In a national radio interview following his recent forced retirement,
Australian Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba, Australia, raised the
issue of what he said “a lot of people are calling creeping
infallibility.”
In the May 8 interview, on Australia’s ABC radio network program
“Sunday Nights,” Morris said that Pope Benedict XVI, in his letter
demanding the bishop’s early retirement, stated, “The late Pope John
Paul II has decided infallibly and irrevocably that the church has not
the right to ordain women to the priesthood.”
“To my knowledge, I have never seen that written before -- using the
word ‘infallible’ concerning JPII’s statement, because he never used the
word ‘infallible,’ ” Morris commented.
Whether the papal treatment of Morris was fair or just is one matter
-- this paper thinks it was not. The deeper question, going beyond
individual persons and cases, is whether the church is experiencing what
the Australian bishop and many theologians in recent decades have
described as “creeping infallibility.”
At issue fundamentally is whether John Paul, in his 1994 apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
(“Priestly Ordination”), intended to (or actually did) lay out an
infallible teaching when he said, “I declare 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.”
John Paul did not formally pronounce the teaching ex cathedra
(speaking from the chair of Peter) or say he was teaching infallibly in
his declaration.
It is also notable that he said only that it was a “judgment” that is
“to be definitively held” -- not a matter of “divine faith” that must
be “believed.”
For any serious Catholic or student of Catholic teaching, the issue of the words employed in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis
is not of minor import. It is one to which John Paul and Benedict --
then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith -- devoted considerable energy in the 1990s.
There are two interconnected chords in the 1990s as the late John
Paul and Ratzinger sought to strengthen the level of church teaching
authority exercised by the pope or by the clear consensus of the world’s
bishops on matters of faith or morals.
One was the doctrinal congregation’s 1998 offer of a new profession
of faith and oath of fidelity for Catholic theologians and for others
entering church offices. The profession introduced a new element. In
addition to firm faith in the word of God and everything proposed by the
church as divinely revealed, it added the declaration, “I also firmly
accept and hold each and every thing definitively proposed by the church
regarding teaching on faith and morals.”
That language, widely commented on by theologians and canonists at
the time, was interpreted as a Vatican effort to restrict theological
dissent on matters not infallibly defined but nonetheless regarded by
church authorities as requiring assent -- if not of faith, at least of
intellect and will.
The other chord, prefiguring the new oath of fidelity, was the doctrinal congregation’s 1995 Responsum ad Propositum Dubium
(“Response to a Proposed Doubt”) concerning the level of teaching
authority in the pope’s apostolic letter on the ordination of women the
year before.
The response, which John Paul approved for publication, said his
teaching “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.”
That document did not place the source of infallibility in a papal
judgment or decree, but in the universal teaching of all the church’s
bishops. At that time there were many Catholic bishops around the world
who would have regarded the ordination of women as at least possible, if
not actually desirable.
And even today -- in spite of concerted Vatican efforts over the past
two decades or more to stack the deck by making opposition to women’s
ordination a sine qua non for promotion to the episcopacy (Jesuit Fr.
Thomas J. Reese several years ago revealed a Vatican questionnaire that
explicitly asked all possible episcopal nominees for their views on
ordination of women) -- the universality of Catholic bishops’ opposition
to ordination of women to the priesthood is at least questionable.
Witness Morris’ pastoral letter that led to his dismissal.
So if Benedict said in his letter to Morris, as the Australian bishop
asserts, that “the late Pope John Paul II has decided infallibly and
irrevocably that the church has not the right to ordain women to the
priesthood,” how did the alleged universal opinion of Catholic bishops
(which is in dispute) rise in the apostolic letter to what Benedict
described -- not an infallibly held universal view of the world’s
bishops, but an infallibly and irrevocably taught decision by the pope
himself that women cannot be ordained to the priesthood?
The doctrinal congregation can make many definitive decisions
regarding church doctrine and life.
It is beyond its authority to
determine which church teachings are infallible and which are not.
Only a
pope clearly speaking ex cathedra or an ecumenical council of the
world’s bishops can determine that.
“Creeping infallibility” is precisely what is at issue here -- a
papal document that made no claim to infallibility raised to the level
of infallibility by a Vatican congregation’s statement that has no
competence to make such a determination, and now almost casually
described as infallible in a disciplinary letter to a bishop by the
current pope.
We rest our case on Canon Law 749.3: “No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident.”