Vatican takes first step to clarify dogma of papal infallibility

The proposal has been published in an official document of the Dicastery for Christian Unity, explicitly approved by Pope Francis and presented at a press conference at the Vatican, which can be understood as confirmation that the issue will be addressed in the near future.

This is the first step towards a historic decision that will have a huge impact on healing the divisions among Christians. To understand this, we have to keep in mind that Christianity is the largest religion, with about 2.4 billion people baptized, but it is divided into many branches or confessions. The largest branch is the Catholic Church, with about 1.4 billion believers; but there are also Orthodox churches, Protestant churches, Anglican churches, etc.

Apart from some doctrinal issues, one of the points that fundamentally divides them is the type of authority that is accorded to the Pope as the successor of Peter. According to Catholics, the Bishop of Rome has universal authority on church issues; for the Orthodox, at most an “honorary primacy.”

A document to avoid divisions among Christians

In 1995, John Paul II called on all Christian leaders to engage in a “dialogue” to end this problem and find a way to exercise this “primacy” that would be acceptable to all. It was about “finding a form of exercising primacy which, without in any way renouncing the essentials of its mission, opens itself to a new situation.” He cited as an example the first millennium, when “Christians were united” and “when differences arose between them in matters of faith or discipline the Roman papacy regulated them by consensus.”

Almost thirty years later, the Vatican has collected the official or unofficial responses of Christian confessions to this proposal in a single document. The text is called “The Bishop of Rome”, and it “contains an objective synthesis of the ecumenical discussion on the subject, thus reflecting its point of view, but also its limitations.”

The comprehensive text lists “theological questions that have traditionally challenged papal primacy” and includes “some important advances in contemporary ecumenical reflection.” But it proposes some important decisions that allow us to keep moving forward.

He acknowledged, “Dialogues (between Catholics and other Christian denominations) continue to raise concerns about the relationship between infallibility and the primacy of the Gospel, the infallibility of the whole Church, the practice of episcopal collegiality, and the need for reception.”

There are all kinds of proposals, as he assures that these years of dialogue have “identified some principles for the exercise of primacy in the 21st century. The first general agreement is the mutual dependence between primacy and synodality at each level of the Church, and the resulting demand for a synodical exercise of primacy. It refers, for example, to the good results that the development of episcopal conferences, or the governing bodies of the Vatican Curia, has given.

Others have proposed that “the power of the Bishop of Rome should not exceed that necessary for the exercise of his ministry of unity on a universal level, and voluntary limitations in the exercise of his power have been suggested”; also, “separate the patriarchal and pontifical functions of the Bishop of Rome from his political function as head of state.”

Being a “study document” in the text, it is not easy to distinguish between proposals that the Vatican would agree with and those it would not. But it seems clear that it is “the search for a complete and perfect unity that is neither absorption nor fusion, but an encounter in truth and love.” They summarize it with the expression “harmonious Christianity”.

“Such unity presupposes that the relationship of the Bishop of Rome with the Eastern Churches and their bishops will be quite different from that now in force in the Latin Church, and that the churches will continue to have the authority and power to govern themselves according to their own traditions and disciplines,” he explains.

papal infallibility

On July 18, 1870, the First Vatican Council approved the Apostolic Constitution “Pastor Aeternus”, which established that the Pope is infallible when he speaks “ex cathedra” on matters of faith and morals. This means that the Pope is infallible only when, as “pastor of the universal Church” and not as a private individual, he intervenes in “a certain act to proclaim a doctrine concerning faith and morals.” Theologically this is based on the promise that Jesus made to Peter that he would receive special assistance.

This privilege has been used only once, in 1950, when Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the acceptance of the Virgin Mary into Heaven.

The Vatican asks to take into account the historical context in which it was proclaimed in 1870 by a majority of Catholic bishops meeting in Rome to defend the independence of the pope and as a reaction to authoritarianism and liberal rationalism in the West, which turned away from the transcendent concept of the person.