Referring to the terms above, we all agree that according to the Church, since some Vatican Council in 1870, the Pope is ‘literally’ infallible when talking about faith, morals, and the Church ex cathedra.

‘Figuratively’, however, he’s always had some sort of infallibility simply by being the head of the church.  Pope’s have long contended this politically, by excommunicating or executing dissidents. 

The church has historically been not just dogmatic, but all or nothing , often claiming that If you’re not 100% with them, you’re 100% against them.

In past centuries, not agreeing/believing in the papacy wholehearedly could get you killed.  Today, people have a more liberal approach to this, and the church more restrained one.  Today’s “recovering catholics’ are the same types of people who would have been excommunicated and burned for heresey a few hundred years ago.

*In this regard, papal infallibility, like fundamentalist intepretations of the Bible, seems to me to smack of the intentional fallacy.  But this may be a subject for another comment.

I know that, silly.  And you know I know that.  Now that I have rejected any implied or inferred accusations of ignernce, yes, of course you’re right.  But I take my entertainment where I can, and the doctrinal reforms under Pius IX are generous in that regard. 

The divide between Cath and Prot these days seems to come down to doctrine vs. ritual.  I fail to understand how the Prots can discard (or should I say ignore?) the commanding power of rite in favor of mere right[1].

[1]By which I mean NOT that the Prots have it right and the Caths have it wrong, but that the Prots seem to think that getting it right is all there is to it.  But don’t mind me.

I too have tried other services and wasn’t touched. If I wanted to be a practicing something, it’d have to be non-christian, I suspect. There is something about the ceremony : I’ve never been able to shake the sensation that other christian services were some sort of nice prayer service, without the real whammy of the Mass. (sorry, I’ve used up my resistance to capitalization). And no amount of intellectual ecumenical openness touches a core feeling that the other traditions are somehow derivative.

Stupid, I know–maybe it’s just the early indoctrination talking ?

Another weird thing, and I think it has to do with the identity/family part of being Catholic, is that if I were to become pagan I’d have to be a closeted on, at least in relation to my parents. It’s one thing to have been able to tell then that I wasn’t straight or that I was leaving the US, but pagan, nope, can’t imagine telling them about that. Isn’t that funny ?

A lot of people focus on the weird RC things like the wars/bribes/inquisitions/etc—what I find way more interesting is all the pagaenty and details of the rituals and beliefs - it has such a black magic voodoo feel to it..  Aside from the pope’s infallibility, think of his title… ‘Pope’ is just the informal name.  Formally, he’s “”Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God”

I need better things to do than write on former professors blogs while things compile at 3am.

Or, as somebody somewhere once told me, asking me why I don’t stop being Catholic is like asking me why I don’t stop being Italian.  I don’t really have a choice.

There’s something about Catholicism—and I insist it has to do with the bizarre beauty of the ritual—that gets into the blood of those raised in the Church, that makes it all but impossible to leave it without leaving Christianity altogether.  (The same phenomenon makes it impossible for me to write about “the Church” without capitalizing it.  It’s on the level of reflex.) Though I may technically have been, as you point out, a small-p protestant (in the sense of one who protests), the idea of becoming a Protestant with a capital P is weirdly unthinkable.  I’ve attended several other churches—from high Anglican to Southern Baptist—and, with all due respect to those who believe differently, none of their services have done a blessed thing for me.  They all seem so flatly literal, where the Catholic mass is theater.  Or poetry.  It’s metaphorical, in any case—which is why the intrusions of the literal, in the form of “you must believe x in order to be a Catholic” are so profoundly upsetting.  Because like the more hermeneutical forms of Judaism, I don’t so much believe as interpret.

I shoulda been a Jesuit, I think.

That’s (a).  (B) is that papal infallibility (pretty much invented by Vatican I in 1870) is massively misunderstood.  The pope is only considered to be infallible when he’s speaking ex cathedra, which is only invoked either to reiterate articles of faith that have always been taught (the Universal Magisterium) or to state solemn definitions (the Extraordinary Magisterium).  The latter has only been invoked once in history—in 1950, regarding the Assumption of Mary.  The former is more expansive, but the “always” part of it excludes any one pope’s wacky ideas.  Papal statements that don’t invoke either the Universal or Extraordinary Magisterium are not thought to be infallible.

That’s your catechism for the day.

Wacky Catlicks!

People seem to lose faith in Catholicism because of some ideological argument—usually stemming from a realized inconsistency between two teachings or having read about its sordid and rather un-christian past.

I fail to see how, or why, people can’t admit that they aren’t really Catholic—that instead, they believe in some other flavor of Christianity, probably one that Jesus would find far less appalling, and possibly even respectable.

Considering that one of the basic tenets of the RC church is Papal Infallibility I think its pretty safe to say, KF , that your connection to the Church wasn’t severed once again, as it wasn’t there to begin with.

Good news though, you might not have to join the Anglicans as you might technically be a protestant already.

Gasp!

I believe Ratzinger was involved in the writing of the Ex Corde document, - which schools that are Catholic or Catholic-affiliated are supposed to sign on to- and since I’m at a college with affiliations with the Catholic Church, that has been an issue here.  It’s a horrible piece of work, quite stunning, really, for its insistence on teaching Truth.

A sad day here, though not unexpected.  I have found myself, like some others, almost liberated by this election because, based on the extremity and hard-heartedness of this man’s political and ideological positions, now I don’t have to feel guilt for my own choices.  And god knows, guilt is such a determining factor in my life, as for many other Catholics. 

Why feel guilty now?  Where’s the moral authority that should make me feel low?

Steve