That’s the only vehicle for infallibility that is within the Vatican’s power to choose. For infallibility by the ordinary magisterium, it’s too late to do anything about it now. Either something was taught infallibly by the Church’s magisterium throughout history or it wasn’t. There isn’t anything the Vatican can do about it now.
Since it is not papal infallibility the Vatican cannot, of course, by virtue of its own power make it infallible. But it seems rather that the Pope and the Bishops can have the role of
confirming or
verifying that something has indeed been taught infallibly by the ordinary magisterium. Confirming or verifying it-- making it manifest-- does lie within the Pope’s power, I would suppose, even if making it infallible by means of the ordinary magisterium is not. This distinction surely holds.
…If you read the theological debates on the subject, it is clear that virtually nothing is known for sure about the verification of the historical conditions that must be present for a teaching to be infallibly by the ordinary magisterium. Thus it is even more puzzling that the CDF has decided to declare that several Church teachings are infallible by the ordinary magisterium without even bothering to settle the theological debate about exactly what historical conditions need to be verified.
Since you expand on this below, I’ll treat this below.
…the following condition must hold: Every (or nearly every) Catholic bishop must have taught that (1) women cannot be ordained priests (2) not just by church law but by divine law, and (3) that it is mandatory that Catholics agree with (1) and (2) on pain of anathema.
I think you are right that it need be by divine law and not merely Church law, but you are wrong if you claim that it need be explicitly intended by each bishop. It could merely be implicitly intended, and this would be completely coherent with the development of doctrine. And also, if one prohibits it because of Church law, it does not follow that it cannot also be implicitly prohibited by reason of divine law.
So for how many bishops throughout time can this be verified? In order to verify the strength of the language used in promulgating the teaching for point (3), it must be considerably stronger than the language used to condemn female altar servers, for example, Pope Benedict XIV’s encyclical Allatae Sunt (26 July 1755):
…to the bishops of Lucania condemned the evil practice which had been introduced of women serving the priest at the celebration of Mass. Since this abuse had spread to the Greeks, Innocent IV strictly forbade it in his letter to the bishop of Tusculum: “Women should not dare to serve at the altar; they should be altogether refused this ministry.” We too have forbidden this practice in the same words in Our oft-repeated constitution…"
Why does it have to be stronger language? This strikes me as being, perhaps, a capricious criterion. The question about whether something can be reformed is about the nature of the
object of the prohibition, not the strength with which it is prohibited. For any thing which is important, and prohibited, it does seem it ought to be done so forcefully. Take, for instance, clerical celibacy in the west. Ought we not to denounce disobedience to this strongly? Yet this doesn’t mean that it is irreformable. As long as it has the force of a discipline it certainly ought to be prohibited forcefully.
I’ll treat verification below, with this quote:
You are misreading me completely. The historical fact that must be verified for a doctrine to be infallible by the ordinary magisterium is whether or not it has been taught unanimously by all of the members of the college of Catholic bishops thoughout the history of the Catholic Church. The conventional theological wisdom prior to the 1990’s was that this historical condition was so intractable to verify that it could never really be known for certain whether any given teaching was infallible by the ordinary magisterium.
Your view on verification is shown to be absurd by your own conclusion: the idea that it is
in principle impossible to know that any one doctrine is infallible by means of the ordinary magisterium. If there is such a thing as the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium (and since an ecumenical council has said there is, there surely is), then such a position, at least practically, is a denial that any sort of charism exists for the Church.
I think the position is obviously absurd for other reasons, though. You are treating the question of ordinary infallibility as a historical question. Now, it is the case that no doctrine of faith can be known definitively through historical inquiry. Historical inquiry cannot afford us the sort of certainty which faith demands. It is absurd, therefore, to claim that what would be necessary and sufficient to establish a matter of faith is a historical inquiry. It could never be sufficient, even if it could in some sense be necessary. For a matter of faith is held with unswerving certainty, but purely historical inquiry is held according to probability. Historical inquiry can show us the fittingness of a doctrine, but surely it cannot demonstrate it.
Besides, it is not the mind of the Church that we would literally need positive evidence from every single bishop there ever was in order to establish the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium-- no more than the dictum of Vincent of Lerins is meant to be taken in such a fundamentalist way, at least. If we are abandoning being fundamentalists in other ways, then why ought we be so fundamentalist when it comes to interpreting what the Church allegedly means when it looks for what has been always and everywhere taught?
God bless,
Rob
Regardless of whether the parish is left without a priest…
