Talk:Catholic Church/infallibility

Sources, and quotes from them, about infallibility in the Catholic Church.

Source

 * Gaillardetz, Richard R. By What Authority?: A Primer on Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Sense of the Faithful. Liturgical Press (2003). ISBN 0814628729.

Quotes
By the end of the first millennium, it was commonly held that when all the bishops gathered in an ecumenical council to teach on faith and morals, and their teaching was received by all the churches that teaching was protected from error and normative for belief.

Many of our most basic Christian convictions about Christ and the Trinity were solemnly defined by ecumenical councils in the first millenium. This does not mean, of course, that every teaching of an ecumenical council is an exercise of infallibility. The Second Vatican Council, for example, did not invoke the charism of infallibility in its own teaching.

At Vatican I the council explicitly announced its intention to issue a solemn definition with the following formulation, "we teach and define as divinely revealed dogma ..." However, when considering councils before the modern period, when these distinctions were not as well established, it is more difficult to know when a council intended to solemnly define a teaching. Scholars must carefully study the wording of conciliar decrees and consider the council acta (formal records of council decrees) in order to detemine the intentions of a council.

Second, the Bishop of Rome, in communion with his fellow bishops, can also solemnly define a dogma of the Church. This was first explicitly taught at Vatican I. But the council specified a number of important limits and conditions for the exercise of papal infallibility. The council taught that the pope could only teach infallibility, ex cathedra, that is "from the chair of Peter," as universal pastor of the whole Church. In the past there have been popes who have written theological or historical works. Even though they were popes, they were writing as theologians or historians. In these instances, the council agreed, the pope did not exercise the charism of infallibility. A pope could only teach infallibity when officially taught as the universal pastor of the whole Church.

Actual exercises of papal infallibility have been relatively rare in the history of the Church. Though lists of papal definitions differ somewhat (before the modern age, popes, like councils, did not explicitly announce when they were exercising the charism of infallibility, therefore, determining instances of the exercise of papal infallibility requires careful history research), one scholar, Francis Sullivan, lists five instances in which popes have solemnly defined a dogma, independent of a ecumenical council: (1) Benedict XII's teaching on the beatific vision in Benedictus Deus" [1336]; (2) Innocent X's condemnation of five Jansenist propositions in Cum occasione [1653]; (3) Pius VI's condemnation of seven Jansenist propositions articulated at the Synod of Pistoria in Auctorem fidei [1794]; (4) Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception in Ineffabilus Deus [1854]; (5) Pius XII's definition of the Assumption of Mary in Munificentissimus Deus'' [1950].

There are many church teachings that have been commonly accepted as divinely revealed even though they have never been solemnly defined by a pope or council. We should remember that popes and councils generally defined dogmas only if these teachings were being serious challenged. But what about the many church teachings that Christians have viewed as central to their faith but which were never seriously challenged and therefore were never formally defined by a pope or council? We might think of the Church's belief in the communion of saints or in the resurrection of the body. These teachings are central to the Catholic faith even though they have never been solemnly defined.

Catholicism teaches that when such teachings have been taught consistently by all of the bishops in the own dioceses as teaching that must be held as definitive and not simply as probable opinion or as likely to be true, even though the bishops are not formally defining these teachings, they are exercising the charism of infallibility. This third form of exercising the charism of infallibility is called the ordinary universal magisterium.

It is possible for there to be a non-infallible exercise of the ordinary universal magisterium. The best example would be the teaching of the ecumenical council when it is not issuing a solemn definition. It would be "ordinary" teaching because there is no solemn definition, and "universal" because it engages the whole college of bishops. Other instances of a non-infallible exercise of the ordinary universal magisterium would be the situation in which the bishops, while dispersed throughout the world, held a common judgment regarding a particular teaching but were not agreed that the teaching should be held as definitive.

Quote
Careful study of the Catechism will illustrate to the reader that it does contain doctrinal definitions of the popes and ecumenical councils; it also contains teachings which have not been communicated in these most solemn forms. It would seem then that, in and of itself, the Catechism cannot be classified among these supreme and most solemn forms of Church teaching.

Some authors make the argument that because it was the product of worldwide consultation among the bishops, the Catechism is collegial in character and should be considered to be of the same doctrinal authority as the documents of the Second Vatican Council. It would seem to me, however, that the Catechism did not benefit from the complete exercise of collegiality that took place at Vatican II. What was most clearly lacking in the development of the Catechism as compared to an ecumenical council was public, and extensive disputation, as well as a final vote on the text by the Church's bishops. It is important to note that this position has never been proposed by the pope or any official of the Holy See