Dear Friends,
Things are arguably a lot easier when you don’t attribute infallibility to a human being or a human institution. My Roman Catholic friends do not have it so easy. On Monday Pope Francis released a document (Fiducia Supplicans) explaining that same-sex couples and those in other “irregular” relationships may, in fact, receive a priestly blessing. Not only is this contrary to Roman Catholic historical teaching, it contradicts a document Pope Francis himself released just two years ago. That’s some swift doctrinal “development.”
And … confusion reigns! Dan Hitchens over at First Things best describes it:
In a by now familiar sequence of events, the Vatican released a document on Monday which caused instant confusion. ‘Pope says Roman Catholic priests can bless same-sex couples,’ the headlines announced. Optimistic Catholic apologists said the media had misunderstood the document, which permitted no such thing. Pessimistic Catholic apologists said the headlines were, alas, correct, and that the pope had erred. Part-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read in a conservative manner and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. Full-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read as a ‘development of doctrine’ and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. The liberals rejoiced, with a slight undertone of impatience. The world took a brief interest, concluded that the Church was at least making some slow progress, then yawned a little and moved on to the next headline.
Amazing. Everyone read the document as affirming their prejudices! Hitchens takes the reader through the salient portions of the document and aptly describes it as a “black hole” from which no light can escape. And then he engages in a familiar little coping session—yeah, yeah, sure, Popes can and have been wrong (at least he acknowledges Honorius I—most Roman Catholics memory-hole that guy), but this wasn’t an ex cathedra pronouncement and there’s nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things.
I could not ask for a tidier illustration of something I’ve periodically written. Roman Catholic apologists are forever telling me and my tribe that the Bible must have an infallible and authoritative interpreter: the Roman Catholic Magisterium. I once had a letter to the editor published in First Things in which I asked what I thought was a rather obvious question: how does this Magisterium communicate these “infallible and authoritative” interpretations? With words, I imagine. And on Monday the Pope himself issued a lot of words, five or six thousand of them, interpreting what the Bible means by “blessing.” Now: to whom do I go to provide the “infallible and authoritative” interpretation of those words? After all, everybody now disagrees about what they mean. The very thing the Magisterium is supposed to avoid—interpretive confusion and chaos—is plainly what the Magisterium has produced Anno Domini 2023.
You don’t—and cannot—solve the epistemological and hermeneutical dilemma of interpretive subjectivity and diversity (ever hear the bit about “30,000 denominations?”) by attributing infallibility to the Pope or the church at large; you simply relocate the dilemma. Only now we don’t get to argue over what the Bible means; we also have to argue over what Fiducia Supplicans means. That’s the cost of treating dogmatic theology as of equal weight as Scripture itself—it makes everything far more complicated than the problem it is supposed to solve. Oh, and for all that work, it doesn’t even solve the problem. Because it can’t.
The Roman Catholic Church rejects the Reformation doctrine of the perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture. That rejection is grounded in the notion that—and theoretically only works if—their own pronouncements are themselves perspicuous. My friends need to cope with that reality, and I’ll issue an invite: the Tiber has two shores, and one can swim the other way.
Oh, and since I dug up that letter to the editor, I might as well share the whole thing with you.
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