The Glorious Multiplicity of the Magisterium

The phrase “the magisterium of the Church” is simply a fancy phrase for the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. This teaching authority resides in the Pope and in the college of bishops speaking together, and is ensured by the Holy Spirit through the apostolic succession.

In paragraphs 48 and 49 of Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis explains why it has to be this way.

Since faith is one, it must be professed in all its purity and integrity. Precisely because all the articles of faith are interconnected, to deny one of them, even of those that seem least important, is tantamount to distorting the whole. Each period of history can find this or that point of faith easier or harder to accept: hence the need for vigilance in ensuring that the deposit of faith is passed on in its entirety (cf. 1 Tim 6:20) and that all aspects of the profession of faith are duly emphasized.

As Catholics, we profess the truth—the whole truth, so far as we can understand it. That includes the truths that can be known by observation of and experimentation and reflection on the created world around us, and the truths of faith that God has revealed to us in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, and through the Old Testament history of His chosen people. These truths, when properly and fully understood, cannot be in conflict, because God is the author of both, and God is Truth itself.

The truths known from the created world are easy enough to pass down, because every generation has the created world before them. The truths known from Jesus Christ need to be passed down carefully, lest revelation be lost. And we mustn’t lose any slightest part, because as Pope Francis says, all of these truths are connected. Deny one, and you’ve got a problem, as any logician can tell you: from a contradiction, you can reason to anything.

Each generation has its own blind spots, its own parts of the faith that it would rather not look at too closely. It is the job of the Magisterium, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to pass the entire faith along anyway.

And here’s the kicker: what applies to each generation applies to each individual even more. Not only do we each have our blind spots, there are precious few of us (if any!) who have the time and patience and capacity to encompass the whole teaching of the Church, the entire deposit of faith as it is currently understood. Every person, every Christian, every theologian is necessarily a specialist.

And that means it takes a team to remember it all. It takes a body, the body of Christ.

As a service to the unity of faith and its integral transmission, the Lord gave his Church the gift of apostolic succession. Through this means, the continuity of the Church’s memory is ensured and certain access can be had to the wellspring from which faith flows. The assurance of continuity with the origins is thus given by living persons, in a way consonant with the living faith which the Church is called to transmit. She depends on the fidelity of witnesses chosen by the Lord for this task. For this reason, the magisterium always speaks in obedience to the prior word on which faith is based; it is reliable because of its trust in the word which it hears, preserves and expounds.

Even during that most dangerous time in Church history, the Arian heresy, when the bulk of the bishops had gone over to Arius, there were a staunch few like St. Athanasius who stood for the hard teaching, and who would not be silenced, and who ultimately pulled the Church back from the brink of destruction.

Destruction? That’s a big word. Would the Church really have destroyed itself if (per impossibile) Bishop Arius had won? This could not have happened, of course; Christ promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against His Church. But suppose the largest part of the Church had continued to follow Arius, and cast off its allegiance to Rome. If, as the Pope claims, the Faith is based on ultimate truth, then Arius’ teachings must necessarily contradict ultimate truth. From a contradiction you can prove anything; you would eventually find multiple teachers in the Arian tradition teaching things completely consistent with Arianism but inconsistent with each other. This new Arian church would fragment and splinter into thousands of smaller sects.

It’s just what would happen; we’ve seen it happen in our own era.

It’s the glorious multiplicity of the Magisterium that saves us from that: that the truth, the Faith, wasn’t entrusted to just one person, but to a collection of people, and to their successors, so that nothing might be lost—so that the entire Faith might be preserved, even in those eras when we’d most prefer not to. Glory to God!