Clarity on a Topic Too Unclear to Most
Professor’s Bookshelf #14: John Joy’s "Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility"
Long-time readers of Tradition & Sanity will know that one of our recurring themes has been the right understanding of the office of the papacy.
The primacy of Peter and his successors is a foundational, necessary, and beautiful dogma of the Catholic Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Yet it is also open to misunderstanding and, as we know from the historical record, can be abused by those who fulfill the office unworthily. Nor should this be shocking to us, when we consider that one of the twelve apostles chosen by Christ betrayed Him and then hanged himself in despair; St. Paul, too, complains about renegade disciples. The Church is made up of wheat and tares, as the Lord teaches, and this applies at every level, until the end of time.
The reason the dogma is so unclear to Catholics nowadays is, I would argue, the clouding effect of over a century and a half of exaggerated papal adulation and exaltation, combined with acidic forces in modern philosophy that have rendered men skeptical of almost every source of external or internal knowledge.
Christians always acknowledged the pope, but they had the common sense to get on with their Christian lives according to the norms of natural law and ecclesiastical tradition. They were not, as it were, hanging on each word of the pope to see what they should think or act today as opposed to yesterday or tomorrow. The pope was seen as a remora or barrier (in Newman’s word) to innovation and novelty, someone who would hold fast to the traditional teaching even at the cost of looking hidebound, backward, entrenched, unoriginal, and downright stubborn. And Christians felt confident in believing and acting in accord with the tradition and traditions handed down, which acted like guiderails for their lives.
This, you might say, is what the normal functioning of the Church looks like: the pope is there in Rome to make big decisions, to evaluate disputes and act as a court of final appeal, to appoint bishops (to a degree; that the pope should appoint literally every bishop in the Latin Church is a very recent development), and so forth, but 99% of the time you know what you need to do because your traditional catechism, liturgy, devotions, and local clergy are saying it consistently and coherently.
Sadly, that’s not the world we’re living in anymore. Various parties, some more orthodox than others, have taken advantage of the swelling of the papal office to sow terrors or errors of one kind or another, be it (in the early twentieth century) threats against modernists who weren’t actually modernists, or (in the twenty-first century) threats against traditionalists who are simply Catholics. Adding to the effect of chaos is the continual pepper-spray of the sedevacantists, blinding some observers to the obvious—that Vatican I taught there will always be successors of Peter in the visible Church, and that the morally unanimous consent of Catholics as to their pope suffices to establish his identity—while their rationalist engines churn away, constructing an uncompromisingly ultramontane remnant that shelters in a few chapels dotted across the world, praying a Roman Canon evacuated of its prelates.
I’ve talked about these points especially in these earlier posts:
Hyperpapalism & Luther: Strange Bedfellows
As anyone familiar with online discussions knows (perhaps to his weariness or chagrin), traditional Catholics are frequently accused of being crypto-Lutherans, rebellious followers of that German heresiarch in rejecting Vatican I’s dogma of papal infallibility and primacy.
Vigilius, Vatican I, and the Specter of Hyperpapalism
The German clerical author who writes under the name Vigilius recently published an important essay in which he maintains that modernity—in the form of Cartesian epistemology and Hobbesian absolutism—crept into the modern Church’s response to it, taking the form of hyperpapalism.
It is therefore of considerable importance for Catholics who wish to be well-educated on the papacy to apply the twin gifts of faith and reason to understand it better. And that brings me (at last) to the main topic of this post: John Joy’s excellent book Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility. Short, sweet, and to the point, he masterfully clarifies what the Church actually teaches, with many concrete examples from history—not omitting our more troubled recent history. In today’s Professor’s Bookshelf, I will share some excerpts from this book, so that you can see if reading Joy’s book might be a wise step for you to take in your ongoing education as a Catholic.
As usual, I’ll place the page numbers in parentheses at the end of selections.
