In Our Time - Papal Infallibility

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why, in 1870, the Vatican Council issued the decree ‘pastor aeternus’ which, among other areas, affirmed papal infallibility. It meant effectively that the Pope could not err in his teachings, an assertion with its roots in the early Church when the bishop of Rome advanced to being the first among equals, then overall head of the Christian Church in the West. The idea that the Pope could not err had been a double-edged sword from the Middle Ages, though; while it apparently conveyed great power, it also meant a Pope was constrained by whatever a predecessor had said. If a later Pope were to contradict an earlier Pope, then one of them must be wrong, and how could that be…if both were infallible?WithTom O’Loughlin Professor of Historical Theology at the University of NottinghamRebecca Rist Professor in Medieval History at the University of ReadingAnd Miles Pattenden Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1870, the Vatican Council issued the dogmatic words, Pastor Eternus, which, among other areas, affirmed papal infallibility. It meant effectively that the pub could not air in his teachings.

It was an assertion with its route to... in the early church, as the Bishop of Brom advanced to being the first among equals, and then becoming overall head of the Christian church in the West, the vicar of Christ. The idea that the Pope could not err has been a double-edged sword from the Middle Ages, as while it apparently conveyed great power, it also meant that a Pope was constrained by whatever a predecessor had said. If a later Pope was to contradict an earlier Pope, then one of them must be wrong, and how could that be, if both were infallible?

With me to discuss the rise of the idea of papal infallibility are, Loughlin, Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham, Rebecca Rist, Professor in Medieval History at the University of Reading, and Miles Patton, departmental lecturer in early modern history at the University of Oxford. Tom O'Cleckland, how was the papal infallibility defined in the Vatican Council of 1870? In 1870, the decree saw the Pope as the final judge, and he was able to make a definitive statement. So we think of it as a definition,

but we think of definition as a definition to get in a dictionary. What they meant by a definition was that he could give a definitive judgment. And this definitive judgment was guaranteed to him by the promise to Peter that it could not be wrong when it dealt with faith and morals and he was deliberately choosing it and he was setting it out to be believed. by all the faithful, and then just to be doubly sure of that, they said, and it is irreformable out of its very self, ex-saysay, rather than out of the consent of the church. And what was he giving this judgment on?

In theory, anything to do with Christian religion. But on this particular council? The council was giving this power, was the Pope, the Council was making a definition that a Pope when making a definition was infallible. In 1854, the same Pope used his own authority to decree that Mary was immaculately conceived. In other words, that unlike all other human beings, she was free of original sin. Yes, that's a hundred and four. That's before.

In 1870, the Council decreed that the Pope was himself infallible. And then in 1950, Pius X. 12th declared that Mary was taken body and soul into heaven. What sort of reaction was it to that in 1950? In 1950 there was very little reaction to that because the actual idea behind the definition had been accepted in Catholic and indeed in Orthodox liturgy under another term for at least 1,400 years. and giving it the status of an infallible statement was a little bit like getting a first-class honours in a degree course.

It showed that it was just adding gilding to the lily. How controversial was the very idea of infallibility, the Catholic said? Well, the idea of infallibility, of course, has been controversial since at least the 13th century. It becomes a real problem at the time of the Reformation. And in 1870, there were many Catholics who thought that going down the route of trying to define infallibility and actually make it part of Christian faith was just going over the top. Thank you.

Rebecca Rist, if we scroll back about 2,000 years, and we have about that time a bishop of Rome, you've simply one of many bishops. How did he become more prominent at the beginning? How did he begin to gain power? Yes, well, we're talking about the development of an idea of papal primacy. So I'd like to emphasize that in the ancient texts and in the early Middle Ages, there is no sense of papal infallibility. As we've already heard, that starts to become a notion from the 13th century onwards.

So what we're talking at this very early period is about how the Bishop of Rome came to be first among equals. So that happens really throughout, we have different letters of different bishops of Rome throughout the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, and indeed some earlier going back to Clement of Rome, who was a presbyter. In one of his letters he wrote to the Church of Corinth, and he seems to suggest that the Bishop of Rome has some kind of special authority over other Christians.

