As I noted in the previous post, this fascinating and deeply learned book acutely portrays the tensions of 19th-century Catholicism, not just between its titular figures of Pope Pius IX and Ignaz von Dollinger, but between academic history and theological dogma, between the German academic context and that of a Roman bishop squeezed in and about to lose his Papal States once and for all, and finally between different notions of papal authority, jurisdiction, and infallibility. On this latter point, many familiar characters show up, not least Cardinal Manning and John Henry Newman (whose life is told in Ker's magisterial biography). Finally, this book contains a good bit of history of relations between Orthodox and Catholics, who, under Dollinger's leadership, were already discussing issues--filioque, papal authority--that would have to await another century and more before being taken up again.
When we left off last, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age had set up for us the central tension in the book and in the life of its titular characters: infallibility and Vatican I are undeniably products of their time, a ferocious reaction to the European revolutions of 1848 and before, a deliberate and crude poke in the eye of the French and Italians who had so harried (even to the point of kidnapping) previous popes and who now were in essence colluding in the campaign to unify the Italian peninsula and thereby deprive popes of their dubiously acquired, and appallingly run, territories once and for all. At the same time, however, it does not seem possible--all the ultramontanist machinations notwithstanding--that the decree of Vatican I, which led to Dollinger's excommunication, could have been pulled off had it not enjoyed earlier support from people, including theologians, who were not coming at the dogma like reactionaries ready to ram a hot poker through Italian politicians and the imperialists of the French Second Empire.
There was, in other words, something of a theological case, flawed and problematic though it was, that could be made for infallibility and jurisdiction going back well before the 19th century, as Brian Tierney was among the first to discuss decades ago.
Dollinger thought that case complete nonsense. In writings under a nom de plume and then more boldly under his own name, he argued that the notion of infallibility "represented a novum, 'altogether unknown in the Church for many centuries'" (137). It was a position from which he was never to budge for the rest of his life. Dollinger's problem, in short, was that any definition would result in the "'triumph of dogma over history'" (143).
Less diplomatically, he would denounce the doctrine as "moonshine based on 'forgeries and fictions'" and this doctrine would prove a "'millstone'" around the neck of the Church, an idea in the 21st century it is hard to disbelieve. And like all flawed heroes in the heat of battle, Dollinger would undermine himself by fatal overreach in some of his rhetorical claims, causing sympathetic near-allies to withdraw, and leaving him more isolated, especially when he indulged in such controversies as attacking the Council of Florence as not being really ecumenical, and therefore inadmissible as evidence of earlier widespread belief in infallibility and jurisdiction, as the Infallibilists were attempting to argue.
All councils have extra-conciliar and blatantly political factors that loom large, and Vatican I is no different, as Howard so skillfully makes clear. Consider just one brief bit of chronology:
18 July 1870: the final vote on Pastor Aeternus, with 533 voting placet and 2 voting non placet; the other fathers having left to avoid voting against the decree. (At its convocation the bishops numbered some 700.)
19 July 1870: the Franco-Prussian War broke out, causing Napoleon III to withdraw his troops from Italy, leading to the final collapse of the Papal States and the realization of the project of Italian unification.
20 September 1870: Victor Emmanuel's Italian troops breached the walls of Rome at Porta Pia, and the city was now to become the capital of a new nation-state. From here until after the Lateran Accords of 1929, all popes considered themselves "prisoners" and would not leave the Vatican. Rather than quietly, let alone gracefully, accept this, Pius IX redoubled his rhetoric about the temporal states being necessary for the preservation of the Church's spiritual power, an argument I confess to finding absurd. He promoted, and allowed others to promote, a new cult around his person as though he were a proto-martyr about to be sacrificed at any moment. It is not an edifying spectacle to behold. If ever we needed a re-reading of Freud's Future of an Illusion about infantilizing father-figures and neurotic transferences, this is it.
