Can't make mistake?

Thomas Nast--who did not like neither Pope Pius IX nor Irish Catholics--drew a Tammany Hall cartoon in which all the leaders of the Tammany Ring are depicted as bishops and cardinals in a parody of the First Vatican Council. Obviously Nast thought HE was infallible.

God is subtle, but He is not malicious. (Albert Einstein)

Okay, so how do you decide which issues are "matters of faith"? And once you decide which ones are, how do you know your decision is infallible? As I said, I think this basically reduces down to respecting the pope's authority. If Pope Francis says something you respect, you are more likely to think he's infallible. If he says something disagreeable to you, you will accept his infallibility only if you are really determined to think a pope can't be wrong.

The problem with saying anything is infallible is that in saying so, you are making it unlike other things in our customary experience. The people and books we encounter normally are not absolutely free of error. If you treat something as infallible, you start to lose the ability to understand it. You can only understand something to the extent it is like other things you know. But of course if you respect someone's authority, that's not a problem for you: you are inclined to accept their statements even when you don't understand them. But as I said, two people may accept a pope's statements as infallible while understanding them in completely different (and maybe contradictory) ways. So that raises a question about whether "infallible teaching authority" really provides any useful information.

For example, Martin Luther and his Catholic opponents both thought the Bible was infallible, but they drew contrary conclusions from it.

We accept people's authority all the time because it makes life easier for us. If I go to my doctor or auto mechanic, it normally makes sense to trust them to do a job I couldn't do myself. Only when my health deteriorates or the car breaks down after I see them would I suspect they fell into error. I think that's the only kind of "infallibility" I accept: trusting people enough that I can focus on other matters and get through my life.

But if I say, "I'm going to trust them even when their work seems to fail," I have accepted their infallibility as a DOGMA. Now, has the pope's leadership ever failed? That's the question that would be debated passionately by a lot of people. I personally think so, but it's a complex issue.

"Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice."

I realize the basic point is divine revelation: that God reveals to us the truths we need, and God cannot err. The ex cathedra statements are the ones based on divine revelation. The question then is whether God is infallible, not the pope.

However, if you look at the way this sort of claim tends to be made about the Bible, sometimes people will say something is infallible (or "inerrant") because it's in the Bible, and at other times, they imply that if it really belongs in the Bible, it must be inerrant. For example, conservative Protestants often say that it's only the "autographs," or original manuscripts of the Bible that we don't have, that were inerrant. If we had them, we would see that any errors we see in today's Bibles weren't there. So the whole claim of infallibility is unverifiable.

I'm assuming a similar thing might happen in Catholic theology. If people think a particular statement by the pope is true, they will be more likely to say it's infallible and "ex cathedra." If they don't think it's true, they say it's not ex cathedra.


"Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice."