Understanding Papal Infallibility

Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, or infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.                                     

George Bernard Shaw - A thought-experiment: Let us put ourselves in the shoes and the mindset of those who first heard the pronouncement of infallibility at the First Vatican Council in the nineteenth century. Many Catholics then did not already believe in papal infallibility. Could and should the new pronouncement generate belief in this group? And was the pronouncement of infallibility itself infallible?

At present, we understand the infallibility of the pope and ecumenical councils to consist in definitive pronouncements regarding faith or morals, binding on the universal Church. But “infallibility” seems to be concerned with truth and certainty – epistemological matters, to use the technical philosophical vocabulary. Did the pronouncement jar or reassure the faith of Catholics?

The initial announcement of infallibility makes sense in the context of long-standing philosophical and theological currents. In medieval metaphysics, the ideal was to begin with self-evident first principles, and derive conclusions methodologically from these; this approach carried over also to natural-law ethics, starting with principles like “good is to be done and evil avoided.”

St. Thomas and other scholastics admitted that secondary and tertiary rules derived from this principle were sometimes not crystal-clear. Protestant reformers, diffident about the legitimacy of authority in the Church, put their emphasis on the Bible as a source of certainty. In philosophy, Descartes, dissatisfied with Aristotelian-scholastic “first principles,” and encouraged by what seemed to be a mandate from Our Lady in a dream, sought to lay the foundation for a new philosophical system in the experience of self-consciousness (“I think, therefore I am”).