Now, as I say, Clement of Rome, he's Catholics nowadays, think of him as an early pope. He was really a presbyter. Presbyter meaning? Presbyter just meaning authoritative priest. But then gradually, the bishop becomes more and more important in the early church. And indeed, there's no literature to suggest

that even bishops can err early on. You don't get the case of an ear. bishop until Paul of Somosata, who is accused of heresy at the Council of Antioch in the 3rd century. So up to that time, there hadn't even been an idea that a bishop could err, let alone any idea of kind of popes and when they err and when they don't. When did this strength of the connection with St. Peter come in? St. Peter being the first pope. That's right. St. Peter being the rock on which Christ said he would build his church.

So, as I say, in the ancient world, we just have this very important patriarchate of Rome, but there are also other very important patriarchs at Antioch, for example, or at Alexandria, and from the fourth century onwards from Constantinople. But for a series of reasons, the Bishop of Rome becomes more and more important. Many of these are political reasons, with the fall of the Roman Empire, as it were, the popes, in a sense, can start afresh. Yes, they have to deal with. the barbarian invasions, but they're not tied down as they are, would have been if they'd

been in Constantinople, because they're not tied to any imperial system anymore, so they're freer. And then we also get the problem that Antioch and Alexandria, who have great claims to be important patriarchs because of ideas of apostolic succession, in the 7th century, they are overrun by Islam. And so for that reason, their power diminishes, while that of Rome, Rome grows. Peter was the first bishop supposedly there. He died there. And as I say, those popes from the sort of late antiquity into the medieval period, I'm talking about Leo the Great and Gregory the Great, they make use of Rome as the old empire of the West to build up slowly the idea of the Bishop of Rome as being the primate, as being the most important one.

How important to this growth was the crowning by the Pope of Charlemagne as the first Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800? So for the Pope it was very important because he had this great protector among the Franks now. The Merivindian line had gone down, the Carolingians had come up. So he saw protection against the Lombards being given to him by Charlemagne. But Charlemagne equally, you know, Doot Days, he was also gaining because he was getting this wonderful sanction for his rules. So it was a reciprocal arrangement. And of course, both in a sense Pope and Charlemagne are vying to get the most out of it that they can. So by that point we're now in, yes, 800.

What support Mosler in the scripture for this primacy of the Bishop of Rome or the Pope? The most important scriptural passage is Matthew 16, which is all about the powers of binding and loosing that were given to. to Peter by Jesus. But there's no mention of the idea of a Pope. That's right. The church then interpreted it as being given not just to Peter and in one sense not just to the early disciples because they also share in the apostolic tradition but to his successors.

And that's something that the church develops over the centuries, that idea of the tradition being handed down not just to Peter but to his successors. Martin, thank you very much. Mark Patton, how did the primacy of the Pope contribute to the split with the Orthodox Church? And if you could tell people what the Orthodox Church was compared with the Church of Rome? Well, the Orthodox churches are almost by definition the churches that don't accept or didn't accept the primacy of the Pope during the Middle Ages. They were all the churches of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire and outside the Roman Empire in the Middle East. for all of the first millennium, most of those churches did accept the primacy of the Pope in some way,

but they interpreted that primacy very differently from the ways in which popes were beginning to interpret it in Rome. So, for instance, Eastern Orthodox Christians tended to regard the Pope as first amongst equals rather than as a hierarchical head of the church. And they therefore thought that, for instance, his jurisdiction over other bishops was very limited, that the Pope couldn't intervene in affairs in diocese beyond Rome, and also that the Pope could not make theological pronouncements unilaterally, but that any decisions about doctrine needed the convening

of a full ecumenical council of the church. Rebecca mentioned the influence of Islam from the late 7th century onwards. Can you develop that? I think that, as Rebecca said, the fall of the patriarchates of, Alexandria and Antioch was very important for this because, in a sense, it left only Rome and Constantinople as the two important centres of Christianity that were independent of Islamic empires at the end of the first millennium. And a series of controversies then erupted between the two, one of the first ones occurred during the Pontificate of Gregory the Great in the five

90s when the Patriarch of Constantinople decided to add the title ecumenical to his other titles, which seemed to be competing with the Pope as a kind of head for the overall church. And Gregory wrote a number of letters complaining to the Byzantine Emperor about that. And that was the first in what is really a series thereafter of conflicts and rivalries that ultimately ended in the great East-West schism. when Pope Leo the 9th and Patriarch Michael mutually excommunicated each other in 1053. Is it true to say that the Orthodox part of the Christianity was not as obsessed by the idea of the Pope, was not even concerned as by the idea of a Pope? I think that that is correct, that the whole Orthodox conception of how the Universal Church is organized is much more decentralized than that of the Latin West.

that the Orthodox Communion was always very happy to see bishops as having jurisdiction in their own diocese, and even for there to be multiple parallel churches that coexisted within a single communion, but nobody had authority over all of them. Thank you very much. Tom, Tom O'Ocline, I think it's in your nose that you bring in this wonderful phrase, creeping infallibility. When did it start to creep? It starts to creep around sometime between 7 and 800, where there are three sources of canon law.

