Infallibility does not mean a pope can tell us all things. [Part 3.3 of a series.]

rotestants—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?

Somewhere–I can’t remem­ber where now; prob­a­bly in one of his podcasts—the Calvin­ist apol­o­gist Dr.* James White bemoaned the fact that popes have had 2000 years to give an infal­li­ble inter­pre­ta­tion of every last verse of the Bible. What’s tak­ing them so long? Either popes aren’t real­ly infal­li­ble, or they’re crim­i­nal­ly lazy.

BAD APOLOGISTS SAY.

I’m being a lit­tle unfair to Dr.* White. (Only a lit­tle.) In fair­ness, his objec­tion is often made in reply to Catholic apol­o­gists who will some­times say that bib­li­cal inter­pre­ta­tion is chaos with­out an “infal­li­ble inter­preter.” What good is an infal­li­ble text with­out an infal­li­ble inter­preter? I’ve heard Steve Ray pose that ques­tion a lot. Maybe oth­ers have; he’s who I remem­ber. The Calvin­ist will then say: But Rome has only infal­li­bly inter­pret­ed a hand­ful of vers­es. You’re not much bet­ter off than we are!

Frankly, it’s a dumb ques­tion (“what good is an infal­li­ble text,” etc.) and Catholics should stop pos­ing it—to what­ev­er extent they still are. It’s dumb because it tac­it­ly assumes sola scrip­tura to be true. If the Mag­is­teri­um pub­lished a com­men­tary on the Bible, with the infal­li­ble inter­pre­ta­tion of every verse, does Steve Ray mean we would­n’t need a pope after that? Could Fran­cis retire to the south and enjoy the beach­es of Naples while the car­di­nal elec­tors decid­ed they need not both­er lock­ing them­selves up in the Sis­tine Chapel any more? Why would Catholics need a Mag­is­teri­um if they had an infal­li­ble com­men­tary?

And here Calvin­ists will point out that some­one will also have to inter­pret the com­men­tary. And then the inter­pre­ta­tion of the com­men­tary will need an inter­pre­ta­tion, and so on in infi­nite regres­sion. And when they point this out, they have a point.

The pur­pose of the Mag­is­teri­um, the pur­pose of infal­li­bil­i­ty, is not to inter­pret texts for us. It is not the pur­pose; it is not a pur­pose; and Catholics ought to stop imply­ing that it might be, because the Protes­tant has an unde­ni­able come­back. There are all sorts of con­flict­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of Scrip­ture, all sorts of con­flict­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of Mag­is­te­r­i­al doc­u­ments, and papal infal­li­bil­i­ty has not pre­vent­ed Catholics from divid­ing off into a whole host of fac­tions.

God gave the pope the charism of infal­li­bil­i­ty for only two rea­sons:

• to safe­guard the deposit of faith and keep the Church free from error
• to apply peren­ni­al teach­ing to new ques­tions that the bib­li­cal authors could not have antic­i­pat­ed, such as stem cell research

That’s it. He did not give the pope infal­li­bil­i­ty so that he could inter­pret Romans 4:8 for us, or answer inter­minable dubia about Fidu­cia Sup­pli­cans, and then more dubia about the answers to the dubia. Some­times, it is true, the exer­cise of infal­li­bil­i­ty will neces­si­tate exe­ge­sis of some verse of Scrip­ture. Matt. 16:18 is one exam­ple of this; Rev. 12:1 is anoth­er.

But there is no guar­an­tee that Catholics will all under­stand a pope’s teach­ing cor­rect­ly. And nowhere I’m aware of does it say the pope has an oblig­a­tion to inter­pret his encycli­cals for the whole Church, and then inter­pret his inter­pre­ta­tion, and so on ad infini­tum.

GOOD APOLOGISTS KNOW.

Now, what infal­li­bil­i­ty does do, with respect to bib­li­cal exe­ge­sis, is to make cer­tain read­ings impos­si­ble. That is to say, it exerts a neg­a­tive rather than a pos­i­tive influ­ence on exe­ge­sis. The Church has infal­li­bly taught that Mary was “ever-vir­gin”; she and Joseph nev­er had sex­u­al rela­tions. What that means is that a Catholic can not inter­pret Mark 6:3 to mean that James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon were Jesus’s sib­lings. I wrote about this before. Catholics, I said, are not forced into a choice between

total anar­chy of inter­pre­ta­tion and rigid con­for­mi­ty to a sin­gle infal­li­ble hermeneu­tic. The Church allows Catholic read­ers of Scrip­ture lat­i­tude and free­dom to meet the text with their own intel­li­gence and inquiry, while set­ting lim­its to avoid anar­chy. We are not, in fact, left to our own pri­vate inter­pre­ta­tion. Though he set us in a large room, God also “set bars and doors” (Job 38:10).

The same thing is true with Mag­is­te­r­i­al teach­ing. The pope does not give Catholics an infal­li­ble hermeneu­ti­cal key to inter­pret Amor­is Laeti­tia or Dig­ni­tas Infini­ta. But what we can’t do is inter­pret them to be in con­flict with the deposit of faith, with pri­or defin­i­tive teach­ing. The one hermeneu­tic we must apply is a hermeneu­tic of con­ti­nu­ity. Apart from that, the Church—wisely or unwise­ly as the case may be—asks Catholics to use the sense God gave them to fig­ure out the right inter­pre­ta­tion for them­selves.

Nowhere in Church teach­ing do I read that infal­li­bil­i­ty means omni­science. The pope has no author­i­ty, no capac­i­ty at all, to tell us all things or answer what­ev­er ques­tion pops into our head. We can’t just send him an e‑mail when we’re con­fused about some pas­sage in Job. Christ did­n’t give him the keys so that he could answer inter­minable dubia. He is not the Answer Man.