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If you’ve been watching the news, you may hear about the United States negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. Perhaps you’ll hear something like “President Obama has reach and agreement with Ayatollah Khameni over Iran’s nuclear program.” You may also hear a news story about the economic problems in Greece. You may hear something like “Greek Prime Minister Tsipras has negotiated a bailout with German Chancellor Merkel and other European heads of state.” If you’re a sports fan, you hear something like “NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has suspended Tom Brady for four games due to his role in cheating last year.”
All of these stories have a common theme: there’s usually one or two larger than life figures who chart a new course in history by virtue of their authority and office. These issues are likely more complicated than they are portrayed by the media. The essence of telling the news is to tell a story and it’s easier to tell a story when there are a limited number of characters so complex negotiations and teams of analysis, lieutenants and lawyers are compressed to the drama of two or three people sitting at a table arguing over whatever issue is before them.
The deal with Iran is a good example of this. Barack Obama is the president: he has the authority to enter into treaties with other nations. Previous presidents may have had different ideas about how to deal with Iran and the next president may again have different ideas. But whoever the president is, his opinions are ultimately what counts in these situations. Of course, each country has it’s own national security and economic concerns. There are likely dozens of people on each side, perhaps hundreds, who have inputs to the negotiations but ultimately it’s portrayed as a battle of wills between the president of the US on one side and the supreme leader of Iran on the other, with little attention given to the values of either country.
It’s easy to see the Pope in this same way. It’s easy to see the Pope as the king of the Church: ruling with an iron fist and basically doing whatever he wants. We expect our worldly leaders to be innovators: to update things, to put aside structures and ideas designed for an earlier age. And it’s easy to see the Pope in the same light. But that’s exactly the wrong way to look at the Pope.
The Church’s teachings are based on three elements: Scripture, Sacred Tradition and Magisterial Teaching. They all depend on each other. They are often compared to three legs of a stool. If either is taken away, or given undue prominence, the stool will fall over.
Let’s look at the first two. When Jesus was on Earth, He didn’t write a book, nor did He instruct His followers to write a book. Jesus was an itinerant preacher. He traveled from place to place speaking to the crowds. Many of those sayings were written down in the Gospels written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But many weren’t. We know that from the Bible itself. The end of the Gospel according to John indicates that only a portion of Jesus’ teaching and actions were written down and in the book of Acts we have an example. Paul writes in Acts 20:35 “The Lord Jesus Himself said it’s better to give than receive,” but those words don’t actually appear in any gospel. Paul would have had to hear that from one of the original disciples of Jesus, but those disciples didn’t include that saying in one of the Gospels for some reason. But what they did write down, along with the writings of the apostles and the Jewish scriptures is revered by Catholics today. We greatly honor the Bible, standing when the Gospels are read at Mass, for instance.
The Sacred Tradition, then, is the sayings and actions of Jesus that didn’t get written down in the Bible. When the apostles began spreading the word, they had their own disciples that learned about Jesus and wrote down what they heard. And then the disciples of the apostles had their own disciples and on and on. These people who lived in the first few centuries of the Church are collectively called the Church Fathers, and many documents written by them survive today. By reading those documents we can understand what the early Church believed and how they acted and what they valued. The Church Fathers are an important historical record of the faith handed down by the apostles. They are not authoritative in and of themselves. A specific Church Father may write something that’s his opinion and therefore is merely an interesting opinion of an interesting person. But when we read multiple Church Fathers all asserting the same thing, then we can believe that this was the universal faith of the early Church. So things like the role of the Pope, the nature of the priesthood, the duties of Christians in society, how to interact with non believers, the role of men and women are all dealt with by the Church Fathers and are an important part of official Church Teaching.
The magisterium is the third leg of the stool and supports the others. The magisterium is the teaching office of the Church and is made up of the Pope and the bishops in union with the Pope. The bishops are part of the magisterium, but properly speaking, the bishops only make formal doctrinal statements when all the bishops in the world get together in a “Church Council”. The Pope has the authority to speak on behalf of the entire college of bishops. The purpose of the magisterium is to be a living interpreter of the scriptures and Sacred Tradition.
As an example of how this works, consider the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, the so-called Bread of Life discourse. In this chapter, Jesus gives a sermon in which He says that He is the Bread of Life come down from heaven and who eats of this bread will live forever. But what can this mean? Does it mean that we must physically eat a person’s body? Or is it symbolic? It’s not possible to know from the Bible alone: Christians are divided even today upon that point. But it we look at it through the perspective of the Church Fathers and the consistent teachings of the magisterium, it’s clear that Jesus was referring to consuming His real presence in the Eucharist.
So scripture must be interpreted with the help of the magisterium and the Church Fathers, and the Church Fathers have to be read as being consistent with scriptures and the magisterium and the magisterium has to be understood as being consistent with scriptures and the Church Fathers. Neither can contradict the others. The Catholic Faith is summarized in The Catechism of The Catholic Church. All three legs of that stool are brought together to explain the Church’s teachings.