There are the scriptures, there are the decisions of councils, and there are the decisions of popes which are known as decretals. And suddenly you have the fact that there is someone alive who can issue a decree, which has the same status in law as something from the Council of Nicaea, or a line from the scriptures. And the Bishop of Rome starts to become a living oracle. He becomes the vicar of this whole tradition, and then gradually moves to be the vicar of Peter, and then to be the vicar of Christ. And once you have someone who can claim to have such unique authority,

then gradually other people start to see this person, not just as someone with this precise authority, as the canonists would define it, but someone who is this almost mystical figure of unlimited authority. What was the idea of knowledge at the time that enabled, as it were, the idea of infallibility to flourish? Well, this probably is the greatest difference between the world in which we live and the world in which the idea of infallibility arose. Because in the world in which infallibility arose, all knowledge, and particularly all religious knowledge, was known. it had all been revealed. Once the last apostolate,

Dine, everything was revealed. Everything was revealed. There was nothing more to reveal. You had to go back to them to get it the truth. But it was all there if you could just work it out. And so the trick was to engage in a massive form of deductive detective work. And anything you could deduce logically

was valid. And infallibility was the logical quality that said, if there's two ways of deducing, something, the way the Pope says of deducing it is right. And that, of course, that's a theory of knowledge that applied to the cosmos, it applied to medicine, it applied to logic, it applied to religion. So religion thought of itself as having all of the answers in the same way that there was the knowledge of the cosmos could be found in Aristotle. And this was contradicted

quite early on in a 12th century of Amelad attempting to assail that position and so on, but Basically, the church, as Devin McCulloch has showed very powerful in his books, powered through. Abelard produces a wonderful book called Yes and No, Sick at None. And in that, he shows that you can get one statement saying this, and one statement saying the exact opposite. And from this, Abelard shows that these three authorities, Scripture, councils, popes, you just cannot use them as this great, consistent quarry. of ideas. You actually have to have

reliving thought. There is in fact quite an ironic paradox in this, in that the canonists who were expanding the Pope's authority and the concept of the Pope's primacy at this time, they were very clear that in fact the Pope could err, and that was one of the

logical conclusions that they reached as part of this understanding of knowledge. And it's because of that, that they then had to find some way of correcting papal error some of them first came up with the idea that in fact the whole church itself was infallible even if the Pope wasn't and it's that idea which then subsequently was used by others and transferred to the papers

have been in a very different context. I must go to Rebecca for a moment. Well, one more thing. Well, it's just, it's precisely in worrying about that problem that the word infallibility enters the theological vocabulary. Rebecca, Regress, can we talk about the purpose? plays that the Franciscan order played in the development of infallibility and the relationship of the Pope with his. That's right. So we're talking about the 13th century here. Before the Franciscans really get going, the Pope is there primarily as a judge.

Well, he's a figure of unity and he's a judge. That is his role. But with the coming of the Franciscans, things start to change. Because the Franciscans get very worried that statements which have backed their order, which have been made, by popes, particularly Nicholas III with his papal preceptive, might be overturned by future popes. So the ideas that popes have been putting forward to support Franciscan ideas of apostolic poverty, they are worried that in the future something might wreck that. And so they start to bring in this idea of papal infallibility

to make sure that you can't go back on the statements of your predecessors. Is it what infallible used at that time in the 13th century? Yes, it just starts to be used. First of all, by someone called Peter Orlevy, who was very worried, as I say, about a coming pseudo-Pope, as it were, as he sought, who would, as it were, ruin what had been set up by Nicholas III in Exeat. So he starts to use that term of something being infallible, a papal statement being infallible. Now, what's very interesting is that the idea infallibility here is actually diametrically opposed to the idea of papal sovereignty. We might think of them being the same, but in fact, medieval popes very much wanted to be sovereign