The pressure on the Papal States in the late 1860s, and their impending demise, provoked in Pius and his courtiers and defenders a skillful counter-propaganda campaign that portrayed the pope as a harried, persecuted fellow, a "prisoner of the Vatican." This was enormously influential in arousing sympathy for the pope, and that sympathy softened up a lot of people to the claims of infallibility and jurisdiction that were being bandied about, giving the pro-infallibility crowd an initial advantage the minority found hard to overcome. Rather than directly and openly resist the move for a definition, which would seem in bad taste and unsympathetic to the pope, the minority adopted what Howard suggests was a strategic mistake: that of arguing that the time for a definition was "inopportune." The problem here, says Howard, is that "it appeared to cede the high ground of theological principle to the Infallibilists" (140). It was a mistake they would never recover from.
In the end, a "moderate" form of infallibility and jurisdiction was accepted by the council, the more "maximalist" position having been curtailed in part by the efforts of the minority, whose day, Margaret O'Gara first argued, would come at the Second Vatican Council. But this was still a bridge too far for Dollinger, who refused to knuckle under to pressure from his German bishop and was therefore excommunicated, a devastating blow to him which would never be lifted.
In addition to rejecting the ideas on historical grounds, Dollinger was, Eastern Christians will want to note, an early proto-ecumenist, who spent a lot of time organizing conferences with Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox in an attempt to heal the divisions of the Church. These conferences, held in Bonn, involved Orthodox participants from St. Petersburg, from the University of Athens, Romania, Syria, and elsewhere in the Orthodox and Anglican worlds. They discussed such issues as the filioque, noting in one of their decree that the filioque (so well treated in The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy by A. Edward Siecienski, whom I interviewed here) was inserted via an "illegal" method and that the whole Church, East and West, should consider removing it.
Echoing words of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, words which I have myself made much use of in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, Dollinger argued that "'the great stumbling block and real hindrance to any understanding in the eyes of the Easterners...is the papacy, in the form which it has assumed'" (194).
These conferences were discussing issues that would then fade for nearly a century until the modern Orthodox-Catholic dialogue would take them up again, coming in some cases to a near-identical position as that of the Bonn conferences Dollinger organized and led. But as with us now, so with them then: hyper-Orthodox converts began to derail matters. In this case, "the joker in the pack," as Howard aptly names him, is some pest called Julian Joseph Overbeck who veered from Anglicanism into Lutheranism, then ordination as a Catholic priest who attempted to confect a marriage, after which he left and became an Orthodox layman in the Russian Church. He ginned up a letter-writing campaign to Orthodox hierarchs to derail the Bonn efforts, and to proclaim that Orthodoxy was the one true faith, all others hopeless heretics with whom no congress should be had. La plus ça change...
In the end, Dollinger died disappointed all around: by the decree of Vatican I, by his resulting excommunication, and by the failure of the Bonn conferences to resolve Christian division.
But did he die a failure? Howard ends by raising "a delicate question for Catholics today: to what degree was this excommunicated scholar an intellectual architect, or at least a significant harbinger, of the Second Vatican Council"? To which I would add another question: to what degree do we still need to learn from Dollinger about conflicts in the Church over papal authority, conflicts never so much in evidence after 1870 as they are today?
Concluded.
Showing posts with label Infallibility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Infallibility. Show all posts
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Thursday, November 24, 2016
Papal Infallibility and Authority (Updated)
More than four years ago, on a now-defunct blog, I was asked for some recommendations on books about papal infallibility, a topic so often grossly misunderstood even (perhaps especially) by Catholics themselves--most hilariously in the oafish character Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited. (Brideshead is, of course, the best-known novel of Evelyn Waugh, but here and here I discuss his other works in considerable detail.)
More recently, within the past few months, I have been repeatedly approached on Facebook and elsewhere by people asking for books about these matters. These requests are occurring in the context of heated discussions getting recently hotter over papal authority and the magisterial status of Amoris Laetitia, and the notion being bandied about rather carelessly of an errant pope being publicly corrected by some cardinals for what they regard as errors in that document. In such a context, it seems opportune to revisit some thoughts first posted on here in 2011, but with updates. Now is the time, perhaps more than ever before in Catholic history, to be extremely clear about the limits of papal authority, as I argued just over a year ago. (For more general thoughts on synodal authority, see here and here.) Now is the time, moreover, to be equally clear about appeals to "history" and to questions of historical "development," whether of doctrine or pastoral practice.
