Few doctrines have given rise to as much debate as infallibility.
-From The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism
A violent thunderstorm struck Rome on the morning of July 18, 1870, just as the vote was beginning on the most controversial measure before the First Vatican Council.
Considering the setting and the circumstances, it’s understandable that at least some of those who were in St. Peter’s Basilica on that Monday or who later read about what had happened would find it tempting to think that God was making a statement.
How they interpreted what God was saying was another matter.
At issue was a document, “Pastor Aeternus” (Eternal Shepherd), that, among other things, would establish papal infallibility as a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.
Supporters of the document saw the storm as a sign of God’s approval, mirroring the thunder and lightning that, in the account in the Book of Exodus, buffeted Mt. Sinai on the day that God handed down the 10 Commandments to Moses.
Opponents saw it as a sign of God’s wrath, an admonition that the Church had gone too far, that too much authority was being vested in a single human being, that only God was the source of absolute truth.
Whatever its meaning, the deluge added unexpected drama to an already dazzling ecclesiastical event.
As the roll was called in the massive, magnificent edifice that is Catholicism’s principal church, each of the council’s voting delegates -on that day, 535 archbishops, bishops, cardinals, patriarchs and abbots, who were attired in red, ankle-length robes and tall, pointed hats called mitres — responded aloud in Latin, signifying agreement with “placet” (“it pleases”) or dissent with “non placet.”
A correspondent for The Times of London wrote:
“The `placets’ of the Fathers struggled through the storm, while the thunder pealed above and the lightning flashed in at every window and down through the dome and every smaller cupola, dividing if not absorbing the attention of the crowd.”
At one point, the storm shattered a stained-glass window in a wall high above the prelates and 78-year-old Pope Pius IX. The former shielded themselves from the falling shards by ducking for cover. The Supreme Pontiff was untouched, protected by the canopy over the papal throne.
In contrast to the wild spontaneity of the tempest, the vote proceeded with scripted predictability.
“Pastor Aeternus” was affirmed, 533 to 2. Of an estimated 20 percent of the council delegates who had taken a dim view of the doctrine, more than 60 had gone home to avoid voting, while most of the rest decided to go along with the inevitable.
Thus by a huge majority, Catholic popes would henceforth be “empowered” with the “charism” (a divine spiritual gift) of “infallibility” when speaking ex cathedra (literally, from the chair) in defining “a doctrine of faith and morals that must be held by the Universal Church.”
The scene in St. Peter’s is compellingly described in “Power and the Papacy: The People and Politics Behind the Doctrine of Infallibility” (Triumph), by Robert McClory, an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University.
The catalyst for McClory’s book was a four-syllable adverb that appeared in a 1995 Vatican statement on female priests.
Issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has been called Pope John Paul II’s enforcer of orthodoxy, it said the Church’s prohibition against the “priestly ordination of women” had “been set forth infallibly.”
When he saw the word, McClory felt “a tremor, a kind of electric shock.”
Infallibly. As in infallibility, as in papal infallibility.
Stifling all argument
“Most Catholics have been taught from Day One that `papal infallibility’ is like a nuclear bomb,” he says. “It vaporizes any further arguments or discussion of the subject at hand. There is no more to be said.”
A month ago, Ratzinger issued another statement that addressed women’s ordination. Again, he said, the ban had been “infallibly taught.”
“I thought, `Here they go again,’ ” McClory says. “It gave me another jolt.”
And late last week, again illustrating his authoritarian rule, Pope John Paul II, through Ratzinger, issued an apostolic letter crafted to curb the independence of bishops. The letter tightens Rome’s control over the bishops, making it nearly impossible for them to issue binding statements on doctrine or other matters at odds from the Vatican view.
“We are talking about doctrine, that is to say, the truth,” Ratzinger was quoted as saying last week. “The truth is not arrived at by majority.”
Whether the decrees are aimed at controlling bishops or affirming doctrine, many Catholics are unlikely to react to Ratzinger’s statements as viscerally as McClory.
A priest in Chicago for 13 years, he left the priesthood in 1971 to marry and become a writer; he and his wife, Margaret, a former Dominican nun, have been active in the liberal Catholic organization Call to Action since its founding in 1976; he is also a staff writer for the National Catholic Reporter and the author of “Turning Point,” a 1995 book about the battle at the Second Vatican Council over artificial contraception.
