First from Failoni: The really bad argument against infallibility.

n the com­box on Out of His Mind—a blog that makes John Bugay look like a mar­vel of intel­lec­tu­al depth—chronic goof­ball Kevin Failoni posts the fol­low­ing weird remarks about papal infal­li­bil­i­ty. (The syn­tax is a lit­tle mud­dy, but you’ll get the drift of what he means.)

Romans 1 says that men sup­press the truth in all unright­eous­ness. Paul goes on to say that there are none right­eous, none who under­stand, none who seek for good. [Soft! here fol­lows bad prose.] So we see out­side the men who were appoint­ed by God to speak and write his infal­li­ble word until the once deliv­ered faith saw this end, men’s judg­ment and under­stand­ing is affect­ed by sin. [Got that? Read it twice if you got lost; I had to. The rest is more clear.] The [p]ope is a mere sin­ner like our­selves and in no way can claim infal­li­bil­i­ty. Thats [sic] why there is error in the­ol­o­gy and the [C]hurch[:] sin­ful men sup­press the truth.”

Well, there is a gem of truth buried deep in all this rub­bish: Sin makes peo­ple stu­pid. That’s true. You don’t need to go fur­ther than the com­box on Out of His Mind to fig­ure that one out. There the men are as mad as a March hare. Human rea­son is cor­rupt­ed by orig­i­nal sin; I’ve made that point before. But the real flaw in the loopy Mr. F’s think­ing is the idea that infal­li­bil­i­ty some­how would mean that the pope does not sin. Read what he says on a dif­fer­ent thread:

[T]he prob­lem is, Rome cant reform, its impos­si­ble, they are infal­li­ble. False church­es cant deal with their own sin. Thats why its all revi­sion­ism, right.

Now, if this were just the apos­tro­phe-free igno­rance of some­one who trolls around blogs, it would hard­ly be worth both­er­ing with. I could be watch­ing the game, or read­ing a good book, rather than writ­ing this post. But the loopy Mr. F does not just make this stuff up; he actu­al­ly steals it from peo­ple like Dr. John MacArthur, who said these words in an anti-Catholic ser­mon [tran­script here] on May 1, 2005:

John Paul II apol­o­gized for the his­tor­i­cal fail­ings of Catholics in a very vague way because when he was con­front­ed with some of the issues of the past, some of the embar­rass­ing things like forced con­ver­sion and anti-Semi­tism and some of the hor­ri­ble things that were done, he apol­o­gized in a vague way. And you have to under­stand this. How can you apol­o­gize if you’re infal­li­ble? How can an infal­li­ble church apol­o­gize? But lis­ten to what they believe. They do not believe that the church con­sists in the laity. The church does not con­sist in the laity. … The sins have been com­mit­ted by the sons and daugh­ters of the church who make up the laity. This is absolute­ly ridicu­lous giv­en the sex­u­al per­ver­sion of the priest­hood.

Let me unpack this for you. What Dr. MacArthur is say­ing here is that the Church teach­es that the laity can sin, but that some­how the cler­gy can not. If you scratch your head over how any­one could pos­si­bly have such an idea, I scratch my head too. This idea—that infal­li­bil­i­ty means that the pope can­not sin—is a howler that is not lim­it­ed just to the kind of peo­ple who rant at the bot­tom of blogs. It can grip the brain even of some­one who should know bet­ter but does­n’t, or refus­es to, or pre­tends not to. (I haven’t made up my mind which of these is true about Dr. J. Mac.)

And there are two ways you can answer the error, apart from the obvi­ous one of point­ing out that, since even the pope goes to con­fes­sion, the Church can hard­ly teach that he is like Mary, or Christ, and does not sin.

The first is to point to the actu­al texts in which the Church speaks about infal­li­bil­i­ty and thus show that she makes no claim about the sins of popes. Infal­li­bil­i­ty means some­thing quite else. Here, for exam­ple, is the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church, §890:

It is [the] Mag­is­teri­um’s task to pre­serve God’s peo­ple from devi­a­tions and defec­tions and to guar­an­tee them the objec­tive pos­si­bil­i­ty of pro­fess­ing the true faith with­out error. Thus, the pas­toral duty of the Mag­is­teri­um is aimed at see­ing to it that the Peo­ple of God abides in the truth that lib­er­ates. To ful­fill this ser­vice, Christ endowed the Church’s shep­herds with the charism of infal­li­bil­i­ty in mat­ters of faith and morals.

So the teach­ing here is not that the pope will not do bad things, but that he will not teach false things. The point of all this is for Catholics to know the truth, not for them to have lead­ers who do not sin.

Nor does Pas­tor Aeter­nus make any men­tion of a sin­less pope. PA is the Vat­i­can I doc­u­ment that first defined the dog­ma of infal­li­bil­i­ty. Here is what it says:

We teach and define that it is a divine­ly-revealed dog­ma: that the Roman Pon­tiff, when he speaks ex Cathe­dra, that is, when in dis­charge of the office of Pas­tor and Teacher of all Chris­tians, by virtue of his supreme Apos­tolic author­i­ty, he defines a doc­trine regard­ing faith or morals to be held by the Uni­ver­sal Church, by the divine assis­tance promised to him in blessed Peter, is pos­sessed of that infal­li­bil­i­ty with which the divine Redeemer willed that His Church should be endowed for defin­ing doc­trine regard­ing faith or morals: and that there­fore such def­i­n­i­tions of the Roman Pon­tiff are irreformable of them­selves, and not from the con­sent of the Church.

The pope, says Vat­i­can I, is infal­li­ble when he defines doc­trine. It does not say that the pope will be with­out sin.

So all this is one response that you can make to this bit of anti-Catholic lore. A sec­ond is to employ the Socrat­ic method against it. You might ask ques­tions such as these ones.

• Was Paul a sin­ner?
• Are his epis­tles infal­li­ble?
• If your answer to the first ques­tion is yes, how can your answer to the sec­ond ques­tion also be yes?
• If your answer to ques­tions 1 and 2 are “yes,” and you are not being incon­sis­tent, how is it incon­sis­tent for the pope’s words to be infal­li­ble under the con­di­tions set forth in Pas­tor Aeter­nus?

A line of inquiry such as this is use­ful when the anti-Catholic comes at the issue of infal­li­bil­i­ty from the oppo­site direc­tion. Per­haps he con­cedes that the Church does not teach that the pope is with­out sin. Per­haps his claim is that the the pope, being a sin­ner, can­not pos­si­bly be infal­li­ble. Sin has made him stu­pid.

The prob­lem with that line of rea­son­ing is that a Protes­tant ful­ly accepts that the Bible is infal­li­ble, though it was writ­ten by sin­ners. Paul was the “chief of sin­ners,” which means he was the chief of stu­pid peo­ple. But Romans is still infal­li­ble. If the Holy Spir­it could ensure that the authors of Scrip­ture made no errors, how is it that the Holy Spir­it can­not ensure that the pope makes no errors when defin­ing doc­trine to be held by the Church?

Now, none of this proves that papal infal­li­bil­i­ty is true. But what it does do is force peo­ple who use the MacArthur-Failoni argu­ment to back down from some of their myths. Bad claims are out there, and come back from time to time like flies that are in reg­u­lar need of swat­ting. Bet­ter ones also exist, though, and must also be answered. And one of those I will take up, Lord will­ing, in a future post.