From the bulletin of August 2, 2020
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Second Vatican Council, or simply “Vatican II.” Many of you lived through it and remember the impact it had on the Church at large. When we do get to that council, we will spend a lot of time going through it, but our historical tour hasn’t gotten there just yet. We’re still in the 1800s and now we’re going to take a look at the First Vatican Council. It was called on December 8, 1864 by Pope Pius IX in response to the rising influence of various secular philosophies that rejected a belief in God, including rationalism, socialism, communism, and materialism. It was only able to issue two decrees before it was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war.
The first document was called Dei Filius. It’s a straightforward explanation of key parts of the faith that were being questioned at the time. It explains that we really believe in God as the creator of all things and that this God revealed himself in history throughout the Old Testament and definitively in Jesus Christ. It reaffirmed that faith is a supernatural virtue which must work with the supernatural virtue of charity to do God’s will and be pleasing to him. Since the world was trying to emphasize human kind’s ability to do good on their own and to figure out everything with reason alone (rationalism, communism, etc.), this was seen as a necessary reinforcement of spiritual truth. Still, the Church has never repudiated the use of reason and a chapter of this document re-affirms what we’ve always believed – that faith and reason work together in understanding God and his creation and are therefore never in opposition to one another. I’ve already addressed this several times: the Church is not anti-science or anti-reason. We simply oppose the false claim that only science and only reason are enough on their own.
The other document, however, was and is a bit more controversial. Called Pastor Aeternus, was a document about the nature of the Church herself. It ended up defining four doctrines: the Primacy of Peter the Apostle, the continuation of his Primacy in the Pope, what that power means, and Papal Infallibility. The first parts were not very controversial. We’ve always known and believed that the Pope is Peter’s successor and that he is the head of the Church. This was the case even in the very beginning. We’ve always known that, because of this, the Pope has special authority when it comes to teaching the faith, calling ecumenical councils, and correcting wayward bishops and priests. The controversy in this council was that last teaching: the infallibility of the Pope. It is a doctrine, so that means it is something we have always believed and it means Catholics are required to believe it is true, but this is the first time it was clearly laid out in this form. In and age that emphasized reason to a fault and a false idea of “free thinking,” this was seen as a very “backwards” way of thinking.
Now, the word “infallible” means that it’s absolutely trustworthy or incapable of error. In short, this teaching claims the Pope cannot make a mistake when he defines a doctrine. The controversy around this comes from a few different angles. There are some who simply reject the idea outright. After all, no human being is perfect and we all make mistakes, so how can we say the Pope is infallible? They would say that we trust the Holy Spirit to guide the Church as a whole and that it’s wrong to think the Pope has a special gift of avoiding error. There are others who simply reject the idea that the Church can’t change her teaching. Technically, that’s a heretical belief, but there are and always have been priests and bishops who want to change teaching on certain moral issues, so they refuse to accept anything so “rigid” as Papal infallibility. Finally, there were those who believe the Pope can be infallible in certain cases, but they feared that proclaiming it in this way would cause misunderstanding. St. John Henry Newman, whom we’ve just learned about, was one example of this. Even though they lost that argument, they have a fair point, one we’ll look at more next week.
In Christ,
-Fr. Albert