Just before getting into that, however, let me, as a footnote as it were, offer here a notice of a book I read almost 20 years ago, and found enormously valuable: The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, by the philosophers Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin. Some have suggested that what is happening in, and as a result of, Amoris Laetitia may be something of a revival of casuistry in Catholic moral theology, which Jonsen and Toulmin suggested was often unfairly criticized and unhelpfully thrown out by the twentieth century. In rubbishing casuistry, they suggest (and Stanley Hauerwas has echoed this), Catholic tradition lost some valuable tools for dealing with complex issues in, e.g., modern bioethics.
To the task at hand: A book that offers very sobering judgments in all three areas--historiography, development, and papal authority--is Francis Oakley's deeply disturbing The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870 (Oxford, 2008). This was the last time of open, and multiple, schisms in the Western Church over papal authority, and this massive crisis was resolved only by the controverted Council of Constance asserting itself over the three rival claimants to the papal throne and ultimately not just "correcting" them but in fact dismissing them all and proceeding with someone new, viz., Martin V.
In Oakley's judgment, which I share, Catholic tradition has never adequately dealt with this, and papal historiography especially so. The too-tidy narrative, and chronological list of popes one finds in, e.g., the Annuario Pontificio, conveniently trace all modern popes to Martin V, and rubbish the others as "anti-popes," which is bad enough, but it is the shameful way that Constance is treated, with its infamous decree Haec Sancta being so selectively treated, that must give one pause, as I argued here at some length.
Part of what Oakley shows is that the theories of papal infallibility and authority which triumphed at Vatican I were not the only ones on offer. Though often misunderstood, papal infallibility, as Vatican I claimed, is actually a very simple, very narrowly defined, "negative" charism not nearly so opposed to other Christian traditions, especially in the East, as some may think. See, e.g., the book by the Greek Orthodox hierarch and theologian, Stylianos Harkianakis, The Infallibility of the Church in Orthodox Theology (St. Andrew's Orthodox Press) (ATF Press, 2008). I reviewed the book for an academic journal in Europe (the newly revived One in Christ) and there remarked that this was a strange book whose publication more than a half-century after it first appeared in Greek as a doctoral dissertation was not explained. The author's foreword acknowledges this question, but offers an unconvincing rationale for ignoring decades of far-reaching scholarship: “the theme as such would not allow any serious alterations, at least in terms of Orthodox Ecclesiology.”
I grant the author’s point that not much recent work on Orthodox understandings of infallibility has been done; but so much work has been done on Orthodox ecclesiology (not least by the author’s compatriot, John Zizioulas—to say nothing of Christos Yannaras, and many, many others, some of whom are discussed here) that readers should know that this section of Harkianakis’s book is very outdated. The twentieth century was widely recognized as the "century of the Church" or the "century of ecclesiology," and this was true in Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic circles so that to ignore fifty and more years of ecclesiological development is a massive omission.
Where the book is truly outdated is from the fourth chapter onward, but leaving that aside, let me stress that the first three chapters are still very valuable, offering as they do a lucid understanding of Orthodox understandings of the infallibility of the Church, defined thus: “that attribute of the Church which, by the power of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, safeguards the faith entrusted to it from all error, and at the same time rightly teaches the word of truth.” In his extensive reflections on infallibility, Harkianakis presents very little if anything that a Catholic, properly understanding what Pastor Aeternus says and means, could or should object to.
Harkianakis's argues that infallibility “refers only to matters of faith and morality” (as Catholics would unhesitatingly agree), it only “covers these articles of teaching in themselves…but not the concrete form in which they appear” (as Catholics would agree), and it is “first and foremost understood negatively” (as Catholics would again readily agree), merely keeping doctrinal pronouncements free from error.