because they wanted to have control over temporal and spiritual affairs. Between temporal meaning land and... Well, in the papal states, yes, land, but also as supreme judges, they wanted to be able to intervene authoritatively. So a pope like Innocent III, for example, right at the beginning of the 13th century. He's always writing to powers and saying, far be it from me to intervene in this matter, oh, King of France or something. And then, of course, he does, because he claims the right to do so Ratione Paccati by reason of sin. So the popes are actually setting, well, it's an umbrella term. You can get everything in, can't you? But so they are seeing themselves as

supreme judges, but as sovereign judges. Whereas once the Franciscans start to put forward this idea of infallibility, that is actually limiting, they think, the powers of popes. However, it then gets even more complicated. Why do I think it's limiting the powers of them? Well, because it's making them stick to what they've already pronounced on. Oh, I see. So they have to keep in tune with the pronouncements of their predecessors. How much they disagree with them? Yes, indeed. So their sovereignty is being, you know, attacked possibly. Then it gets even more complicated, of course, because then as we move into the late 13th, 14th, and even 15th century, we have the idea of conciliarism growing,

people like William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and so on. Now, they want to also play with this idea of infallibility, but in their case, it's to do something a bit different. It's to reduce the power of the Pope in favour of a more democratic, as they see it, if I can use an anachronistic word for this period, but anyway, a more kind of open decisions of people being made in council. And they're very much trying to push the idea that it's councils that cannot err and popes that can.

So they start to sort of worry about this whole issue of papal infallibility. But it all starts off with the Franciscans. And he comes to her head with Luther, Martin Luther 1517, thesis, Dorritenberg and so on. but Martin Luther's great attack on the Roman Catholic Church was a turning point. Can you tell us about that, Tom? Luther looks at the three traditional source of authority and he says, well, councils that Rebecca has just been telling us about, they have made a mistake because they condemned and then handed over for burning the great theologian Jan Hus, who Luther sees as his predecessor. and therefore councils are out.

And then the papacy, well, it has erred because it has made statements about the indulgence. And so there's only one authority left. These are the indulgences where if you pay enough money, you can shorten your time in purgatory. You could shorten your time in purgatory and you could show yourself to be a good Christian. So. That's an error, of course. For Luther, that is an error because that is the idea. that you could buy your way into heaven.

And also to line the pockets of the Catholic Church. And he sees that just as accidental damage. The main problem is this is you're buying your way into heaven. The collateral damage he just sees us as something for politicians. But if those two sources have both earth, then there's only one source, Scripture. And then he comes up with his famous phrase, by scripture alone, Solas Scriptura.

the reaction to this is that the papacy doesn't defend the power of councils but it defends its own authority and so there is a new papal insistence on its infallibility and on the role of the Pope within Catholicism.

So the attack of Luther produces a counter-attack that leads to the modern development in infallibility. Can we talk a little bit, Mars, about the Pope's position as being a supreme judge in the temporal world as well as supreme head in the spiritual world. The two things that Mike was referring to. Yes, well, the temporal and the spiritual spheres are very much combined in ideas about the Pope's jurisdiction. and popes claim that the entire temporal sphere is subordinate to the spiritual sphere

so that their spiritual authority gives them an authority over all temporal affairs. And in the late Middle Ages and into the 16th century, popes use that in a number of ways that proved to be very controversial. One of the most controversial is in fact giving dispensations to other members of the church from the church's own rules. So one of them that people will probably, have heard about are our marriage dispensations, for instance, when Henry VIII could marry his brother's widow. But others include allowing bishops not to reside in their diocese, which is one of the

things most complained about by Protestant reformers. So can I turn to you then on this, Rebecca, by this time, let's say after the reformation, how entrenched was the power of the people, How widely accepted was it in spiritual, temporal and even judicial worlds? Well, after the Reformation, Catholics are very much on the defensive in certain parts of Europe, and they're looking to the Pope, again, to be this figure of unity. And they're clinging, those of them that survive in England, for example, they're clinging to this idea of the Pope so that they can remember that they are part of, as it were, the old faith. Now, the papal states are still continuing on at this time

and will do in some form or other right down until Garibaldi. Obviously, we're only left with Vatican City today. This is the land where the Pope actually has direct temple power, as distinct from the kind of temple power I was suggesting earlier, which is where he claims the right to intervene in temple matters, but that's because there are anything to do with sin he can intervene in. So he has two types of. of temporal power. He has the temple power

in the papal states where he acts like any other prince would. He can raise taxes, popes in the medieval period, for example, of even led armies, and that indirect authority that he's wielding as

the great spiritual unifier and spokesperson in the temporal sphere. As this creeping infallibility as Thomas so presently told us, as going on. Was this being generally accepted? Were people, were people,

is there any evidence that was being resented or were just people just taking it? Tom? The cultural, the cultural icon is constantly growing within Catholicism from the 16th century. He becomes the distinctive Catholic thing.