The faithful must take care, therefore, to be well formed in the tradition of the Church, especially the sacred Scriptures, the common teaching of the fathers and doctors, the divine liturgy, and the infallible decrees of prior popes and councils, so that they may not be led astray if the bishops, or the pope, or even an angel from heaven should preach a gospel contrary to that which has been received from the apostles (see Gal 1:8). (13-14)
Pope John Paul II distinguishes the ordinary (merely authentic) papal magisterium, which is exercised continually, from the extraordinary or solemn papal magisterium, which is exercised only in ex cathedra definitions, and then proceeds to say that the pope is infallible “only when he speaks ex cathedra.” But if the pope is infallible only when he speaks ex cathedra, then he is not infallible when he does not speak ex cathedra, and therefore he is able to teach error, even in matters of faith or morals, in his authentic magisterium when not speaking ex cathedra.
In order to uphold the objection, one would have to deny what Pope John Paul II teaches here, which would be to attribute error to the teaching of his authentic magisterium in a matter pertaining to faith, in which case the objection would fail. Therefore, the charism of the Holy Spirit’s assistance, about which the pope speaks in the passage quoted, cannot be understood as an absolute protection against error, such as is given in the case of infallible teaching, but should rather be understood as a grace of office, of which the pope must avail himself in order to benefit from it, just as grace is given to the justified so that they would not sin, but not so that they could not sin. (14-15)
This same religious submission is also due to the teaching of the individual bishops, who are certainly not infallible, as the Second Vatican Council teaches in Lumen Gentium §25 and as history also proves by the example of Nestorius and other heretical bishops. But if the response due to the teaching of individual bishops, who are not infallible, is this same religious assent or religious submission, then we cannot conclude that the authentic magisterium of the pope is infallible simply from the fact that a religious submission of will and intellect is owed to it. (15)
Untying knots of terminology that are often confused:
The term “ordinary magisterium”…means one thing when applied to the Church and another thing when applied to the pope.
The term “extraordinary magisterium” refers unequivocally to the explicit and definitive teaching of the Church—that is, the infallible teaching of the Church that is tangibly enshrined in public documents of the supreme magisterium. But because the extraordinary magisterium has two essential characteristics (namely, that it is both explicit and definitive), two very different forms of teaching can be contrasted against it and each will appear to be “ordinary” by comparison, though in different ways.
First, and more properly, the term “ordinary magisterium” refers to the definitive but non-explicit teaching of the Church—that is, to the infallible teaching of the Church that is not found in explicit decrees of popes or councils but is gathered instead from all the sources of theology, and especially from the plain sense of Scripture, the consensus of the Church Fathers, the consensus of Catholic theologians, the consensus of the bishops, or the consensus of the faithful.
Secondly, however, the term “ordinary magisterium” is also sometimes used to refer to the explicit but non-definitive teaching of the pope or the college of bishops, which is more properly called the “authentic magisterium” of the pope or bishops. But since “ordinary” in this case simply means “non-definitive” or “non-infallible,” it is impossible for the pope to speak infallibly through his “ordinary” magisterium. This unfortunate ambiguity of the term “ordinary magisterium” has been a source of untold confusion. It is as if one were to call an angel and an ape by the same name simply because neither is a man. (20-21)
It must be said that the pope is able to speak infallibly not only when he defines new dogmas, but also when he definitively confirms or reaffirms a doctrine already infallibly taught by the Church. For the purpose of the charism of infallibility bestowed on the pope by Christ is so that all Christ’s faithful would be able to know with certainty what they ought to believe in order to be saved. But doubts may arise in the Church not only with regard to legitimately disputed questions, but also when the established teaching of the Church is obscured by heresies and errors. And indeed, the need for an infallible judgment is all the more urgent in the latter case. Thus the purpose of infallibility would be frustrated if the pope were not able to issue an infallible judgment by which he confirms or reaffirms existing Catholic doctrine.
