What infallibility does not mean.

n my years of engag­ing apolo­get­ics top­ics with Protes­tants, and even some­times fel­low Catholics, I have found that the Church teach­ing on infal­li­bil­i­ty is one of the most dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to grasp. It is more often nec­es­sary to explain what infal­li­bil­i­ty does not mean than what it does, and so root out the errors in people’s under­stand­ing.

Infal­li­bil­i­ty was dog­mat­i­cal­ly defined by Vat­i­can I in Pas­tor Aeter­nus: “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.”

This is a very spe­cif­ic, and lim­it­ed, def­i­n­i­tion.

• The pope must be speak­ing ex cathe­dra as teacher of the whole Church.
• He must define a doc­trine con­cern­ing faith or morals.
• He must spec­i­fy that the whole Church regard it to be a divine­ly-revealed dog­ma.

Yet there are four things that it is always nec­es­sary to remind peo­ple, even Catholics, that all this does not mean.

• It does not mean that the pope is with­out sin.

This is a com­mon mis­take among Protes­tants and sec­u­lar­ists. In a series of anti-Catholic ser­mons ten or so years ago, Dr. John MacArthur took note of the fact that John Paul II had apol­o­gized for the sins of the Church dur­ing the Cru­sades and the Inqui­si­tion. He seemed to think it incon­gru­ous that a Church that claimed infal­li­bil­i­ty could admit to hav­ing been in error.

But the pope did not apol­o­gize for what the Church taught, but only for what some Catholics had done. There is a dif­fer­ence. Infal­li­bil­i­ty does not mean impec­ca­bil­i­ty. The con­fes­sion­al exists for a rea­son, and even the pope goes to Con­fes­sion.

• It does not mean that every­thing a pope says, or every opin­ion of the pope, is infal­li­ble.

The pope must be speak­ing ex cathe­dra. A Wednes­day audi­ence, or a papal inter­view, are not infal­li­ble.

The pope must be speak­ing on a ques­tion of faith or morals. The pope’s opin­ion about a sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry is not infal­li­ble. The pope’s opin­ion of the Red Sox is not infal­li­ble.

• It does not mean that the pope can answer every ques­tion about the faith, or the scrip­tures, that could pos­si­bly come up.

Protes­tant apol­o­gists are fond of ask­ing, for exam­ple, why the Church does not just give us an infal­li­ble inter­pre­ta­tion of every verse of Scrip­ture.

The rea­son is because infal­li­bil­i­ty has a very lim­it­ed pur­pose, and that is to ensure the uni­ty of the faith and to answer press­ing moral ques­tions that the authors of the Bible could not have antic­i­pat­ed. Embry­on­ic stem cell research is one such ques­tion.

The pope was nev­er meant to replace a person’s think­ing and read­ing abil­i­ty, only to keep them with­in bound­aries set by divine rev­e­la­tion.

• It does not mean that that Catholics have a license to ignore things that are not tech­ni­cal­ly infal­li­ble.

Some Catholics, I am afraid to say, have a very dif­fi­cult time with this last one. But Lumen Gen­tium 25 has set­tled the ques­tion for us:

This reli­gious sub­mis­sion of mind and will must be shown in a spe­cial way to the authen­tic mag­is­terium of the Roman Pon­tiff, even when he is not speak­ing ex cathe­dra, that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme mag­is­terium is acknowl­edged with rev­er­ence, the judg­ments made by him are sin­cerely adhered to, accord­ing to his man­i­fest mind and will.

Vat­i­can I does not define this dog­ma nar­row­ly so that Catholics have an escape hatch by which to flee teach­ings they don’t like. (“Unless the pope says the mag­ic words, I can poo-poo that, bud­dy.”) It does so because the Church is very care­ful to dis­tin­guish between lev­els of epis­te­mo­log­i­cal cer­tain­ty and between what is divine rev­e­la­tion and what is not.

But God did not give us a teach­ing Church so that we would pay atten­tion only to the very nar­row cat­e­go­ry of divine rev­e­la­tion. That is why quib­bling too specif­i­cal­ly about whether such and such a doc­u­ment is infal­li­ble is often a mask. It masks the desire to ignore what is nev­er­the­less author­i­ta­tive.

It may be more impor­tant for Catholics to con­sid­er what is author­i­ta­tive than what is infal­li­ble.

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished at Epic Pew, Novem­ber 23, 2015.