Papal Infallibility

I was originally planning a post that asserted that whether one believes in the Catholic Church's position on contraception as expressed in Pope Paul VI's humanae vitae depends on whether one can accept the legitimacy of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Then a friend who is obviously better versed in the language of the theologians than I reminded me that the decision against contraception handed down in Humanae Vitae belongs to the "authentic" ordinary Magisterium of the Catholic Church. That is, it is presented as "non-infallible" teaching, in which the Magisterium does not give us any absolute guarantee that the teaching is immutably true and therefore forever irreformable. Of course by the time I realized my mistake I had already written a lengthy post on papal infallibility so I'm posting it anyway:

Two dogmas were proclaimed at Vatican Council I on July 18, 1870. The dogma of the primacy of papal jurisdiction means that the pope has universal jurisdiction. He has "direct sovereignty over the entire church” (It is interesting to note that the world's bishops, up to that point the local manifestation of the Church at that instant lost almost all their independent decisoin making power; this arrangement continues to the present day, I believe, to the detriment of the Church.)

The second dogma proclaimed that day, papal infallibility, asserts that the pope is incapable of error when he makes "ex cathedra" decisions on matters of faith and morals. Of course what constitutes a decision based on “faith and morals” expands and contracts depending on papal need. Theologians like Hans Kung note that the fluidity with which the definition of ex catheta is applied is a handy tool for the Vatican bureaucracy to consolidate power in Rome and squelch dissent by pesky bishops and theologians.

The first recorded attribution of infallibility to the pope was articulated by a Franciscan priest in 1279. It was by no means an accepted doctrine within the church. The (presumably also infallible) Pope John XXII went so far as to declare the doctrine the "work of the devil". While not universally accepted, the doctrine nevertheless became an important tool against the reformation, although the bishops of France and Italy rejected it. However it wasn’t until Gregory XVI (1831-46) that an actual Pope made the claim that popes were infallible. Gregory was also known as a champion against modernism. His encyclical, Mirari, viewed freedom of conscience as "a false and absurd concept”. He also found the concept of freedom of the press as abhorrent and democracy to be antithetical to the Church.

Pius IX was the Pope who elevated the notion of Papal infallibility to dogma. He was a man of temporal as well as spiritual ambition. While Pius is the Pope who, on his own authority, elevated the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception, he was also the last Pope to publicly execute someone in the Piazza del Popolo. (Italian revolutionaries Monti and Tognetti were beheaded for attempting to blow up some papal property). Pius was no friend of either democracy or modernism. In his encyclical Quanta Cura (1864), he condemned many of the freedoms Americans hold dearest: freedoms of conscience, speech, the press, and religion. He rightfully recognized that American style democracy gravely threatened the Papacy.

Pius’s motivations for pronouncing the doctrine of Papal Infallibility were decidedly temporal. The loss of the Papal States provided an impetus to expand his spiritual authority as a replacement for his political power in Italy. There was a hope that this principle of authority would bring about the return of lands already lost by the Papacy. He also believed that the principle of authority would help counteract the secular principles of the French Revolution.

So what sort of a man was Pius IX? History records that he surrounded himself with mediocre, unbalanced, sometimes even psychologically disturbed people. His fury in private audiences would become so violent that older prelates suffered heart attacks. He was described as having a heart of stone and at times normal feelings of affection, gratitude, and appreciation would be totally absent -- heartless indifference. Many bishops had the impression that the pope was insincere, that he was striving to get infallibility approved by the use of trickery and cunning. In the presence of many witnesses, one bishop called him false and a liar.

The historian Ferdinand Gregorovius noted in his diary, "The pope recently got the urge to try out his infallibility....While out on a walk he called to a paralytic: `Get up and walk.' The poor devil gave it a try and collapsed, which put God's vicegerent very much out of sorts.”

Part II will discuss how this doctrine gave birth to Paul VI's humanae vitae and the historical and political context surrounding it's promulgation.