Where Catholics and Orthodox differ is in the manner in which infallibility is demonstrated or invoked. Harkianakis argues that it needs to be more clearly seen as an ecclesiological and pneumatological exercise of the episcopate as a whole and not the prerogative of one man. That is precisely the point that I made in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.
It is at this point that Harkianakis argues forcefully that “if at any time the Church were to reject from its life, even for a moment, the idea of the synodical system, it would cease automatically to be a Church.” The synod, according to the author, “constitutes the instrument by which the voice of the Church is declared and is accordingly the instrument of infallibility of the Church.”
Synodality, as the Catholic world has been discovering for two years now, is messy. But councils are also messy, and what is condemned or accepted at one period may fall into desuetude in another or may come to be more widely accepted. All the panic in parts of the Catholic world just now over last year's synod, and this year's resulting document, seems to me at least partly misplaced, and continued harping on it can serve nobody well, least of all those who regard the exhortation as mistaken. The trick to papal history is, in part, to quietly ignore things and soon enough they will disappear.
Turning to more general studies, for those who are interested: Jean-M. Roger Tillard, The Bishop of Rome remains very influential. Tillard (on whom a recent study has been published: Communion, Diversity and Salvation: The Contribution of Jean-Marie Tillard to Systematic Ecclesiology,) in this book and in others, as well as numerous scholarly articles, stressed that part of the problem with Vatican I is that an inoffensive doctrinal declaration has often been given an offensive interpretation leading to still more offensive practice. As he put it, Pastor Aeternus has often been given an extreme ultramontane interpretation that the fathers of the council themselves clearly rejected. This has led to all kinds of problems, not least for Catholics themselves.
Other studies of note include the attempt by Peter Chirico to see if infallibility can be understood via the categories of modern philosophy: Infallibility: The Crossroads of Doctrine; and Richard Costigan, The Consensus Of The Church And Papal Infallibility: A Study In The Background Of Vatican I.
Francis Sullivan has written several important books treating magisterial authority and infallibility. These are good accessible introductions, including The Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church. See also his Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium.
Other general overviews may be found in the work of Richard Gaillardetz, including By What Authority?: A Primer on Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Sense of the Faithful. See also his Teaching With Authority: A Theology of the Magisterium in the Church.
For the historical context of Vatican I, which is crucial to understanding not merely the doctrine but also the council and Pope Pius IX, there are several European historians whose work one must read. Not surprisingly, at least two of them are German Jesuits continuing in their long and venerable history of Dogmengeschichte: Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy; and Hermann Pottmeyer, Towards a Papacy in Communion: Perspectives from Vatican Councils I & II (Ut Unim Sint); and his Le rôle de la papauté au IIIe millénaire.
The Belgian Gustave Thils' work remains important: Primauté et infaillibilité du pontife romain à Vatican I, et autres études d'ecclésiologie (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium).
Dom Cuthbert Butler's The Vatican Council, 1869-1870. Based on Bishop Ullathorne's Letters is a helpful little book, and reminds one that any serious attempt to understand the council must also attend to biographies and other studies of such hugely important figures and movements as Cardinal Manning, Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Cardinal Newman, Bishop Ullathorne, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Lord Acton, W.E. Gladstone, Otto von Bismarck, the Oxford Movement, the Kulturkampf, the fall of the Second French Empire and advent of the Third French Republic, the movement for Italian unification, and not least the Franco-Prussian War whose outbreak caused Vatican I technically to be suspended sine die and never re-convened.
Much of the work of Yves Congar is extremely important, starting in this instance with Eglise et papaute: Regards historiques (Cogitatio fidei).
For an English view from a leading scholar, Owen Chadwick's A History of the Popes 1830-1914 remains utterly invaluable--a dense history lucidly and compellingly written, which I have very often recommended most warmly. (I paid wider tribute to both Chadwick brothers here.)