So the Reformation has done him a favour in a way. The Reformation did the papacy a great favour in building the papacy from not just being the centre of the lives of and the lives of canon lawyers and indeed the lives of princes, but it makes it an actual piece of the content of Christian faith. But there are always, even within Catholicism,

voices which are saying, hold on, hold on, it's not as clear as that. And they tend to get lumped together under the name, the Gallicans. In other words, they are the people who think of Gaul, France, or the King of France, rather than look constantly to Rome. And then sometimes in later terms they're called the ultramontains are those who look over the mountains

and think of nothing but the papacy and the cis montains are those who think there's also a church here on this side of the Alps. And they're still Catholics but they're saying this is getting a bit out of hand. You want to say something? So the Gallicans, yes, they're always looking at their own sovereign

so the French but also the Dutch and they put their sovereign and the idea of sovereign power right up there on the same level as the Pope whereas the Ultramontanes all the time are seeing the Pope as not just the Supreme Judge but also as you said earlier as an oracle so his every word his every utterance starts to take on more and more importance

and that's growing throughout the 17th and 18th centuries Of course there have been a practice going back to the 4th century that in the Western Church using Latin, they prayed for the local bishop and they prayed for the Pope. And that continues till today. But in pre-revolutionary France, they also prayed for the king.

They paid for X our bishop, X are pope, and X are king. I mentioned the, Miles, I mentioned the kind of Reformation doing the Pope of power of good. Can you develop that? Well, one of the irony is of how popes were able to reassert

their power in the counter-reformation is that first of all they did it through a council, that popes had been very reluctant to convene a council to deal with the problem of Luther in the 1520s and 30s, largely because they were afraid that the council would be used against them. But at the end of the council of Trent in 1563, Pius VIII was able to get the council to remit all its decisions and decrees back to him for his confirmation. And he then established a department within the Roman courier, which was responsible for interpreting everything that the council had decided. But there are two ideas in my mind at the moment. Because I know far less than you three.

One is that the pan-Catholicism, as the colleague said, there's never been anything like it before or since the way it took in people after people after people for such a long time in such a varied way. It took them on and united them more. The other that you've mentioned, Rebecca, is that the French wouldn't have that and this wouldn't have. It's fracturing all over the place. How would you iron me out on that one? I would iron you out by saying that, yes, there were fractures,

but the best thing keeping everyone together was the reality of Protestantism. Nothing gave this sense that there is only one universal true church more of a Philip than the fact that you could see people just down the road who were saying no. Like the Kings of England going to Orchorne

and brought to United Own Country at home. Exactly. But popes also helped this process at the end of the 16th century. They commissioned a whole series of new standard texts for Catholicism, a new breviary, a missile, a vulgate Bible. That's a Bible in Latin and a catechism, which formed the basis of modern Catholicism.

And that was very different to the Middle Ages. Back to you, Tom, leaping through the centuries. I'm sure you're very capable of doing. Along came the Enlightenment. which seem to attack directly the Catholic idea of knowledge. The Enlightenment is what, in a sense, undermines the whole theory of invalability. And I always like to take the example of William Herschel here in London. Instead of saying the universe has this shape and then here's where all the stars are, He sits there with his telescope and his sister beside him

and he starts to measure out exactly where each star is. And at the end of it he says, as a result of all my little measurements, I've decided the world is completely different. It's not centered on a single sum. It's a galaxy. And he puts forward the first picture of it. But that picture,

that picture of the greatest reality you could imagine is built up from endless bits of information and the assumption that through research you move from ignorance to a greater degree of knowledge and a greater degree of knowledge again. And that's that enlightenment paradigm, it's an empirical paradigm, that is the exact opposite in terms of its theory of knowledge to the world in which infallibility makes sense. So it's not just, Rebecca, it's not just there is truth or there is not truth.

there are now many versions of truth and truth can be revisited and truth can be tested and it can change and that's in one way and essence of the Enlightenment. Yes, and it's strange because some of these popes we're talking about and we're very interested for example in astronomy but when they become Pope and as I say

we've got this growing idea of them as the kind of mouthpieces of God, the oracles of God then they start to get very worried about things like you know the earth going around the sun Oh, the earth has got to be the centre of the universe. So I'm thinking back to Galileo and that whole, a little bit earlier, that whole issue.