Moreover, in order to avoid falling into the error of the Gallicans, we must hold that the charism of infallibility is not more restricted in the pope than in the Church, as said above. But it is clear from history that the Church is able to pronounce solemn and infallible definitions by which she confirms or reaffirms doctrines already taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium. For the Council of Nicaea solemnly defined the co-equal divinity of Christ, which had been infallibly taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church from the beginning, according to the words of Christ: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Likewise, the Council of Trent defined the necessity of good works for salvation, which had always been taught infallibly by the Church, according to the words of St. James: “You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone” (Jas 2:24). Therefore, the pope can also pronounce a solemn and infallible definition by which he confirms or reaffirms a doctrine already taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium, as Pope Pius XII did when he defined the dogma of the Assumption. (25-26)
The solemn definition of a truth already infallibly taught by the Church is indeed a new judgment, but the only thing new about it is the new act of reaffirming the same doctrine. (27)
Kleutgen’s main purpose in speaking at all about an “ordinary magisterium” was to re-assert against the dogmatic minimalists of his time (who are still with us today) the binding authority of the living tradition of the Church; he wanted to re-direct our attention away from an obsessive fixation on the formal teaching documents of the Church toward the broader horizons and greater depths of the entire living tradition. At the same time, however, he was wary of asserting the authority of Scripture and Tradition apart from the explicit judgments of the Church without linking them in some way to the magisterium in order to maintain (against the Protestant principle of private interpretation) the Catholic principle of ecclesiastical mediation according to which Catholics believe all that and only that which God has revealed and which has been proposed as such by the Church. Hence his reinterpretation of the living tradition of the Church, by which Scripture and the oral Tradition are perpetually handed down in the Church, as an exercise of the magisterium of the Church. (112)
In proof of the authority of the living tradition/ordinary magisterium, Kleutgen appeals to the practice of the ancient Fathers of the Church, who did not hesitate to accuse Marcion, Arius, Nestorius, and many others of heresy even before their doctrines had been condemned by a judgment of the Church; in fact, it was precisely this vigorous opposition that eventually led to their formal condemnation. Yet how could this be if the faith of the Church were unable to be known with certitude apart from her formal judgments? The Fathers of the Church who opposed Arius, for example, seem to have acted on the assumption that the coequal divinity of Father and Son was sufficiently taught by the Church such that its denial constituted heresy even prior to its solemn definition at the First Council of Nicaea. In Kleutgen’s terminology, it was already infallibly proposed as a dogma of faith by the ordinary magisterium prior to its solemn definition by the extraordinary magisterium. And the Fathers of the Church were not gathering citations from the authentic teaching documents of every bishop dispersed throughout the world. They were citing the clear teaching of Scripture and the Tradition received from the apostles. (137-38)
And even for those passages in Scripture which are not sufficiently clear in themselves, says Kleutgen, the Council of Trent refers the faithful not to the explicit judgments of the Church but to “that meaning which she has always held and holds” and to “the unanimous interpretation of the Fathers,” or in other words, to the living tradition. (138)
As examples of dogmas never defined by explicit judgment but taught infallibly by the ordinary magisterium, Kleutgen includes: that Christians have the moral duty to love their neighbors; that pride is a sin and humility a virtue; that God is infinite according to His nature, that He is all good and all knowing, that He foresees the free actions of men; that He freely created and rules the world; that creatures not only receive their existence from Him, but are also held in being by Him; that His providence extends over everything; that the fallen angels are all damned; and that the souls in purgatory are unable to grow in virtue and merit. (139-40)
After this, several more bishops commented (more approvingly) on the text and expressed their understanding of the ordinary magisterium in various ways as consisting in the daily preaching, liturgical prayers, method of conducting and defining business in the episcopal courts, and in the Roman congregations; as being exercised under the authority of the hierarchy, through pastors and teachers, through bishops and parish priests, through the words of preachers, through orthodox theologians, through approved books, through liturgical books and catechisms, etc. (141)
Although this religious submission is normally due to the teaching of the authentic magisterium, it may legitimately be withheld in certain cases. To do so merely on the basis of one’s own private judgment would certainly be rash and dangerous, but assent must be withheld when the teaching in question openly conflicts with the public dogma or definitive doctrine of the Church. For in the case of conflicting obligations, precedence must always be given to the stricter obligation; and the obligation to give definitive assent to the irreformable doctrines of the infallible Church is a stricter obligation than the religious submission due to the non-infallible teaching of the authentic magisterium. (And it is not possible to assent simultaneously to contradictory propositions.) (146)
The Church is infallible. The Church is holy. The Church is guided by the Holy Spirit. But have you ever heard someone (or caught yourself) saying, “The Church” did or said something, when in fact it was the pope who did or said that thing? One of the common symptoms of hyperpapalism is a tendency to identify the pope with the Church, or to identify papal teaching with Church teaching as if the two were entirely synonymous.