For a longer and much more critical historical view, see Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages. Tierney is a major medievalist and his work here and elsewhere is very important--along with that of Francis Oakley, as I have mentioned previously, and Kenneth Pennington.
There are other works that could be mentioned, but this should be enough to get anyone started. Finally, it would be very helpful I think to have further reflection on infallibility picking up the point that the late Tomas Spidlik made in referencing a conversation he had with Romania's greatest theologian of the twentieth century, Dumitru Staniloae:
More recently, within the past few months, I have been repeatedly approached on Facebook and elsewhere by people asking for books about these matters. These requests are occurring in the context of heated discussions getting recently hotter over papal authority and the magisterial status of Amoris Laetitia, and the notion being bandied about rather carelessly of an errant pope being publicly corrected by some cardinals for what they regard as errors in that document. In such a context, it seems opportune to revisit some thoughts first posted on here in 2011, but with updates. Now is the time, perhaps more than ever before in Catholic history, to be extremely clear about the limits of papal authority, as I argued just over a year ago. (For more general thoughts on synodal authority, see here and here.) Now is the time, moreover, to be equally clear about appeals to "history" and to questions of historical "development," whether of doctrine or pastoral practice.
Just before getting into that, however, let me, as a footnote as it were, offer here a notice of a book I read almost 20 years ago, and found enormously valuable: The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, by the philosophers Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin. Some have suggested that what is happening in, and as a result of, Amoris Laetitia may be something of a revival of casuistry in Catholic moral theology, which Jonsen and Toulmin suggested was often unfairly criticized and unhelpfully thrown out by the twentieth century. In rubbishing casuistry, they suggest (and Stanley Hauerwas has echoed this), Catholic tradition lost some valuable tools for dealing with complex issues in, e.g., modern bioethics.
To the task at hand: A book that offers very sobering judgments in all three areas--historiography, development, and papal authority--is Francis Oakley's deeply disturbing The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870 (Oxford, 2008). This was the last time of open, and multiple, schisms in the Western Church over papal authority, and this massive crisis was resolved only by the controverted Council of Constance asserting itself over the three rival claimants to the papal throne and ultimately not just "correcting" them but in fact dismissing them all and proceeding with someone new, viz., Martin V.
In Oakley's judgment, which I share, Catholic tradition has never adequately dealt with this, and papal historiography especially so. The too-tidy narrative, and chronological list of popes one finds in, e.g., the Annuario Pontificio, conveniently trace all modern popes to Martin V, and rubbish the others as "anti-popes," which is bad enough, but it is the shameful way that Constance is treated, with its infamous decree Haec Sancta being so selectively treated, that must give one pause, as I argued here at some length.
Part of what Oakley shows is that the theories of papal infallibility and authority which triumphed at Vatican I were not the only ones on offer. Though often misunderstood, papal infallibility, as Vatican I claimed, is actually a very simple, very narrowly defined, "negative" charism not nearly so opposed to other Christian traditions, especially in the East, as some may think. See, e.g., the book by the Greek Orthodox hierarch and theologian, Stylianos Harkianakis, The Infallibility of the Church in Orthodox Theology (St. Andrew's Orthodox Press) (ATF Press, 2008). I reviewed the book for an academic journal in Europe (the newly revived One in Christ) and there remarked that this was a strange book whose publication more than a half-century after it first appeared in Greek as a doctoral dissertation was not explained. The author's foreword acknowledges this question, but offers an unconvincing rationale for ignoring decades of far-reaching scholarship: “the theme as such would not allow any serious alterations, at least in terms of Orthodox Ecclesiology.”
I grant the author’s point that not much recent work on Orthodox understandings of infallibility has been done; but so much work has been done on Orthodox ecclesiology (not least by the author’s compatriot, John Zizioulas—to say nothing of Christos Yannaras, and many, many others, some of whom are discussed here) that readers should know that this section of Harkianakis’s book is very outdated. The twentieth century was widely recognized as the "century of the Church" or the "century of ecclesiology," and this was true in Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic circles so that to ignore fifty and more years of ecclesiological development is a massive omission.
