Papal Infallibility As An Instrument Of Unity

The common misconception about the doctrine of Papal infallibility is that the Pope can say whatever he wants and Catholics have to believe it. Actually, the effect of Papal infallibility works in the opposite direction, restraining the Pope; as Ross Douthat explained in a column relating to the latest Synod:

On paper, that doctrine seems to grant extraordinary power to the pope […] In practice, though, it places profound effective limits on his power. Those limits are set, in part, by normal human modesty […] But they’re also set by the binding power of existing teaching, which a pope cannot reverse or contradict without proving his own office, well, fallible — effectively dynamiting the very claim to authority on which his decisions rest.

Even without granting a role to the Holy Spirit in its operation, it’s easy to see how Papal infallibility, if anything, acts as a check on the Pope’s power, rather than anything else. Papal infallibility is not so much the Pope’s power to bind the faithful as it is the power to bind his successors.

And to my mind, this means that Papal infallibility, far from being, as it is commonly thought, the main obstacle to reunion between the Christian churches, can be its main instrument.

Here is what I mean: hovering in the background of (especially) Orthodox concerns about primacy and unity, there seems to be a fear that, whatever promises one Pope makes, once the Rubicon of full communion is crossed, a future Pope can undo them, and thereby destroy what makes the Eastern Orthodox communion so special.

As a Roman Catholic, I believe that the Vatican I Council was inspired by the Holy Spirit and that its claims about the Petrine office are true and part of the divine constitution of the Church. But I also believe that these powers of the Petrine office include Peter’s power to bind himself to limit the use of these prerogatives. As the Vatican I decrees themselves say, synodality and collegiality are a prudent and even divinely ordained means of government of the Church, and so, for example, the Pope could credibly bind himself to respect the autonomy of the Eastern Churches.

But even on Papal infallibility itself, the doctrine is useful. As David Bentley Hart writes:

[T]wo comments seem worth making [on Papal infallibility]. The first is that, taking the doctrine again in its most minimal form, the claim of infallibility is inoffensive: if indeed the Holy Spirit speaks to the mind of the church, and the church promulgates infallible doctrine, and the successor of Peter enjoys the privilege of enunciating doctrine, then whenever he speaks ex cathedra of course he speaks infallibly; this is almost a tautology. It is the question, obviously, of how one gets to that point that is all the object of our contention. As for the claim that it is not reached ex consensu, the only real question is whether this is a prior or a posterior condition. That is to say, what does it imply regarding the authority of councils, or other patriarchates, or tradition? Obviously Rome denies that the pontiff could generate doctrine out of personal whim. And, after all, clearly it is true that no doctrine could possibly follow from the consensus of the church, if for no other reason than that the church is not democracy, and truth is not something upon which we vote. That said, I do not wish to conjure this issue away, and I would that the definition had never been pronounced; but this I can say: it is not clear to me that, as formulated, the doctrine destines us to perpetual division. It can, I suspect, be integrated into a fully developed teaching regarding conciliarity, one that can accommodate a certain magisterial privilege that is unique, but not isolated from the charisms of episcopal collegiality.

In other words, even taking Vatican I’s decrees “non-jesuitically”, they represent a spectrum of possibilities for how infallibility is understood and exercised. Conversely, in Orthodoxy, at least any Orthodoxy that recognizes the value and perhaps even necessity of primacy and its unique capacity to “strengthen the brethren” (which is after all a prerequisite for any good faith effort at ecumenism), there is also a spectrum of views of infallibility that are acceptable. While these two spectrums are in some ways quite different, they nonetheless do overlap. And, precisely thanks to the dogmatically-defined doctrine of Papal infallibility, the Pope can, both truthfully in terms of doctrine and credibly in terms of practice, “narrow” the doctrine down to the points of overlap between the spectrums.

Another point about the Petrine office and unity. There seems to be a contingent of Eastern Orthodox who, if I can describe this tendency that way, are interested in unity for its practical benefits–the size of the united Church, Rome’s institutional resources, the unique asset for evangelization that is the figure of the Pope in a mass media age, a resolution of Orthodoxy’s endless jurisdictional squabbles–but believe that this can only be achieved at the cost of what you might call a “reverse Canossa”, where the Pope essentially repudiates everything that makes Catholicism distinctive (including non-Church-dividing and even imaginary differences) and converts the Church to Eastern Orthodoxy. I appreciate these people’s sincerity and their zeal for doing what they see as guarding the deposit of faith undefiled. But. Putting aside the fact that this would create a schism as profound as that which would occur if overnight Orthodox hierarchs tried to impose azymes and the Latin Rite on their faithful, or even the fact that this is quite simply impossible, this seems to be strikingly self-defeating even from the perspective of those who hold these views. (Here I think of Vladimir Volkoff’s joke: “What if the Pope infallibly declares that Papal infallibility is not true?”)

As Douthat notes, what makes the Petrine ministry “attractive” is precisely the credibility of the claims upon which it rests; to “grab” the Pope as Eastern Orthodoxy’s PR man while publicly repudiating the doctrines that make his ministry what it is is like destroying the village to save it. Furthermore, it is not only the claims specific to the Papacy that would be rendered risible in the eyes of the world. “Whoops? You know what, those fifteen ecumenical councils that we’ve always said are ecumenical councils? Turns out they weren’t! Our bad! But, guys, the Church is totally infallible.” While that would be an internally consistent claim to make from the perspective I am presently discussing, it would make the newly-united Church’s claims about itself–and therefore all of its other claims–a laughingstock to anyone else, especially those whom our Lord commands us to evangelize.

Instead, I persist in believing that the best way forward for Christ’s Church, which is also the doctrinally correct course, is a recognition that the Church is a divine, not a human work; that the Truth is a person, not a doctrine; and that, therefore, there really exists a deeper understanding of the deposit of the faith that shows that most of what is thought of as separating Catholicism and Orthodoxy does not; and that there is a truthful, faithful, orthodox, practical way to reconcile that which presently does. But this requires, on both parts, the humility of letting oneself be challenged by the Holy Spirit and to slay one’s idols–nothing is more idolatrous than a Christless doctrinairism–, a recognition that what is authentically true in each side is desired and wrought by Christ for his Church, and, most of all, a genuine–I think this is the best word–eros for the other, a genuine, honest, and profound desire that goes beyond a recognition of the obvious practical merits of unity.