“No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is
manifestly evident,” says Canon 749.3 of the church’s Code of Canon Law.
Jesuit Fr. Ladislas Orsy, professor of law at Georgetown University here, cited that canon almost immediately when NCR asked him if Pope John Paul II’s 1994 teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
“that the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly
ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by
all the church’s faithful” is infallible.
Orsy, a leading canonist well-known for his theological expertise,
acknowledged, however, that the question of which church doctrines are
taught infallibly is “extremely complex.”
Another leading Jesuit theologian, Fr. Francis Sullivan, said he
thinks recent events have made it clear that the church is now
presenting as infallible the teaching against women priests.
NCR raised the question after Bishop William Morris of
Toowoomba, Australia, stated in a national radio interview that a letter
from Pope Benedict XVI ordering his early retirement said that the late
Pope John Paul II “decided infallibly and irrevocably that the church
has not the right to ordain women to the priesthood.”
Benedict ordered Morris, 67 and bishop of Toowoomba for the past 18
years, to take early retirement following an investigation into a
pastoral letter he wrote in December 2006 in which he expressed openness
to ordaining women and married men, if the Vatican would allow it, in
order to counter the priest shortage.
Sullivan -- a leading ecclesiologist who taught theology at the
Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome for many years and is now
professor emeritus of theology at Boston College -- also stressed the
complexities of determining what church teachings are infallible.
In a telephone interview he said he did not regard Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
itself as presenting an infallible papal teaching -- but he noted that a
later document by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith (then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope
Benedict) asserted that what John Paul affirmed in that apostolic letter
represented infallible teaching -- not by the pope invoking his own
authority, but as the constant teaching of the world’s bishops
exercising their ordinary magisterium, or teaching authority.
Orsy and Sullivan both warned against oversimplified interpretations
of whether the church’s doctrinal position against the ordination of
women is infallible. (Full disclosure: Orsy, in the course of the
interview, included NCR’s coverage of the Morris case among the media that he regarded as not taking full account of the complexity of the issue.)
“If it’s a disciplinary letter, the point is that he’s removed [from
his office as bishop],” Orsy said. “Now if they give a reason, I do not
know. I would not venture to say immediately, without looking at the
document, what is the value of any assertion inside the document”
regarding substantive doctrinal issues such as the status of the
teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.
“One has to look at the original document and fit it into this very,
very difficult issue of papal infallibility,” he added. “Ever since
Vatican II, the interpretations are very, very complicated and
difficult.”
“The pope can remove Morris even if it [the papal teaching on women’s
ordination to the priesthood] is not infallible -- there’s no doubt
about that,” he said.
He said he would “go along” with Sullivan’s reservations about the infallible status of the papal declaration in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.
When NCR asked Sullivan whether he regards the teaching in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis as manifestly infallible, he said, “No. I don’t think so.”
But he also said, “It’s infallibly taught -- at least the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has declared -- and I don’t
want to contradict it.”
Fr. Charles E. Curran, a moral theologian at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas, also cited the canon that nothing is to be
regarded as infallible doctrine unless it is manifestly so.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Ratzinger wants to say it’s
infallible, and that he has said that” in his 1995 response, as then
head of the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation, to a question of whether
the teaching against ordaining women priests was infallible, Curran
said.
The congregation said at that time that the teaching spelled out in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
“requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written word of God,
and from the beginning constantly preserved and applied in the
tradition of the church, it has been set forth infallibly by the
ordinary and universal magisterium.”
“My quick response to that is, it’s a non-infallible statement saying
it’s infallible,” said Curran, who has written extensively on issues of
church teaching and dissent from them.
Of the original papal statement, he said the idea that it was being
presented as infallible teaching “certainly is not conspicuously present
there, and if there’s any doubt, it’s not infallible” according to
church law.
“Having said that, there’s no doubt that Ratzinger wants to call it
infallible -- but he hasn’t crossed the line yet, to do it ‘in an
infallible way,’ ” he said.
Sullivan said the doctrinal congregation declaration from 1995 “may
account for what Pope Benedict said” in his reported letter to Morris.
Sullivan has long been a prominent critic of what some have called
“creeping infallibility” in papal pronouncements, but he was very
reserved about whether John Paul’s 1994 declaration on women’s
ordination represents an infallible teaching, either from the pope
himself or from the universal ordinary teaching of the world’s Catholic
bishops.
Referring to the new profession of faith and oath of fidelity
established in 1998 by the Vatican, Sullivan said, “After the Nicene
Creed that we all say on Sundays, it’s followed by three paragraphs, and
the first paragraph treats those matters that have been definitively
taught as revealed truth, which must be responded to as a matter of
faith. ... But the second paragraph, equally definitive teaching,
presents teaching that is not revealed truth and therefore does not call
for a response of faith -- even though one has to admit that the
original edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church did,
mistakenly, actually say that that kind of doctrine could also be
defined as a doctrine of faith.”
When he called Vatican attention to that error, he said, the final
official version of the catechism in Latin was corrected accordingly.
Sullivan’s point was that definitive teaching may be regarded as
infallible, even if it is not taught as divinely revealed truth
requiring an assent of faith -- a rather narrow and technical
distinction that would probably be lost on most Catholics.
Sullivan said the second paragraph of the new profession of faith and
oath of fidelity “deals with doctrine that is not revealed but is so
closely connected with revelation that the church needs to be able to
speak definitively about it also, even though it’s not revealed truth.”
“Even if the church defines [such truths],” he said, “it does not
call for a response of divine faith” but rather “a firm assent of the
mind.” He said that is the kind of assent that Benedict seems to have
had in mind in the reported letter to Morris.
“I haven’t seen the original papal text [to Morris],” Sullivan said,
“and one never knows unless one has seen the original text, but if Pope
Benedict did say that Pope John Paul II had taught this doctrine
infallibly, I suggest -- I can’t be certain -- that Pope Benedict may be
thinking of the fact, which is certain, that in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
Pope John Paul II did call upon the faithful to give their definitive
assent to the judgment which he was there proposing, namely that the
church has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood.”