Where the book is truly outdated is from the fourth chapter onward, but leaving that aside, let me stress that the first three chapters are still very valuable, offering as they do a lucid understanding of Orthodox understandings of the infallibility of the Church, defined thus: “that attribute of the Church which, by the power of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, safeguards the faith entrusted to it from all error, and at the same time rightly teaches the word of truth.” In his extensive reflections on infallibility, Harkianakis presents very little if anything that a Catholic, properly understanding what Pastor Aeternus says and means, could or should object to.
Harkianakis's argues that infallibility “refers only to matters of faith and morality” (as Catholics would unhesitatingly agree), it only “covers these articles of teaching in themselves…but not the concrete form in which they appear” (as Catholics would agree), and it is “first and foremost understood negatively” (as Catholics would again readily agree), merely keeping doctrinal pronouncements free from error.
Where Catholics and Orthodox differ is in the manner in which infallibility is demonstrated or invoked. Harkianakis argues that it needs to be more clearly seen as an ecclesiological and pneumatological exercise of the episcopate as a whole and not the prerogative of one man. That is precisely the point that I made in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.
Synodality, as the Catholic world has been discovering for two years now, is messy. But councils are also messy, and what is condemned or accepted at one period may fall into desuetude in another or may come to be more widely accepted. All the panic in parts of the Catholic world just now over last year's synod, and this year's resulting document, seems to me at least partly misplaced, and continued harping on it can serve nobody well, least of all those who regard the exhortation as mistaken. The trick to papal history is, in part, to quietly ignore things and soon enough they will disappear.
Turning to more general studies, for those who are interested: Jean-M. Roger Tillard, The Bishop of Rome remains very influential. Tillard (on whom a recent study has been published: Communion, Diversity and Salvation: The Contribution of Jean-Marie Tillard to Systematic Ecclesiology,) in this book and in others, as well as numerous scholarly articles, stressed that part of the problem with Vatican I is that an inoffensive doctrinal declaration has often been given an offensive interpretation leading to still more offensive practice. As he put it, Pastor Aeternus has often been given an extreme ultramontane interpretation that the fathers of the council themselves clearly rejected. This has led to all kinds of problems, not least for Catholics themselves.
Other studies of note include the attempt by Peter Chirico to see if infallibility can be understood via the categories of modern philosophy: Infallibility: The Crossroads of Doctrine; and Richard Costigan, The Consensus Of The Church And Papal Infallibility: A Study In The Background Of Vatican I.
Francis Sullivan has written several important books treating magisterial authority and infallibility. These are good accessible introductions, including The Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church. See also his Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium.
Other general overviews may be found in the work of Richard Gaillardetz, including By What Authority?: A Primer on Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Sense of the Faithful. See also his Teaching With Authority: A Theology of the Magisterium in the Church.
For the historical context of Vatican I, which is crucial to understanding not merely the doctrine but also the council and Pope Pius IX, there are several European historians whose work one must read. Not surprisingly, at least two of them are German Jesuits continuing in their long and venerable history of Dogmengeschichte: Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy; and Hermann Pottmeyer, Towards a Papacy in Communion: Perspectives from Vatican Councils I & II (Ut Unim Sint); and his Le rôle de la papauté au IIIe millénaire.
The Belgian Gustave Thils' work remains important: Primauté et infaillibilité du pontife romain à Vatican I, et autres études d'ecclésiologie (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium).
Dom Cuthbert Butler's The Vatican Council, 1869-1870. Based on Bishop Ullathorne's Letters is a helpful little book, and reminds one that any serious attempt to understand the council must also attend to biographies and other studies of such hugely important figures and movements as Cardinal Manning, Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Cardinal Newman, Bishop Ullathorne, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Lord Acton, W.E. Gladstone, Otto von Bismarck, the Oxford Movement, the Kulturkampf, the fall of the Second French Empire and advent of the Third French Republic, the movement for Italian unification, and not least the Franco-Prussian War whose outbreak caused Vatican I technically to be suspended sine die and never re-convened.
