Papal Infallibility

After I sent my “1966 Papal Commission Favored Lifting Contraception Ban” article to my Philippine Science High School Yahoo group a few weeks ago, I received a response from a classmate who was once an organic chemist before he became an Opus Dei Catholic priest. He joked that while I may be a “Constitutionalist”, I am certainly “not a very good theologian and no expert in canon law.”

My chemist-priest classmate specifically disputed my contention that “the Catholic teaching that contraception is intrinsically evil is not an infallible teaching.” On the contrary, he wrote, it “meets all four requirements (for a papal teaching to be classified as infallible) since not only has it been taught by different Popes in solemn encyclicals (Pius XI, Paul VI, John Paul II) and the Second Vatican Council, but is in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”

It appears the whole controversy on the Reproductive Health (RH) bill opposed by the Philippine Catholic Church is based on a Papal Encyclical, Humanae Vitae, that was in turn based on preserving the doctrine of papal infallibility, the belief that the pope is incapable of committing human error when it comes to making ex cathedra policy pronouncements on behalf of the church.

The Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control that Pope Paul VI set up in 1964 had basically one mission—to determine how the Church could change its position on birth control without undermining papal authority. After three years of intense debate and discussion, the 40-member Commission concluded it was just not possible to make this change without undermining papal authority.

But while the 35 members in the majority voted in good conscience to recommend the change anyway because it was morally the right thing to do, a vocal minority of five members, led by then Bishop of Warsaw Karol Wojtyla (who later became Pope John Paul II), protested on the grounds “any change on the birth control issue would destroy the principle of papal infallibility, and that infallibility was the fundamental principle of the Church upon which all else rests.”

As the Commission minority report stated: “If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XlI’s address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error.”

According to my classmate’s explanation, “Pope Paul VI did not take the Preliminary Report of the Commission in 1966 simply because it was wrong. And he knew that it was wrong because of Papal Infallibility.”

But papal infallibility is a novel concept. Popes had generally held that they were not infallible because only Jesus Christ could not err. Popes also opposed this doctrine because it limited their power: if popes were infallible, then all the acts of previous popes were also infallible and could not be changed.

Pope John XXII was faced with this problem in 1324 when a group of Franciscan monks called “the spirituals” contended that the pope must follow the precedent set by a previous pope who agreed with their view that the church must follow the life of St. Francis of Assisi and live in poverty. In his Papal Bull, Quia Quorundam, John XXII denounced the notion of papal infallibility as an invention of the enemies of the papacy who sought to limit the power of the reigning pontiff.

“Like all medieval popes, John XXII saw that papal infallibility would make him not the equal of his predecessors but their inferior, for he would only be able to teach some things with their consent,” wrote Brian Tierney in his book, Origins of Papal Infallibility 1150-1350.

In his book, “How the Pope Became Infallible: Pope Pius IX and Politics of Persuasion” (1981)”, Catholic historian Bernhard Hasler described the circumstances that faced the Catholic Church in Rome at the time of the First Vatican Council. It was in the year 1870 when the papacy lost the “Papal States” – the territories of central Italy over which the pope had sovereignty for more than a millennium from 756 to 1870. So the Council was faced with the burning question of how the papacy could still retain its power after the devastating loss of its papal states.

It was then when a group of conservative church leaders led by Pope Pius IX came up with the idea of an “infallible pope” which holds that when the pope formulates a doctrine, he is transmitting this dogma on God’s behalf so the pope’s teaching cannot possibly be in error. Therefore, even without the army of the Papal States, the pope’s word would still carry enormous power.

That’s how it began barely 141 years this month on July 20.  But apparently, the pope’s word does not carry enormous power now. More than 40 years after Pope Paul VI released Humanae Vitae banning the use of contraception, independent research show that some 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church.

There are other alarming facts.  In 1965, there were 42,000 men in American seminaries studying for the priesthood. Today, there are fewer than 6,000, even though the number of Catholics in the US has nearly doubled. The average age of nuns in the United States is 65 years but only 3 percent are under age 40, while 35 percent are older than 70. One-half of all American priests quit the priesthood before reaching retirement age.

If popes are infallible, then why did Jesus berate the first pope? In Matthew 16:23, when Peter refused to follow his order to proceed to Jerusalem where he would be crucified, “Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”

Jesus could have said this of Peter’s bishops in Rome in 1870 when they came up with the doctrine of papal infallibility for political expediency – “the things of men.” He could have also said this of Peter’s successor in Rome in 1967 when Pope Paul VI rejected what 35 members of his own commission recommended as the morally correct thing to do simply because of concern that doing so would undermine papal infallibility, the “fundamental principle” of the Catholic Church.

Papal infallibility may very well be the “stumbling block” that Christ referred to.

(Send comments to [email protected] or mail them to the Law Offices of  Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94127 or call  415.334.7800).