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Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei
But at any rate the most basic answer is they are in opposition to the will of God because the pope says so, he is inspired directly by the holy spirit and as such is infalible(sp) on church matters.
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Not exactly true. The pope is only considered infallible when he says he is infallible and goes through a specific formal process. That is not the case for the issues above.
What is Papal Infallibility
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The battles within the Catholic Church since Vatican II have been fought over many issues, mostly sexual, but the real conflict has been over the teaching authority of the Magisterium. Both on the left and the right—inadequate political labels which will have serve—there has been a reluctance to accept the guidance of the Magisterium on certain topics. This has led to an outright rejection of the Magisterium’s teaching authority by dissenters on the left, and, less frequently, to attempts at a highly legalistic revisionism on the right.
Man in his fallen state does not like authority. He prefers to make his own rules. Satan’s proposal to Adam and Eve will always have resonance: man, rather than God, gets to decide what is right and wrong. But this attempt at a radical human autonomy is bad metaphysics; it ignores the fact that in God "we live and move and have our being." It is also a formula for unhappiness. God is only interested in our own good, both now and in eternity, and this good can be anchored only in objective truths which we ourselves do not create.
But we need an infallible means of knowing these truths, since our intellect and judgment are clouded by original sin. In fact, our salvation depends on it. This is why the plan for our redemption includes a teaching Church built on the "rock" of Peter. Christ conferred this name on the apostle in Caesarea Philippi, where to this day there is a large rock formation, almost a small mountain. When Christ said, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my Church," he and his disciples may well have been standing in the shadow of this sign of permanence and immobility. Jesus promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church. He meant by this not only that the Church would last until the end of time, but that it would be indefectable and teach truth, not error.
In the Acts and Letters of the Apostles, in the letters of Pope St. Clement and St. Ignatius of Antioch, we see the teaching authority of the Church already firmly established. One of its early tasks was to establish the canon of the Old and New Testaments. Although the fact is understandably overlooked by our Protestant friends, it was not until the end of the fourth century that the twenty-seven books which comprise the New Testament were agreed upon by two ecumenical councils, subject to final approval by the pope. The Bible was never meant to stand alone as a separate authority. It is the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, which preserves the deposit of the faith, of which Scripture is a part. St. Augustine, as usual, got it exactly right: "But for the authority of the Catholic Church, I would not believe the Gospel."
But how does the Church exercise this authority? How does it make clear that a certain teaching is objectively true and cannot change? One way is through the exercise of what is called the extraordinary Magisterium. This refers to the authority granted to each successor of Peter who, in the words of Vatican II, enjoys "infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful—he proclaims in an absolute decision a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals."
When making such solemn pronouncements, the pope is not speaking as a private theologian, but as supreme teacher of the universal Church. Before doing so, he may consult with bishops and theologians, but it is he, and not they, who exercises infallibility under carefully defined conditions. This infallibility is not a personal attribute of the pope, but a charism of his office. Its most recent exercise was the promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption of Mary by Pius XII in 1950.
Papal infallibility is a stumbling block for many Christians, even many Catholics. But it is actually a very limited doctrine. It means that when, and only when, the successor of Peter makes a solemn pronouncement about faith or morals, he is guarded by the Holy Spirit against teaching error. Unlike scripture, such pronouncements are not "inspired." They are simply free from error. The other way the extraordinary Magisterium can be exercised is through an ecumenical council of bishops when they define a doctrine under the guidance of the pope and subject to his confirmation. Two of the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council are "dogmatic" in this manner: Lumen gentium, or the Constitution of the Church, and Dei verbum, on revelation.
Solemn pronouncements are not, however, the way the Church usually goes about teaching the faith. There is also the doctrine of the ordinary Magisterium. It was succinctly defined by the First Vatican Council in 1870: "Moreover, by divine and Catholic faith everything must be believed that is contained in the written word of God or in tradition, and that is proposed by the Church as a divinely revealed object of belief either in solemn decree or in her ordinary universal teaching."
In other words, there is a body of infallible teaching that has not been made known by solemn declarations. What this refers to is the deposit of faith handed down through the centuries. The pope is its chief guardian, and he may use whatever means he chooses to preserve and teach it. As one writer puts it, the pope does not invent the truth, he locates it.
The infallibility of the ordinary Magisterium was clearly and explicitly taught by Pius XII and by the Second Vatican Council. Here is what Pius XII wrote in his 1950 encyclical Humanae generis: "Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in encyclical letters does not itself command consent, on the pretext that in writing such letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their teaching authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say, ‘He who heareth you, heareth me.’ … But if the Supreme Pontiffs in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, it is obvious that the matter, according to the mind and will of the same Pontiffs, cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians."
