CHURCH INFALLIBILITY IS USELESS

The Catholic Church claims that it can make decisions about faith and morals that are infallible or without error. The doctrine of infallibility does not teach that the Church gets new revelation but is only guided by the Holy Spirit to see what has been revealed. Basically, it means that the Church has to research and it comes up with the right conclusion thanks to the input of the Holy Spirit. But the Church is bad at research. Its philosophy is faulty, its historical research is biased and full of error and its theology is delusional and full of controversy. It has recognised miracles and saints on bad evidence and changed its mind in many teachings. So its research is not guaranteed from error. So why should it be right when it claims to be infallible? If an infallible decision was found to be wrong it would mean that the Church never went along with the Holy Spirit and perhaps resisted infallibility so infallibility is useless. Only a mad God would confer it. Experts have a huge variety of opinions and a bigger variety of reasons for these opinions and reckoning who is an expert is itself just a matter of taste. You would need to be infallible to know how to start your research and who to go to. The view that the pope is infallible puts an impossible burden of research and responsibility on man.

The Catholic Church is based on the doctrines that the Church decreed were true while using its power of infallibility. Infallibility refers to being able to declare something without making a mistake. Church Councils are infallible and the pope as well. The pope is infallible under certain circumstances.

There is hot disagreement among theologians regarding which papal statements through the ages was infallible and which were not. One thing is for sure it is foolish to even consider any pope to be infallible when Leo I declared the Greek Emperor to be guided by the Holy Spirit and therefore incapable of doctrinal error (page 166, The Early Church). The first time the Church spoke of a man being infallible and it was a pampered politician!

Lots of papal decrees seem to be in accordance with the rules for making an infallible statement. The one there is a big problem with is if the research leading up to the statement was undertaken properly but this is one that is always ignored in practice. They were made to the whole Church, they were official statements and the pope appealed to his authority under Christ and declared that further discussion of the topic was not on. No explicit claim to infallibility was made in the statements that are accepted as infallible such as the Immaculate Conception and the assumption. The Church does not require one but it has to be necessary nevertheless.

Going by the Church rules then Pope Gelasius was infallible then when he declared the impossibility of unbaptised babies going to Heaven. Pope Innocent VIII made it a sin in 1484 to have sex with demons who took human form called incubi and succubi.

The reason for the debates is that the Church despises many of the doctrines that the pope advanced and wants them to be his own erroneous opinions. So the Church only takes the pope as infallible when it agrees with him and when it does not. This approach is dishonest.

Ephesians 2 decrees that all offices in the Church make up a holy temple to the Lord. The papacy has often been unholy and incapable of making the Church a temple for the Lord.

It is impossible to believe that when Acts 20 prophesied that crafty wolves would come after the apostles were gone and devour the faith of many and not spare the flock meaning the whole Church that a papal system would have been desired or believed in. It is easier for a pope to mislead the Church for all look up to him than for packs of wolves to do it. It is complained by Protestants and progressive Catholics that the Church puts canon law above God and the Bible. It really does do that. But the papal system is behind this abomination and the only way to end it is to end the papacy because the pope depends on canon law to become a true pope. He must not be excommunicated, he must not be a heretic and he must not have murdered the previous pope or tricked him or the conclave into electing him. The result is that infallibility and the papal office and the true Church are at the mercy of the observance of canon law. One pope did trick his predecessor into abdicating and what about the popes we don’t know about?

INFALLIBILITY CAN’T REVEAL

The Church teaches that infallibility is not inspiration so the pope or Church could give and infallible revelation but use the wrong words to express it for it is up to him how he or they put the truth across.

Belief in infallible statements is not a part of the Catholic faith (page 88, Believing in God). The Church believes it uses its infallibility when it gives statements of binding dogma but that is not the same as it making infallible statements. You can use statements to mean to express the truth or what is infallible revelation and they may not do that for their grammar or wording is not right. So the wording is not infallible but the meaning is. That is what the Church means when it denies believing in infallible statements.

(This is different from Hans Kung’s view that infallibility is a priori wrong. He said that an infallible statement cannot be infallible because it is made up of words and words can mean anything. For example, the word yellow conjures up an image of a different yellow colour and yellow shape in the mind of a person who reads the word. This view of his is obviously mistaken for if he were right we would not be able to understand one another at all.)

What use is infallibility when it does not guarantee that the right words will be used? The charism is for making the Church pick out truth from error and for establishing certainty in the faith.

What if the Church resists the influence of Jesus and issues a fake infallible proclamation? The Church is not always certain what was an infallible decree in the past and what was not. We are told that God will kill anybody who tries to delude the Church this way. But anybody who makes a decision to commit such a sin is no longer in the Church for trying to pervert the faith and destroy proper unity. It is too incredible to believe that God would murder them.

The fact that the Church can be open to Jesus and his gift of infallibility and then wilfully misrepresent what it has learned by using ambiguity is fatal to the doctrine of infallibility.

The doctrine of infallibility has been carefully studied by the Church so it knows of the problems and contradictions. It only propagates the myth of infallibility to get power over minds and to increase the mystique of the Church.