yalla

I haven't read all of this thread thoroughly yet and I hope this is not a sidetrack but I read the popular book "Vicars of Christ'' by Peter de Rosa and found it interesting and informative re the catholic church.

John A. Broussard

Read the Syllabus of Errors (easy to google). This pronouncement by the papacy will tell you more about the Catholic Church than you may ever care to know.

Prester John

Piffle, i would classify about the first requisite for Wisdom to be the ability to recognise ones own fallibility. Thinking you're infallible is about the most unwise thing you can actually do.

carry on....

Chili

The Church is infallible which just means that it is in charge of its own destiny. It has a dogmatic constituition that is infallible only because it is true.

Prester John

The definition of infallible to mean in charge of ones own destiny is not the normal one. Normally infallible means not making mistakes. I see how i got confused now.

Chili

The things is that if the Church is the representative of Christ on earth it must be infallible. This is just a necessary truth and if you, or I, see something wrong it is up for discussion but will be blamed on human error.

The point is that infallibility must go hand in hand with omniscience so it would be a contradiction to say that the Church is not Infallible. Next, there is only one that can be Infallible and that just happens to be us.

badger3k

Yeah, considering I was brought up to believe that the Pope was considered unable to make mistakes in the interpretation of Catholic doctrine, that's a new one to me. So much for a Roman Catholic education, huh? Supposedly, when he makes a pronouncement on the issues, he is not capable of making mistakes. It has nothing to do with destiny, or anything like an everyday issue (ie - the Pope could say the sky is red, but he is not speaking under his "infallible hat"). I do find it interesting that the doctrine was only established in the 1800s (IIRC), at about the time when people were leaving the Catholic Church for the others (Protestant, etc). Why wasn't he infallible from the get-go?

Chili

He was, and that was obvious. It is an inspired religion that is beyond criticism. This same is true with the bible wherein our criticism just points at our lack of comprehension.

John A. Broussard

He was. That was the point to the pronouncement that the pope is infallible. The claim is that he was from way back in Peter's day. It just wasn't official.

In fact, it's still not clear which of the pope's pronouncements are clearly infallible and which are not. I've done some looking, and the count of infallible pronouncements seems to be somewhere between 2 and 6.

badger3k

I didn't know they back-dated it (or would that be "grandfathering" - "popefathering?"). Heck, to be honest, they never taught us that the doctrine didn't really come about so recently either, so we were never introduced to such an idea until I got out of the scam. Is there early reference to infallibility in these pronouncements you found or is this also some backwards history? By this I mean did the pronouncement itself, at the time, say that it was infallible? The only one I think I heard about was done shortly (10-20 years?) prior to the infallibility doctrine - what the writer said was basically this tested the water of the idea, to consolidate the Pope's (and therefore the RC Church's) power and authority.