In Lumen gentium #25, a key Vatican II text about which dissenters don’t like to be reminded, the Council Fathers teach that "loyal submission of the will and intellect must be given, in a special way, to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he does not speak ex cathedra in such wise, indeed, that his supreme teaching authority be acknowledged with respect, and that one sincerely adhere to decisions made by him, conformably with his manifest mind and intention, which is made known principally either by the character of the documents in question, or by the frequency with which a certain doctrine is proposed, or by the manner in which the doctrine is formulated."
These words constitute a "hard saying" for dissenting Catholics. They are one reason why enthusiasts of the "spirit of Vatican II" are seldom eager to discuss what the Council Fathers actually wrote about papal authority. One liberal theologian has gone so far as to deride what he calls "Vatican II fundamentalists." These are people who refer to the Council’s specific texts about the role of the pope. But faithful Catholics can be grateful that Christ left a teaching office which need not solemnly define as dogma every doctrine in order for it to be held as objectively true.
The ferocious attacks on the pope’s authority to teach in the manner affirmed by Lumen gentium began in the 1960’s—not coincidentally the decade of the pill and sexual liberation. No document has so divided the Church as Paul VI’s Humanae vitae (1968), which simply reaffirmed the Church’s traditional teaching that contraception is an intrinsically evil act. John T. Noonan’s analysis of the authority of an earlier papal encyclical forbidding contraception, Pius XI’s Casti connubii (1930), applies equally to Humanae vitae:
"How great was that authority? By the ordinary tests used by the theologians to determine whether a doctrine is infallibly proclaimed, it may be argued that the specific condemnation of [contraception] is infallibly set out. The encyclical is addressed to the universal Church. The Pope speaks in fulfillment of his apostolic office. He speaks for the Church. He speaks on moral doctrine that he says ‘has been transmitted from the beginning.’ He ‘promulgates’ the teaching. If the Pope did mean to use the full authority to speak ex cathedra on morals, which Vatican I recognized as his, what further language could he have used?"
Noonan was quite correct, although he failed to apply his own logic when he later dissented from Humanae vitae. No Catholic should doubt that recent papal encyclicals like Veritatis splendor and Evangelium vitae speak infallibly about such issues as birth control, abortion, euthanasia, and the inadmissibility of the theological fad known as consequentialism. Note the language used by John Paul II in confirming the Church’s condemnation of abortion in Evangelium vitae:
"Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred on Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops …. I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of a human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium."
In May 1994, John Paul II issued a statement reaffirming the Church’s traditional ban on ordaining women to the priesthood. On October 28, 1995 Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, with the Pope’s approval, released a statement saying that the norms of the earlier statement of 1994 required "definitive assent" to the fact that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women. He said that the decision was irrevocable, irreformable and infallible as a doctrine of the Catholic faith.
In this case, the Magisterium was merely confirming what was already obvious to many Catholics: that Christ wanted a male priesthood, that this teaching was handed on to the Apostles and has been taught always and everywhere by the Catholic Church, and has always and everywhere been believed by the body of the Catholic faithful.
Since such a declaration does not fit the mood of the times, it has naturally been criticized by those eager to see women ordained as priests. One criticism is that the Congregation’s 1995 statement is not in itself infallible. But this is mere technical quibbling: the Congregation’s statement was a very serious exercise of Church authority, and the logic of such criticism would be to demand extraordinary papal declarations on every doctrinal question submitted to the Congregation. This would ultimately reduce the Church to solemnly defining every point of doctrine before it could be taken seriously. It would force the Magisterium into a legalistic mode of operation which is the reverse of Christ’s way of teaching.
Another criticism is that the Vatican did not poll every bishop in the world before making its pronouncement about ordination. But the pope is not required to do this, and, in any event, until the advent of modern communications, such a poll would not have been possible. Even today, there are jailed bishops in places like China and Vietnam who cannot be reached by any means. All the pope is required to do is to determine that the doctrine in question is Apostolic. Which is another way of saying that it is taught firmly and irrevocably by Tradition and supported by Scripture.
Cardinal Ratzinger has warned that legalistic carping over the teachings of the Magisterium is a symptom of the kind of rationalism now rampant in the West, but which has still not infected the Eastern churches. More important than the concept of infallibility, Ratzinger writes, is that of auctoritatis—authority which is humbly accepted because of what it is, without a constant demand for legal credentials. Such auctoritatis has to be the basic assumption of any community of believers. And auctoritatis cannot be limited to ex cathedra decrees. The living organism of the faith would suffer if reduced to a skeleton of solemn and binding pronouncements.
In the final analysis, the pope and Cardinal Ratzinger are right in resisting demands that teachings such as that against contraception be stamped and sealed by solemn definitions of the extraordinary Magisterium. Such a precedent would be dangerous; it could easily turn the Church into a pharisaical institution, a kind of ecclesiastical Supreme Court. Catholics of good will already know that these teachings are authoritative and true and will not be changed to suit the whims of a dying secular culture. And in charity, faithful Catholics should propose, rather than impose, them to the less discerning.
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