So the theology means that they back away from scientific discoveries and interests, which actually they may have a personal interest in. So they're in a very awkward position. But it's a direct contradiction, doesn't it? That there is no such thing as certain knowledge. Where does that take us, Miles? How did papal infallibility emerge after that?

I think papal infallibility emerges from the Enlightenment, largely because of another of the kind of consequences of the Enlightenment, which is religiously plural societies, that once you can accept multiple different kinds of knowledge, it followed in many European societies that you should tolerate multiple religions. And at that point, there was a question about whether states and governments should in fact control the religions

which were practiced within their territories. So a logical extension of that is the idea that perhaps the Pope should be in control of the Catholic Church after all across the whole of its territories and diocese. Do you think, Tom, Tom, do you think that the Vatican Council

was the culmination of the creeping was over? We were in with fallibility, full, impalibulability. full on. And this was a big assertion to say, you know, abhornt, here we are, go back enlightenment, we're not frightened of you. I think it's go back enlightenment, go back everything that had been happening since the French Revolution, go back Garibaldi, go back all these movements. And Pius Ith had more or less declared war on the modern world earlier in a series

of letters that he had written. And the Vatican Council was almost like saying, we dare you to say we're wrong because we, you just, you just keep saying it. But the key, the key paragraph at the very end of past reiturnus, that's the bit that everyone loves to argue about. And that's the bit I think that, that if people are interested in fallibility, they go and read. But actually the key thing to read is the very opening, very pious paragraph of past reternos. Because if you look at the beginning of that, that document from 1870, it presupposes that we know everything there's to know about the history of the church. We know everything that God could ever want us to know about Christian religion. We know indeed everything that is in the mind of God and how to interpret scripture.

The sheer world of confidence of religious certainty, where you actually say religious certainty is greater than mathematical certainty because it's founded on the word of God, that is all captured in that opening word from 1870, that opening paragraph, and it's that world that is at odds with what's happening from the Enlightenment until today. Rebecca, what do you make of that? Yes, actually I wanted to go back to something that Miles had said before that,

just about this issue of tolerance. I'm always saying to my students that in the medieval period, tolerance isn't up there on a pedestal as something that you should aspire to. So look at the way heretics are treated in the medieval period. But with the Enlightenment, there's this new interest in, yes, religious freedoms, toleration of other religions. And so the papacy is very much, as it were, on the defensive in that issue.

And then coming on to what you were saying just now, Tom, yes, we've got to remember that Pastor Eternus and then the Dever, two infallible statements that we have, one before and one after it. We've got a whole lot of popular piety that the papacy is trying to deal with in this period in the 18th and into the 19th century, particularly to Mary. This is the time of lords and the apparitions of Bernadette. This is the time when more marches built in Paris. So the papacy is now becoming a sort of voice for the Catholic people, particularly the French Catholic people. And that's very interesting. because as it were, the Pope is bypassing, as it were, the hierarchy of the church

and going straight to what the people want, which is increased Marian devotion. So that's a sort of addition that we're getting from the 18th century onwards. Is there any... Sorry to interrupt you. Is there any thought, Miles, that the... As evolution is creeping up and totally different views of the world, any thought that the Pope and those around him are shaking in their boots, about this?

I'm not sure that there is really because I'm not sure that Pius the ninth and his advisors would necessarily have understood the debates about evolution as they were emerging in the mid-19th century, that they were very steadfast. What do you mean understood them? They're clever men. They never understood them, but they would accept it. There might be a different word. Well, yes, perhaps that's a better word, that they wouldn't have accepted them because, as

Tom said a few minutes ago, they were very steadfast in their idea that revealed truths were more important than truths that could be shown empirically or historically. And that was at the very centre of many of these arguments about papal infallibility in the 1850s and 60s, however many times those against papal infallibility showed that there was no historical basis for it. Those arguments were simply rebuffed on grounds that that wasn't what they believed. But there's this business that we flagged earlier on, Tom, of infallibility hobbling future popes. the idea of lifting the ban on contraception

was put down which that pope was advised to do he had not to do it because a previous pope had said there should be no ban of contraception oh the 1960s sorry let me start again there should be no ban on contraception the 1968 decision whether it was technically infallible or not has been treated by a vast number of Catholics, bishops and

possibly even by some of Paul the Six Papal successors, as if it were infallible. And there's a very, it's quite amazing. A committee is, a committee of experts is set up. And it reports unanimously that there is no basis for continuing the ban. And they go to the Pope and we don't know the ins and outs of it, but it seems that the killer argument was, there is a statement in 1931, which was actually made by a Pope to try and counter a statement made by Anglicans.