Many of the teachings of the Catholic Church are mysteries that our minds can’t fully comprehend. How can Jesus be God and man? How did he, as a child, learn to walk and talk when He, as God, is omniscient? How could he die on the cross? Can an immortal and eternal God die? You can see how people, in an attempt to explain these mysteries, might “simplify” things a bit so that we could more easily understand them. So you end up with heresies that deny Jesus was human at all. Or you end up with heresies that deny He was really God. Or you get heresies that claim He was a man who was “possessed” by God. These are all wrong. But when the Church says a heresy is wrong, it’s obligated to define what the correct answer is. And so it has to define the teaching it’s trying to affirm, which is what we mean by “defining a dogma”. This is done by the magisterium.
This leads us to the big issue with the magisterium: papal infallibility. The dogma of “papal infallibility” means that the Pope, when speaking on matters of faith and morals cannot teach error. Infallibility does not mean that everything the pope says is correct. It means that the Pope cannot teach error in matters of faith and morals. It is a gift for the benefit of the faithful, not for the benefit of the Pope. The Holy Spirit prevents the Pope from saying otherwise.
In an upcoming class, I’ll discuss the role of Mary in the Church, but I want to touch on one of the Marian dogmas here because it’s an example of the exercise in papal infallibility. At issue is the Assumption of Mary, which is a dogma of the Church that says that at the end of Mary’s earthly life she was raised bodily into heaven. This was infallibly declared by Pope Pius XII in the 1950s. Prior to declaring the dogma of the Assumption, Pius XII had written an encyclical called Deiparae Virginis Mariae in which he raised the possibility of declaring this dogma. He cited support from the council fathers in Vatican I as well as popular support from the faithful. In the encyclical, he asked the bishops throughout the world whether they would assent to declaring the Assumption to be a dogma of the Church. The response was nearly unanimous, so four years later he issued the encyclical Munificentissimus Deus, establishing the dogma of the Assumption.
This is a slow deliberative process. If we look further into the Assumption, we’d find that at the time that Pius XII declared the Assumption to be a dogma, most Catholics believed in it, but they believed a lot of extra details. Some believe that Mary died and after three days was raised from the dead and then was assumed into Heaven. Some believe that Mary did not die, but was simply assumed into Heaven when her time on Earth was finished. Some believe that all of the apostles were transported to where Mary was at the time of the Assumption. Some believe that was in Ephesus, some believe it was in Jerusalem. These beliefs can be cause for division and conflict. Pius XII does not address them at all, and this is the essence of “defining” a dogma. The dogma of the Assumption states that Mary was assumed bodily into Heaven. Period. If you wish to believe that she died first, then that’s OK, but you can’t criticize or condemn anyone who believed otherwise. The Church makes no statement about that, so either view is OK. So in a sense by defining the Dogma, the Church has not imposed a belief on the faithful, but has given the faithful freedom to agree to disagree about the non-essential elements.
If we have to understand the pope and the bishops as being consistent with the Catechism, then it raises a couple of questions. The first one is: why do we need the pope? We can just read the Catechism to know what to do? The simple answer is that the Catechism itself was created by the magisterium and so depends on it. The Catechism that’s currently in circulation was published in the 1990s and is the latest in a series of catechisms published by the Church. Things change and already the Catechism is started to feel a little out of date because it does not directly address some of the issues that are looming today that perhaps were only science fiction in the 1990s: things like embryonic stem cells, “adult chat rooms” on the internet, human cloning and the like. The magisterium is needed to apply the consistent teachings of the Church to the situations that exist in the world today.
The second question that might come up is: if the pope can’t contradict Scripture and Sacred Tradition, what can he do? The pope does possess a great deal of authority. For instance, he names all the members of the curia, the body that runs the various departments in the Vatican which has a great influence on the life of the Church. He also is the supreme legislator of the Church and can update Canon Law and change the disciplines of the Church (for example, fasting during Lent). All of the bishops are instructed to “tend their flocks” and, as such, you’d expect bishops to identify and speak on the issues that most affect their dioceses. A bishop in a border diocese may focus on immigration, for instance. The Pope is uniquely positioned to set an agenda for the entire Church. The Italians have a saying “first a fat pope, then a skinny pope.” One pope may want to focus on a specific set of issues and the next pope may focus on a different set of issues depending on the events of the day, and each person’s natural inclinations.
Strictly speaking, the Pope is no different than any other speaker when he strays from the narrow confines of faith and morals. He has the normal human quotient of charisma and dramatic flourishes to make a point. He can give a stirring speech. He can instruct, reprove, guide and comfort. He can also make factual errors, misstate things, and even make errors of judgement in what he chooses to talk about. But the fact that he’s straying from the bounds of faith and morals doesn’t mean his speeches are irrelevant. He’s preaching a message that he thinks is important today, so we should at least give him the benefit of the doubt. If he says something that’s factually wrong, or inconsistent with our experience, we should still try to take his deeper meaning and apply it to our lives. The Pope is the the Vicar of Christ (“vicar” comes from the same latin word where we get “vice” as in “vice-president”) and as such he speaks with great authority even when speaking off the cuff. Put simply, the Pope is the Pope. His opinions should count in our lives, when properly interpreted in light of scripture and Sacred Tradition.
Excellent explanation, Ben. Thanks!
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