The trouble with papal infallibility

It's one of the great ironies of history that a man named Pope put his finger on what's wrong with the papacy.

"To err is human; to forgive, divine," wrote the English essayist and poet Alexander Pope in his famous Essay on Criticism in 1711. Sixteen years later he elaborated: "A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."

Pope wasn't thinking specifically about the 21st-Century Catholic Church, an institution suffering from a wisdom deficiency precisely because of its refusal to admit mistakes. But he could have been.

The notion that the pope is by definition infallible about matters of faith or morals has bounced around the Vatican since Pope Boniface VIII issued his Bull Unam Sanctam in 1302. Boniface at least had some valid excuse for claiming infallibility: The wisdom of Alexander Pope— not to mention the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment— wasn't available to him. So you could say that, when Boniface foolishly insisted he could do no wrong, he was just doing his limited best.

Autocrat of a billion?

But Pius IX had no such excuse when he formalized the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870. Much of the Church's institutional lethargy today— its inability to address the dry rot caused by priestly sex abuse, gender inequality, birth control prohibitions, celibacy— can be traced, I would argue, to that intellectually flawed doctrine.

To some observers, the pope is a rare modern example of an absolute dictator— the "autocrat of a billion souls," as Robert Zaller recently put it in BSR. (Click here.) Yet far from enhancing the pope's power, the doctrine of papal infallibility has undermined it: In effect every pope is locked in to the rulings of his predecessors. He can't change Church policy without admitting that some previous pope erred.

Paul VI doubles down

Consider (as Garry Wills has pointed out) the Church's position on birth control. In 1930 Pope Pius XI prohibited any form of artificial birth control. Pius XII reinforced that ruling in 1951, condemning all contraception except the "rhythm method" (abstinence from sex during a woman's perceived fertile period).

Then in 1965— by which time birth control devices were far more effective and widespread— Pope Paul VI convened a commission of Catholic clergy and lay people to reconsider the question. That commission duly concluded that no justification in "natural law" could be found for such a prohibition.

But at this point Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the secretary of the Holy Office, reminded Paul that Catholics had for years, on papal warrant, believed that using contraceptives was a mortal sin, for which they would go to hell if they died unrepentant. On the other hand, Catholics who had obediently followed Church teaching all those years had been obliged to raise and support large families unless they abstained from sex.

How, Ottaviani asked, could Paul VI say that Pius XI had misled his flock in such a serious way? And how could Paul make such an admission without undermining his own authority as moral arbiter in matters of heaven and hell?

The result: As Wills puts it, Paul VI "doubled down," adding another encyclical in 1968 that rejected his own commission's conclusions in favor of the status quo.

A facile "'Letter to Women'

Thanks to the doctrine of papal infallibility, the Catholic Church today has become the living embodiment of the futuristic dictatorship ridiculed by Terry Gilliam in his 1985 film, Brazil: a top-down society where nothing works because the ruling bureaucracy, obsessed with demonstrating its omnipotence, expends all of its energies on covering up its own inevitable mistakes.

In his 1995 "Letter to Women," Pope John Paul II rejected calls for the ordination of women priests (and birth control, too) by citing "the Church's two-thousand-year history" and "its historical conditioning." The life of the Church in the Third Millennium, he added hopefully, "will certainly not be lacking in new and surprising manifestations of "'the feminine genius'."

In effect John Paul was saying: "We can't change something we've been doing for 2,000 years" (as if 2,000 years is a long time in the mind of God) and "We can't shape history— that's somebody else's job. We can only react to it."

Calling Thomas Aquinas

How could the leaders of such an awesome institution grow so obtuse and defensive? Why did popes begin checking their brains at the door and proclaiming their inerrancy at the very moment that Enlightenment thinkers like Alexander Pope were discovering the virtues of learning from one's mistakes?

The Catholic clergy wasn't always so hidebound. At one time the Church attracted the best and brightest minds in Christendom— think Thomas Aquinas, or Thomas More, Ignatius Loyola, or even Desiderius Erasmus, who became a priest despite his low regard for religion because, in the 15th Century, where else could a thinking man find a job that allowed him to utilize his mind?

Today, by contrast, intelligent Catholics enjoy multiple creative employment opportunities outside the Church, with the result that the Church must draw its priests, bishops, cardinals and popes from a much smaller talent pool.

The Mafia and Wolf Block Schorr

Of course that's what happens to any organization that loses its monopoly on talent. Philadelphia's Mafia, the Inquirer crime reporter George Anastasia astutely observed in the February issue of Philadelphia Magazine, has declined because "Second- and third-generation Italian-Americans make lousy mobsters. The best and the brightest are now doctors, lawyers, entertainers, athletes, educators. As a result, you're scraping the bottom of the gene pool when you try to put together a crime family today."

Much the same logic explained the rise and fall of the Philadelphia law firm of Wolf, Block Schorr and Solis-Cohen, which for much of the 20th Century enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the city's best Jewish lawyers. Wolf Block could commandeer the cream of the best Jewish law school grads and pay them sub-par wages because, as one managing partner once explained, "We know our people have no other place to go."

Eventually, of course, Jewish lawyers found plenty of other places to go in Philadelphia. Partly for that reason (although not solely for that reason), the once-mighty Wolf Block was dissolved in 2009.

Sheep vs. shepherds

Today's Catholic Church has become, increasingly, an institution whose sheep are smarter than the shepherds and consequently refuse to be herded around any more. In the most extensive survey ever taken of Catholics under age 30— funded by the Lilly Endowment in the 1990s— the number who accepted "church teaching" on contraception was so low as to be statistically nonexistent. The people who participated in that poll are now approaching middle age and, I suspect, they're even less willing to surrender the right to think for themselves to some holy man who claims infallibility.

You may recall the old joke about the man who dies and goes to heaven, where he's mystified to find the place divided by a high wall. When he asks what's on the other side, an angel explains, "That's where we put the Catholics. They think they're the only ones up here." If that joke were updated today, most Catholics would be on the same side of the wall with everyone else, asking the same question, and the angel would explain, "That's where we put the popes. They think Catholics are the only ones up here— and they think they're never wrong."

As the Church has demonstrated in its confrontations with both the Roman Empire and the Soviet Empire (although less so with Nazism), institutionalized faith can provide an effective and inspiring counterweight to armed dictatorship. There will always be a place in the world for the Christian message of the power of love in human affairs. But in a world where the only certainty is change, it remains to be seen whether that message can be best disseminated by an institution that insists above all on its own inerrancy.

America is a much better place today for acknowledging that slavery and racial segregation were mistakes. Germany and Japan are much better places for rejecting their centuries-old warrior worship. A pope might learn something from those lessons, if his job description didn't preclude him from rejecting the past.♦


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