apostles) who received their delegation from those whom the Lord Himself delegated, not some self appointed loon. It’s a free country. You can say to the Lord that you don’t care if He established legitimate authority in the Church. You’re going to read and interpret the Bible the way you want to. Who cares what that old Bavarian in the Vatican says? The first Christians certainly seemed to. I just hope you get a hill with a nice view, because you’re probably going to be there for a long time.

So here are principles 2 and 3

2) THE BIBLE IS NOT A BOOK. IT’S A LIBRARY.(I stole that idea from Fr. Bob Barron)

3) YOU CANNOT BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF THE BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY WITHOUT A COMPETENT TEACHING AUTHORITY TO HELP YOU.

Next Week 14+14+14 EQUALS HOW MUCH? (The Bible is not a self interpreting book. It isn’t a book at all! Haven’t you been paying attention?