Protestants—some of them: those who spend a large portion of their lives pondering the errors of Rome—seem to think infallibility means a pope can tell us all things. Or at least those things I really would like to know. A pope can use his infallibility to tell us anything he wants to reveal. Can’t he? If he wanted, he could tell me how many jelly beans are in the jar, or how many steps there are between the Tiber River and Peter Kwasniewski’s license plate. So why doesn’t he give an infallible interpretation of every verse of Scripture?
Infallibility does not mean a pope can tell us all things. [Part 3.3 of a series.]
BY: Henry Matthew Alt • April 19, 2024 • Apologetics; Papal Infallibility
Popes say a lot; you can count on one hand the number of times infallibility has been exercised in 175 years. When Pope Francis said “Who am I to judge?” he was not infallible. Even when you interpret that statement correctly—and most people don’t—he was not infallible. None of Benedict XVI’s social justice encyclicals are infallible. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is not infallible. Humanae Vitae is not infallible. Nothing that John XXIII taught is infallible. When a pope gives a homily, or teaches at a Wednesday audience, or speaks to a reporter, or engages in small talk during breakfast, or screams obscenities after stubbing his toe, he does not speak infallibly.
Now that we have seen how the Church defines infallibility at Vatican I, we can turn to what infallibility does not mean. And the first thing it does not mean is that a pope can never sin. Catholics would have to deny their own Church history to believe this claim, typically made by anti-Catholic Protestants. Popes Stephen VI, John XII, Urban VI, Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, and Paul IV (to name only a few) were notorious sinners. Catholics have hidden none of this and don’t need to.
In part 2 of this series, I want to call your attention to Ludwig Ott’s discussion of infallibility in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (p. 284), because he gives a very helpful anatomy of Vatican I’s definition. Ott was a German priest, theologian, and medievalist, as well as a professor of dogmatic theology, and Fundamentals is a standard reference work in the field (together with the highly respected Sources of Catholic Dogma, by Henry Denzinger). Denzinger’s book was first published in 1854, and Ott’s a century later, but they remain the standard references on Catholic dogma. Ott distinguishes four aspects of papal infallibility: the bearer; the object; the condition; and the ground.
Over on Mr. David Griffey’s blog, someone who calls himself “Anonymous” (it could be “herself,” for all I know) demands: “Who nominated [Henry] Scott Alt as an ‘Apologist’ anyway?” In reply, Griffey spends a weird sentence or two comparing me to Sancho Panza before deciding that the “Internet Age” did it. Blame the Internet Age for Alt’s nomination! Mr. Griffey doesn’t mention that the same “Internet Age” permits him to declaim from his blog with no editor or peer review, and the same “Internet Age” permits thousands upon thousands of self-described conservatives to dispense medical advice without a license. But I didn’t come here to talk about all of that. Instead, I want to talk about who nominated all Christians to be apologists.
Jason Engwer at Triablogue revives this common argument in a blog post of January 15. Typically a Protestant will claim that it’s incongruous for Jesus to give Peter authority over the whole Church only to turn around five verses later and rebuke him and call him “Satan.” But Alt! the Protestant will say. Am I really supposed to believe Christ gives Peter infallibility, and the very first thing he does with it is to claim that Jesus will never be killed and rise from the dead? My answer is you’re conflating two separate questions.
Pope Francis and the world’s bishops reconsecrate — I emphasize: reconsecrate—Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary today; and where the English text refers to Mary as “Queen of Heaven,” the Italian text calls her “terra del cielo,” which means “earth of heaven.” The Fatimistas, who seem to think the pope is religiously bound by every last granular detail of a private revelation, are apoplectic. Demon consultant Taylor Marshall was initially non-committal and insisted he was “studying” the matter. Then, after an intense application of every ounce of intellect he could muster, Dr. Marshall decided that “earth of heaven” could be nothing other than a reference to Pachamama.
“I exhort you as your fellow elder,” St. Peter writes, and it’s hard to know who first tried to use this verse as a proof-text against papal primacy. Why, Peter himself says he’s just one among many! So why does the pope lord it over the whole Church? One thing it’s not hard to know is that the Church Fathers are full of assertions that Peter does have primacy, and not one of them ever cites 1 Peter 5:1 to refute the idea. If the text does deny papal primacy, apparently none of the Church Fathers were aware of it. Dear reader, you’re welcome to search an index of Scripture references in the Church Fathers if you think you can find any of them citing 1 Peter 5:1 to deny the primacy of Peter. Surely they were aware of the text — Cyprian refers to it, as do Tertullian and Jerome — but none of them think it means that Peter is no more than the equal of all other bishops.
The crack apologist and fivepoint Calvinist who calls himself “TurretinFan,” and who is known to us as Mr. X, first got upset about this manuscript in 2008. Then, he got upset again in 2009. Now in 2021, after a blogging sabbatical of six weeks, he has decided to let us know that he is upset again. Maybe that explains his absence; he couldn’t bring himself to log onto his blog and has spent the days in severe prayer. I don’t know. It’s not hard to imagine why Mr. X is so upset; the mansucript in question is the “Homily of the Papyrus of Turin” [HPT]. The (lost) original dates to around the 4th century — the one extant manuscript is from the 6th — and Catholic apologists like to cite it as an early example of Marian veneration.
At the National Catholic Reporter, Msgr. Irwin is exercised by the bishops’ draft document The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church. His main concern is that the language of the document is too outmoded; “it reflects 400-year-old theology,” he says, rather than developments since Vatican II. It uses musty words like “transubstantiation”; it insists on obscure distinctions between “venial” and “mortal” sin; it uses the term “Real Presence,” for Jesus’ sake! “Are these terms,” Msgr. wonders, “aimed at people who no longer attend Mass,” or are they aimed instead at the bishops themselves?
I am astounded that I have to set out to prove this, but there we are; the Church’s biggest mission field is the Church. Let’s start with the Catechism of the Catholic Church (a very good place to start). There, in §1989, we read: “The first work of the grace of the Holy Spirit is conversion, effecting justification in accordance with Jesus’ proclamation at the beginning of the Gospel: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Moved by grace, man turns toward God and away from sin, thus accepting forgiveness and righteousness from on high.” Conversion (whether initial conversion or continuing conversion) is all gift and all grace
Its addiction to fake quotations is an indictment on pop apologetics. Did you know that St. Augustine never said “Roma locuta est; causa finita est?” It’s a handy epistrophe; it’s a fair enough paraphrase; but it was not what Augustine wrote. Here are Augustine’s exact words, from Sermon CXXXI. (The context is Rome’s condemnation of Pelagianism.) “For already have two councils [Mileve 
Burke goes amiss when he imagines that a pope could teach error — that it’s possible to begin with — and when he speculates that the pope would have to be corrected in such a circumstance: “Therefore, any expression of doctrine or law or practice that is not in conformity with Divine Revelation, as contained in Sacred Scripture and the Church’s Tradition cannot be an authentic exercise of the Apostolic or Petrine ministry and must be rejected by the faithful. As Saint Paul declared: ‘There are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.’ ”
Last month on Twitter, someone proposed a weird papal thought experiment in the form of a weirder prognostication. Mike Lewis had a screenshot and thread. Suppose, the unnammed twitster mused, that the next pope is Cardinal Burke, or Cardinal Sarah, or “anyone similarly-minded.” [Okay. And?] “Leftist extreme ultramonatanes [Head. Desk.] would have a hard choice: rally behind the pope without question (as they currently do), rethink their extreme [!] interpretation of ultramontanism, or break in some fashion.” Well, Monty, I’ll take door number one. And it’s not at all a “hard choice.”