They were going wishy-washy, but he wasn't going to go wishy-washy. And then it was a case, well, if the misstatement in 1931 was right, you can't change it. If you change it, the statement in 1931 was wrong. If one is wrong and one is right, then neither of you are in fact. And so this logic of continuity became self-supporting. When you say logic of continuity, that might be aggrandizing at this grip of continuity. Well, it's based on a logical, there's a famous logical paradox about this, which, you know, it'll be great fun to talk about. And, but it's basically, you know, it's a version of the liar's paradox.

You can't both be right, but you can both be wrong. if you're both wrong, you're both wrong. So, A. But Vatican too is very clear, if you look at Lumen Gentium, where the Pope can be infallible, it has to be in matters of faith and morals. So not in practical interpretations, but in matters specifically of faith and morals,

either when the Pope is talking ex-cathre from the chair, and there's only, as we've seen, been two instances in history when that has happened, or when he's talking with his bishops and the higher prelates at an ecumenical council. But as to say, it's specifically on faith and morals. Now, we've had two ex-cathra statements on faith, one could argue. One could argue you've never actually had one on morals yet.

But anyway, something like contraception would suggest much more about application, I would have thought. So in that sense, although some Catholics may think that anything the Pope says is infallible, that is obviously not the case. as defined at Vatican too. Finally, Miles and I'm said briefly, what's the status of papal infallibility today, do you think? I think the status of papal infallibility today is quite

ambiguous that popes won't renounce the doctrine but equally they seem to be very reluctant to invoke it for the reasons that we've just been hearing and to pick up on something very briefly that Rebecca said the problem with this division between matters of faith and morals

and the application is that there is other authority except the Pope to decide what that is. So for any Pope to invoke infallibility, he would have to, in a sense, put his own authority on the line with Catholics, and for everyone who might be persuaded by it, he might lose two others who find this an intolerable intrusion into their own private faith. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Miles Patton. Thank you, Rebecca Rist, and Tom. Loughlin. Next week, we'll look at the life and works of Samuel Beckett. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

The one thing I was sorry to say was that, of course, the papacy has actually de facto abandoned infallibility in 1964, because in 1964 there was a small document which had a massive impact on Catholic theology called the 1964 instruction on the interpretation of Scripture, where it more or less says, we are learning. And therefore we have to use scientific methods, and therefore we have to look at all the new ideas that are coming along. And that moment is actually a formal statement

that the old world, we know everything theologically. It's all there in this great, this what used to be called the depositum fidet, this catch-all of everything that was known, was de facto abandoned. And that has been abandoned in, other documents since then, on social teaching, on other religions, on this, that and the other, where there's an awareness that the understanding of the universe advances, the understanding of

humanity advances, and therefore even theological understanding advances. So as a medievalist, I just wanted to add that when I was talking about the growth of papal power in the high middle ages, sort of 11th to 13th century, as I say, there's nothing about infallibility yet, but there's this creeping sovereignty of the popes, and there's a very interesting document called the Dictatus Papai of Pope Gregory the 7th, who was one of the great reforming popes from which we get the Gregorian reform movement in the 11th century,

and he makes in a document some quite startling pronouncements about the powers of the Pope, but even there where he's going for this extreme sovereign position there is nothing specifically about infallibility and that's very interesting. What we do get is the sense that the church will always continue through the ages, so not that a pope will get everything right

but that somehow the church will always survive as it were. And then you get popes like I mentioned in a saint the third and also Boniface the 8th. They're making quite... No, he didn't. Unum Sanktum. He makes him. incredible claims for the powers of the papacy, although...

So, John. Well, he's really saying that without the Pope and without the church, nobody is saved. But there has been a great debate on this. To what extent he was actually drawing on earlier figures, decretists, and also Thomas Aquinas, whether what he was saying was actually that startling, or whether it was just the fact that he put it all together in this one blanket statement, Unam Sanktam, at a time when it was. politically extremely unwise to do so because of Philip the Fair.