As someone attuned to the nuances in writings from Rome, McClory was able to read between the lines of Ratzinger’s statement.
“Pressure for women’s ordination had been building among Catholics since the mid-1980s,” he says. “John Paul released an apostolic letter against women priests in 1994 that was intended to be the last word, but it only intensified the debate and the pressure for change.
“And with the Ratzinger statement, which the pope approved, the Vatican seemed to be threatening dissenters with the ultimate weapon — the doctrine of infallibility.”
It’s a doctrine that in his view should be shelved — deactivated, if you will — because of its potential for being used arbitrarily and locking the Church into positions that are wrong and, occasionally . . . evil.
“Popes have traditionally wanted to make things permanent and fixed,” McClory says. “It doesn’t work. All you have to do is look at our 2,000-year history of final decisions that didn’t turn out to be final after all. Usury is one, the acceptance of slavery is another. The attitude of Christianity toward Jews is another.
“Freedom of conscience is one of them. We’ve also held that error is not a right and that people who are wrong can be persecuted. The Church taught those things with absolute certainty. Those teachings were thought to be irreversible.”
Learning about infallibility
Even though he knew he didn’t like the doctrine, McClory also recognized he knew little about it.
“We sort of ran past the subject in seminary, so I started reading up on it,” he says. “As a journalist, I realized how unintelligible so much of theology is, and infallibility is the closest thing to rocket science in Catholic doctrine. I thought it would be intriguing to write about it on a level where ordinary people can understand it.”
It’s a story populated with fascinating characters, one of whom is an eccentric Italian theology teacher named Pietro Olivi.
“The idea of papal infallibility doesn’t arise until the 13th Century, and it’s Olivi who comes up with it,” McClory says. “He’s a Franciscan, and when Pope Nicholas III issues a papal bull (decree) in 1279 that proclaims Franciscan values as the standard for all Christians, Olivi is delighted.
“But he’s also afraid another pope might someday decide otherwise, and he begins formulating the proposition that whenever a pope speaks definitively about `faith or morals,’ he is immune from error because of his office as Christ’s vicar and the head of Christ’s church.
“So the idea originated as an attempt to curb papal power, not to enhance it: It was designed so no pope could contradict what another had said.”
Alas for Olivi, it was an idea whose time had not yet come.
Not long after Olivi’s death, Pope John XXII issued a papal bull that not only renounced Nicholas’ endorsement of the Franciscan way of life but also condemned the concept of infallibilty, asserting that a pope could not be held to anything a predecessor said and that Olivi’s idea was “the work of the devil.”
Yet Olivi’s prototype, McClory says, was essentially the model adopted some six centuries later at Vatican I.
For many, it was not a case of better late than never.
Indeed, the doctrine received a hostile reception in secular circles as well as from other religious groups. A New York Times editorial listed a series of egregious decisions by past popes, including the burning of heretics, and declared that any such future actions “must not be accepted as divinely approved by all good Catholics.”
Perhaps in part because of the outcry, the doctrine has been employed only once since Vatican I — in 1950, when Pope Pius XII proclaimed that the mother of Jesus toward the end of her life “was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.”
While he steadfastly opposes the infallibility doctrine, McClory applauds the process that Pius XII followed in professing the Assumption of Mary. “He didn’t just get up and do it. He polled the bishops of the world and got back nearly a unanimous reply: `Yes, the people are for it.’
“That’s how all teachings about faith and morals should be made — collegially, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.
“Theologians have been teaching for centuries that the Church is a community and that the Holy Spirit dwells in the entire Church. Doctrine must be hammered out between the body of believers and the teaching authority. The teachers find out what the doctrine is from observing what the Church has believed and now believes and not just from meditating on the subject, which is how things seem to happening in Rome these days.”
The Ratzinger statements about women’s ordinations are examples, he says.
“The pope wants to make his position permanent, irreversible. But popes can’t create doctrines. They can only teach what the Church believes, and therefore they’ve got to consult the Church to find what this is.
“There are strong indications that Catholics do not believe the ban on women’s ordination is final or that it is Christ’s doctrine. The theologians don’t believe it, and the percentage of Catholics at large who don’t believe it has been increasing every decade and has been hovering around 50 percent for a long time.
“Let me quote a great theologian: `Where there is neither consensus on the part of the Universal Church nor clear testimony in the sources, no binding decision is possible.’
“He said this in 1969. His name is Joseph Ratzinger.”
