>>> John Shinners <[log in to unmask]> 12/19 4:11 pm >>>
Brian Tierney, in _The Origins of Papal Infallibility:
1150-1350_
(1972) argues that the doctrine first gained prominence in the early
14th
century among the Spiritual Franciscans who were trying to safeguard
earlier papal pronouncements on the poverty of Jesus and the apostles
from
John XXII's rejection of the idea. John, confronted by an idea of
infallibility that would check his (or any pope's) sovereignty,
rejected
infallibility as a doctrine sent from the devil. It only re-emerged
in
the fifteenth century when popes began to embrace it to counter the
Conciliar movement in the post-Great Schism church, though it was not
formally declared until 1870. (This, at least, is how I remember his
basic
argument.)
Hans Kung's _How the Pope Became Infallible_ summarizes--with
a
good dash of invective--the history of the First Vat. Council and the
irregularities that some historians see in the deliberations of the
Council on the question of papal infallibility. Chiefly, some argue
that
all other ecumenical councils preceded my unanimous vote on questions
of
dogma while Vat I passed infallibility with a majority vote after some
bishops had already left the council in protest over the whole issue
of
infallibility. It's pretty fascinating stuff.
As I recall, Kung was blasted for his historical critique of
infallibility, but Tierney's careful tracing of its questionable
medieval
roots is far more damaging to the concept.
John S.
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John Shinners
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Tierney's work is also not without its historical context. He was
writing with a renewed controversy over the nature of papal authority,
the preliminary stages, one might say, the great controversy over
contraception, among other issues. He was certainly a much better
historian than Kueng, but just how the fourteenth-century
controversies over poverty relate to the Vatican I debates is not
clear to me.
The fourteenth-century controversies, it seems to me, are initial
attempts to define more clearly the more vague notion that the Church
in some way has to be doctrinally indefectible. Just in what way, of
course, requires definition. The pope's tastes in movies, of course,
are not infallible. Everyone would agree on that. Vatican I said "in
faith and morals"--but does ordination of women come under the purview
of "faith" or is it a matter of institutional discipline? These are
the sorts of things that have to be sorted out. As I pointed out in
my previous post, John Paul II, in the way he has approached these
issues, is actually contributing to further definition of how papal
infallibility functions.
But one can say that medieval Catholics did assume some notion of
papal infallibility, _as a subset of the indefectibility of the
church_. When Tierney points out that a debate over the issue couched
in terms we now recognize as "infallibility" terms first emerges in
the 14thc, that is another way of saying that all doctrine gets
increasingly more precisely defined in ad hoc response to challenges,
controversies, debates. The poverty controversy of the late 13th and
early 14thc provoked an attempt to be more precise than had previously
been the case but it does not mean that no concept of indefectibility
existed prior to these debates. It's just that the concept of
indefectibility was much more vague and undefined prior to these
debates and the 14thc debates weren't particularly helpful. Only with
the more general challenge to fundamentals of Catholic ecclesiology
that come from the Hussites, Wycliffe and then the Protestant
Reformers does the underlying issue of the indefectibility of the
Church come into focus. Vatican I represents a certain conclusion to
that long debate.
Indefectibility of the Church is crucial to a Catholic (and Eastern
Orthodox) understanding of the nature of the Church as Christ's body
in time and space. With the development of greater papal authority
(again, in direct response to centrifugal nationalist forces
throughout the Middle Ages but reaching a certain critical mass in the
early modern period),the focus for the Church's indefectibility quite
logically becomes the papacy, which is what is going on at Vatican I
in response to nationalist Gallicanism and its variants in Germany and
elsewhere.
The very idea of an indefectible church, of course, runs counter to
modern historicist understandings. It was perhaps the crucial
dividing point at the time of the Protestant Reformation (but even
there, not so much whether the Church was indefectible--Protestants
asserted it was--but exactly how and where that indefectibility was to
be found: in historical, instiutional structures or in some more ideal
spiritual sense; in papal authority or in conciliar or in presbyterial
or even in princely authority. In general, though, one can say that
Protestant ecclesiology placed the indefectibility and perfection of
the Church much less in historical institutional structures than did
Catholic ecclesiology, or, to put it another way, Protestants, in
light of obvious corruption and abuses in the institutional church,
came to be convinced that the historic/institutional and particularly
the papal church, was more broadly defectible than Catholics did.
This opened the way to more ready acceptance of pure historicism by
Protestants in the modern era than by Catholics.)
But historicism is not characteristic of medieval thought. So, at
least in the form of indefectibility and, since the late 11thc, with a
certain papal point on it, the idea of infallibility obtained. The
subsequent debates were about the exact nature and circumstances of
this indefectibility/infallibility, whether papal or conciliar,
whether in political or institutional matters or in faith and morals,
how to distinguish faith and morals from disciplinary matters etc.
The 14thc poverty controversies,I think, should be seen as an initial
skirmish in this long process that continues to the present in the
controversies over Humanae Vitae and the ordination of women.
Dennis Martin
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