Once you accept a total identification of the pope and the Church, you start expecting every pope to be a pure and holy pillar of truth in the same absolute sense. This kind of identification happens even at lower levels of the hierarchy. When your neighbor says that she has been hurt by “the Church,” what she really means is that she has been hurt by some member of the clergy. This false identification is especially tempting and problematic with the pope because he is the visible head of the Church on earth, and so he can in some cases speak and act for the Church—in persona Ecclesiae, as it were. But most of his acts do not fall in that category. (154-55)
But what exactly is this religious assent? It must correspond in nature to the kind of teaching to which it responds; that is, teaching which is authoritative but not infallible. Because it is authoritative, we owe it our assent; but because it is not infallible, this assent must be opinionative and conditional in nature. By opinionative, I mean that if a pope officially teaches something about faith or morals in a non-infallible way, then we are obliged to think that what he teaches is true (while still acknowledging that it could be false). This is typical of the way we express opinions: I think that the Detroit Tigers will not win the World Series this year (even though I know they could). This is a real assent—I really do think that the Tigers will not win and I have good reason for thinking that; but it is the kind of assent characteristic of opinions rather than certain knowledge.
The religious assent due to non-infallible papal teaching is also conditional. By that, I mean that the obligation holds only as long as it does not conflict with a higher obligation. This is typical of basic moral reasoning in any case where different obligations come into conflict with one another. The obligation to obey the speed limit, for example, might give way in certain cases to a higher obligation to get a dying person to the hospital in time to save his life. The obligation not to break into a neighbor’s house will give way to the higher obligation to save a life if someone is trapped inside when the house is on fire.
An even better example to illustrate the point under discussion is the way we teach the fourth commandment to children. We ordinarily express the obligation that children should obey their parents in an unqualified way, as St. Paul does to the Ephesians: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is just” (Eph 6:1); but this command is always understood to be conditional rather than absolute. It applies only on the condition that parents act within the scope of their authority under divine and natural law. Were a parent to command something contrary to a higher law (divine or natural), then the child’s obligation to obey his parent would cease in that case. For “we ought to obey God, rather than men,” as St. Peter says (Acts 5:29).
Similarly, we are obliged to accept the non-infallible teaching of our Holy Father only on the condition that he acts within the scope of his authority under divine law. If he were to teach something contrary to a higher law of belief, then the obligation to give religious assent to this teaching would yield to the stricter obligation binding the faithful to believe the word of God and hold fast to the infallible teaching of the Church. (157-58)
Other recommended reading:
On the Scope and Limits of Papal Power (Part 1)
The following essay was written by a Thomistic theologian and a friar of the Order of Preachers. Due to unfortunate ecclesiastical politics, he is unable to sign his name to it, but instead of leaving it to molder in a drawer, he has offered it to me to publish for the benefit of readers of this Substack. I am deeply grateful to him and I am convinced t…
On the Scope and Limits of Papal Power (Part 2)
Last week, we began with fundamental concepts such as authority, its derivation from God, and its necessary parameters; the exact nature of papal power and its five inseparable qualities; the distinction between magisterium and jurisdiction; and the pope’s subjection to natural law and canon law.