Stress on papal primacy led to exaggerated clout for a pope among equals - part 3 - Upon the Rock - Future of the Papacy

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 24, 1997 by Paul Collins

This is the third of 11 articles exploring the future of the papacy. The essays, edited by Gary MacEoin, will be expanded and published as a book, The Papacy and the People of God, by Orbis Books, in the near future.

I am amazed that whenever I explain the theological limits to papal power the same question arises: "If the pope does not have a direct line to God, who does?" This is linked with the assumption that pope and church are coterminous and that everything the pope says is absolute law for "good Catholics."

Popular perceptions are not theology, but they do give us access to the way in which belief and doctrine are understood by most people. Many are confused about the extent and limit of papal authority and are surprised to learn how recent total papal control of the church really is.

Infallibility is usually taken as the summation of papal authority. This is incorrect. Infallibility is actually hedged in with severe restrictions. The bishops at the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) were careful to define exactly what they meant by infallibility and stipulated precisely the conditions under which it could be exercised. At Vatican I there was a sizeable minority of bishops who forced a serious debate about infallibility.

No such care was taken with papal primacy, for the minority bishops were less focused on this issue. Yet it is primacy that has created most subsequent problems. It has led to the exercise of untrammelled papal power and has become a major stumbling block in ecumenical relationships with the Orthodox (who consider the definition to be heresy) and Protestants.

What precisely did Vatican I teach on infallibility?

When the pope speaks ex cathedra as teacher of the church, on issues of faith or morals, he speaks infallibly because he shares in the divine assistance promised to Peter by Christ.

This is not a personal gift. No pope can speak infallibly as a private theologian, nor make his personal opinions normative; in order to make an infallible statement, he must always speak within an ecclesial context and give voice to the belief of the church.

Unfortunately, this unequivocal context was muddied at the last moment by the inclusion of a sentence that attempted to exclude the Gallican position held at the council by a couple of French bishops, The Gallicans maintained that the pope was only infallible if the broad church community gave subsequent assent to his teaching. The sentence excluding Gallicanism is badly formulated, and it says that the pope's "definitions" are "irreformable of themselves and not from the [subsequent] consent of the church." This sentence, in isolation, could be interpreted to imply that the pope was infallible of himself and that he did not have to make sure that he was teaching what the church believed and taught.

The very danger that many bishops at the council feared -- that the pope would become an ecclesiastical oracle -- was opened up by this badly formulated sentence.

The council recognized that primacy was an ancient doctrine and no one disputed it. But what did it mean and how was it to be defined? This debate revolved around three questions: the extent and limit of papal jurisdiction, the sense in which papal and episcopal power coexisted, and the relationship of a pope to an ecumenical council. None of these historical questions was dealt with adequately at Vatican I. They were sidestepped, largely because an ideological rather than an historical hermeneutic dominated the thinking of the majority at the council.

Proper jurisdiction

What was defined was that Peter, as head of the apostles, had true and proper jurisdiction bestowed on him by Christ. This jurisdiction is passed on to the bishops of Rome so that Peter lives on in his see in an almost sacramental manner. There is a sense in which the pope is more the "vicar of Peter" than the "vicar of Christ," a term that only came into widespread usage with Innocent III (1198-1216).

The conciliar teaching continued in legalistic rather than theological language: the Roman church possesses "a preeminence of ordinary power" that is "episcopal and immediate." It is significant that primacy is defined in terms of power and not in terms of leadership. In this sense the pope has authority over the ecclesial communion rather than providing a service of unity to it. The universal power of jurisdiction is "full and supreme" in matters of faith and morals, as well as in everything that concerns the discipline and government of the whole church and everyone in it.

The definition suggests that there are no limits to papal power, and certainly since 1870 this has been the popular perception. The reason the bishops of Vatican I were far less nuanced in the definition of papal primacy was clearly recognized even by many contemporaries: the bishops' theology of the church was defective. Cuthbert Butler, a historian of Vatican I, comments: "Here is a summary of Catholic doctrine on the church in which there is no account taken of the hierarchy, episcopate, ministry, ecumenical councils: simply church and pope."