But it's a bold statement. And by that point, he really, the papacy's power is waning. It is not the papacy of Innocent III, which was incredibly powerful temporarily. He's on the wane as the King of France comes up. And so to make such a bald statement is very, very unwise. Yeah, Boniface the Eighth, highest the 9th and the popes of the Reformation, they all advance the theory of papal infallibility and papal power. precisely because people are attacking them.

It's this curious thing precisely because Bonnevis VIII has to literally run out of Rome and flee that he suddenly realizes that the King of France actually has no power at all. Nevertheless, he doesn't use the idea or the term paper infallibility. He doesn't use the jargon, but you've got an intimation of what is to come, definitely.

And as we were saying, often because popes are on the defensive, and this is the way of kind of safeguarding their authority, as you were saying. The other thing is you ask me quite appropriately, how does the idea of papal infallibility fit with the world of the Enlightenment? But there's two other parallel realities to that. The first is that infallibility has built into it a lawyer's view of language, where language is utterly comprehensive of reality,

and things can be perfectly sorted out and defined, and they become black and white. So you have, you know, it's the sort of, it's this lawyer's brilliance idea that it's either yes or no eventually. And also with that goes in a theory of truth, the truth is yes or no. It's on or off switches. Yes, I know.

Yeah. Ambalard, isn't it? It's, but Abelard, of course, is playing. Abelard is actually advancing that, to show that it doesn't work. I think I wanted to take us down a slightly different line on this and to question how far the success of the decree of papal infallibility in 1870 really relies on the Pope's soft power in the 19th century

and on Pope's ability to promote a cult of the papacy using actually quite ironically, specifically modern techniques. So really right up until the eve of the French Revolution, the Pope's never left Rome. and actually the Pope wasn't terribly well known outside his own state in the Catholic world. It was a great shock to the Austrian Emperor when Pius I made the first papal trip to Vienna, when crowds of hundreds of thousands of people turned up to greet him. But thereafter, popes were very good at promoting the idea of themselves as cult figures within Catholicism,

a process which I suppose has taken its most extreme form in the kind of iconic status of John Paul II and as the Pope who travelled all around the world. But Pius I ninth played a very important part in that too, harnessing the new techniques of industrialisation to make sure, for instance, that all Catholics had an image of him in their homes. And that was very important, I think, for cementing this idea that the Pope was someone who might offer them infallible guidance. Is there something about riding with the inevitable punch tom,

the business of contraception, which was spoken as if it were an infallible guidance. degree. But as you said, people voted with their feet. Certainly in Britain, Cardinal Hennon treated it as an infallible statement. He used phrases like an encyclical without ambiguity, as if any individual moral decision could be without ambiguity. But it has led to infallibility, ceasing to be an abstract thing that was discussed by theologians. In 1950, it was an academic debate as to whether it was appropriate or not to define the doctrine of the assumption. Because to those who were Catholics, it seemed to be no more than one more title for Mary. And if you weren't Catholic, it was just one more example of how

Catholics obsess about Mary as a distraction from the central issues of Christian faith. But in 1968, when suddenly there's a decree that affects people in their own individual lives, now infallibility moves from being an abstract thing discussed by canon lawyers and some theologians to being something that is actually discussed out there. And in fact, without 1968, I doubt if you'd be having this program 50 years later. It's quite interesting that Benedict the 16th, deliberately when he wrote books about Jesus and his life, he said, I'm doing this just as any other writer or historian is doing it. I'm not doing it as Pope. So he was trying to make it very obvious to people that there was a difference between when a

Pope speaks Quay Pope with authority and when he is acting like any other clergyman. So perhaps that was an attempt to try to help Catholics to sort of understand that not every word, that the Pope Utters is infallible, which is what sometimes you get. But as we've shown, it has to be only on issues of faith and morals under certain very particular circumstances, namely either ex-cathra or at an ecumenical council.

It has to be technically that, but of course, if you build a triangular model of authority, so that you actually have a chain of command, then anything that comes down the chain of command is assumed. comes with all the glitter of the top of the pyramid. Yes, well, John the 23rd famously had a saying about this that he said he was infallible only when he declared himself to be infallible

and he would never do that so he never would be. We would have to worry about it. And it was rather like a nuclear deterrent that as Pope he would never use and he was prepared to tell everyone that. Thank you very much. I see the producer approaching. I've never been known to say no to a cup of coffee. Coffee? coffee

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