Much of the work of Yves Congar is extremely important, starting in this instance with Eglise et papaute: Regards historiques (Cogitatio fidei).
For an English view from a leading scholar, Owen Chadwick's A History of the Popes 1830-1914 remains utterly invaluable--a dense history lucidly and compellingly written, which I have very often recommended most warmly. (I paid wider tribute to both Chadwick brothers here.)
For a longer and much more critical historical view, see Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages. Tierney is a major medievalist and his work here and elsewhere is very important--along with that of Francis Oakley, as I have mentioned previously, and Kenneth Pennington.
There are other works that could be mentioned, but this should be enough to get anyone started. Finally, it would be very helpful I think to have further reflection on infallibility picking up the point that the late Tomas Spidlik made in referencing a conversation he had with Romania's greatest theologian of the twentieth century, Dumitru Staniloae:
I went to see a dear Romanian friend of mine, the great Orthodox theologian Staniloe, shortly before his death. He told me he could not understand the infallibility of the Pope.
I then replied: You and I are also infallible. He was amazed at my answer, so I explained: When I say during the Mass: "This is my body ..., this is my blood ..." or when I say: "I absolve you from your sins," these are infallible words and this is also the Pope's infallibility, nothing else.
Then Staniloe said: If infallibility is understood in this way, then it is easier to comprehend. Not only is the Pope infallible when he speaks in the name of the Church, but so is the Mother when she tries to speak of God to her child. The priest is infallible in the sacraments and the Pope is also infallible when he speaks in the name of the great sacrament, of the whole Church.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Does Papal Infallibility Actually Weaken Claims to Authority?
In writing my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity I was aware that the First Vatican Council probably needed more attention than I was able to give it. In the past few months I have been able to return to some of the issues raised before, during, and after that council, including the influence of the French Revolution, the thought of Joseph de Maistre (on whom see the fascinating interview I did recently with two Maistre scholars), and the whole problem of "sovereignty," about which I wrote recently.
Part of my recent research has allowed me to return to a book by the historian Brian Tierney. Though I have read other works of Brian Tierney over the years, it is only recently that I have been able to return to and read more deeply from his early book, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Brill, 1966, 1988).
Tierney begins with Maistre's famous declaration that "Infallibility in the spiritual order and sovereignty in the temporal order are two perfectly synonymous words." No, Tierney insists, they are not synonymous, and in fact those two concepts are at war with one another. Longstanding notions of sovereignty, until at least the nineteenth century, held that no sovereign, precisely as sovereign (i.e., beholden to nobody's authority other than his own), was bound by the decrees of his predecessors--to be so bound would be an intolerable infringement precisely on his sovereignty. And yet, as defined today, papal infallibility means precisely being so bound: doctrines proclaimed as infallible are ipso facto held to be irreformable. This is made very clear in Pastor aeternus of Vatican I and its famous conclusion that "when the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra....such definitions are of themselves, and not by consensus of the Church, irreformable" (ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae irreformabiles esse).
Aware of the conflict between freedom and infallibility, Tierney discusses in detail early papalists from the late Middle Ages who wanted to maximize papal authority and therefore shied away from infallibility precisely because they felt it would restrict the freedom of movement and maneuverability of popes. In reading this, I am once more put in mind of an idea I came to many years ago now in reading papal history: that history is one long illustration of the law of unintended consequences.
Tierney concludes on a note that should give all defenders of the papacy very great and serious pause: “After a
hundred years of papal infallibility the main practical result…has been to weaken the authority
of the pope’s ‘ordinary’ pronouncements on faith and morals….The ordinary
Catholic is left with a vague feeling that, if the pope were really certain of
the truth of his own teaching, he would ‘make it infallible’” (275). This paradox, it seems to me, remains lost even today on most apologists for a strongly centralized papacy, a few of whose more fatuous (and ironic) ravings (e.g., Patrick Henry Reardon) I took on in my book.
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