Is the Roman Pontiff infallible in his ordinary magisterium? J.M.A. Vacant, Ch. VI
Given that the Pope has teaching authority over the Church, and has the power to compel assent to his teaching, is right or wrong to refer to a "papal universal ordinary magisterium"?
Editors’ Notes
The WM Review is pleased to present here a translated section from the French text of J.M.A. Vacant’s 1887 study The Ordinary Magisterium of the Church and its Organs. To our knowledge, this may be the first time that it has been published in English.
Vacant was a professor at the major seminary of Nancy, France, and the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique was commenced under his directorship. This study comes with the authorization of the Bishop of Nancy and the Archbishop of Paris.
While his name is not well known today, this work is cited – not always in agreement – by various writers since Vatican I. For example, Cardinal Charles Journet, Fr Joachim Salaverri SJ and Dom Paul Nau OSB all engage with this study.
The Ordinary and Universal Magisterium
This section deals with the question as to whether the Roman Pontiff exercises what is called an ordinary and universal magisterium.
Vatican I taught the following:
Wherefore, by divine and catholic faith all those things are to be believed which are contained in the word of God as found in scripture and tradition, and which are proposed by the church as matters to be believed as divinely revealed, whether by her solemn judgment or in her ordinary and universal magisterium.[1]
Canon George Smith explains his understanding of this text:
“It is by no means uncommon to find the option, if not expressed at least entertained, that no doctrine is to be regarded as a dogma of faith unless it has been solemnly defined by an oecumenical Council or by the Sovereign Pontiff himself. This is by no means necessary.
“It is sufficient that the Church teaches it by her ordinary magisterium, exercised through the Pastors of the faithful, the Bishops whose unanimous teaching throughout the Catholic world, whether conveyed expressly through pastoral letters, catechisms issued by episcopal authority, provincial synods, or implicitly through prayers and religious practices allowed or encouraged, or through the teaching of approved theologians, is no less infallible than a solemn definition issued by a Pope or a general Council.
“If, then, a doctrine appears in these organs of divine Tradition as belonging directly or indirectly to the depositum fidei committed by Christ to His Church, it is to be believed by Catholics with divine-Catholic or ecclesiastical faith, even though it may never have formed the subject of a solemn definition in an oecumenical Council or of an ex cathedra pronouncement by the Sovereign Pontiff.”[2]
The universal and ordinary magisterium is sometimes conceived of as universal in that it comes from a moral unanimity of residential bishops, with the pope, whose teaching compels the universal Church to assent.
But the teaching Church cannot compel the universal Church to assent to error: the Church is, in fact, infallibly protected from such a thing. Therefore theses proposed in this way, as being of divine faith (a common example is that of the existence of guardian angels) are infallible.
Vacant’s Thesis
Vacant’s study addresses this topic in detail, but the section which we are presenting addresses the following particular question:
Given that the Roman Pontiff has jurisdiction and teaching authority over the universal church, and given that he has the power to compel assent to his ordinary magisterium from this universal Church – does he therefore have the power to exercise an ordinary and universal magisterium alone? And is this papal ordinary and universal magisterium also infallible?
The question is not asking whether every act of the pope is infallible – nor even if all of his teaching acts are infallible. The terms of the question are very specific, and are also answered in similar terms by Cardinal Billot, Mgr Fenton, Salaverri and others.
Avery Dulles claims that these views have been “effectively refuted.” It is true that the original discussions of an equivalence between the infallibility of the Church and the Pope referred not to the Pope having a “papal ordinary and universal magisterium”, but rather his infallibility extending to the secondary objects of the magisterium.
However, this remain an important and interesting text. It is not the last word on the subject, and it presents problems which later theologians clarified. But simply waving this thesis away without engagement is evidence of a lack of arguments.
Infallibility
The question for Vacant is this: Do we believe that the Church is, as Van Noort writes, “infallible so that it may be a trustworthy teacher of the Christian religion and of the Christian way of life”? [3] Does the Church teach the truth, or does she just contain the fullness of truth, always alongside more or less error – with it being incumbent on each individual to assess her teaching in order to accept what is true and reject what is false?
Infallibility is a charism, very closely linked to the final end of the Church as a safe teacher and guide. It is a negative charism, in that it prevents the given subject (e.g., the Church, the pope, a council) from teaching error in a certain set of circumstances. This prevention is not an inhibition of free will: the ability to sin or to err is not properly freedom, nor would we say that something like our Lady’s confirmation in grace inhibited her free will.
This charism is given to the Church and her visible head for the reasons that Van Noort says – to establish her as a trustworthy teacher. Could we still hold to this idea if we accept that the pope can command the universal Church to assent, in a definitive way, to errors of faith and morals? In what sense is the Church a safe guide if this is so?
This raises the greater and more thorny problem of what constitutes a “definition” in this context. Vacant has his perspective, but there are others too.
Today, some seek to explain the present crisis by asserting that “in the non-infallible ordinary Magisterium there may be errors and even, in exceptional cases, heretical formulations.”[4] This raises further problems. It suggests that the Church is an untrustworthy guide for the simple, and requires the more educated to always check whether a given teaching is in conformity with her constant magisterium before giving assent.
While there is possibly a lacuna in the Church’s received theology around the idea of “non-infallible teaching”, this traditional theology does not give us anything like a certainty that the ordinary (or “authentic”) magisterium may actually teach heresy, and it is unclear what sort of errors might be possible for a fallible magisterium.
With thanks to Les Amis du Christ Roi de France for granting us the permission to publish this translation from their published text in French.
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