Delivered as the Keynote Lecture for the 2019 Spring Newman Symposium at the National Institute for Newman Studies

And thus, in centuries to come, there may be found out some way of uniting what is free in the new structure of society with what is authoritative in the old, without any base compromise with "Progress" and "Liberalism."¹

preliminary: vatican i's centenary reception as over-intellectualized

Rather than celebrating the 1970 centennial of vatican i, theologians more often lamented the difficulties left to them by its definition of infallibility. "But the teaching of Vatican I really amounts to this," Hans Küng proclaimed, "If he wants to, the pope can do everything, even without the Church."²[End Page 123]

With such provocations, Küng joined the carnival of iconoclasm that was American Catholicism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was my fate to study graduate theology during that period.Infallible? An Inquiry arrived here in translation in 1971. Its 1970 German publication marked the council's centenary. In the overheated aftermath ofHumanae Vitae (1968), Küng began with "the errors of the ecclesiastical magisterium." This involved debatable historical claims and interpretations. Noteworthy, however, was the maximalist approach, in contrast to his earlier works, Küng took to Vatican I's definition of the infallibility of the papal magisterium. He readHumanae Vitae as infallibly proposed and tried to impale dissenters from the encyclical on the horns of a dilemma: either accept the encyclical's teaching on birth control or reject the defined dogma of papal infallibility.

The largely negative reception of Küng's reading of Vatican I, however, testifies to the fact that, by the council's centenary, a minimalist understanding of papal infallibility generally held the field in English-speaking North America.³Lumen Gentium 22 had seemingly resolved the question of the pope's relation to the episcopal college. By the 1970s questions about papal infallibility tended to be more ecumenical and philosophical than historical: 1) How can we mitigate the definition as an obstacle to ecclesial communion with fellow Christians?, and 2) How can we give a philosophical account of the possibility of infallible propositions and a fundamental theological account of how doctrines, as Newman put it, might change or develop in order to remain the same?⁴ Infallibility had[End Page 124] become, in the title of one popular 1976 work, "the crossroads of doctrine."⁵

What is meant by a minimalist understanding of the council's definition? Theologically papal infallibility is inseparable from the infallibility of the church as expressed by its bishops. The constitutionPastor Aeternus invokes the council's approval (sacro approbante concilio) three times: twice in the opening paragraph, at the beginning and the end, and once in chapter four immediately before the definition. Infallibility is not the pope's personal privilege and extends only to matters of revelation, i.e., faith and morals. The pope must make clear that he speaksex cathedra, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful, and that he intends them to hold this teaching definitively.⁶

I learned this from theBaltimore Catechism as a Catholic schoolboy in the 1950s. Of course, it's not as simple as it appears. Theologians and canonists argue, for example, over what makes a teachingex cathedra, or about the distinction and relation between the primary and secondary objects of infallibility, namely faith and morals. Most significantly, however, this limited understanding of infallibility makes no reference to sovereignty, a political concept tied closely to infallibility in the minds of the ultramontane bishops who voted it onto the council's agenda.

In fact, this minimalist understanding of infallibility is very close to the position of the minority bishops at the council, suggesting that they really did, as Margaret O'Gara argued in 1988, triumph in defeat. But the historical difficulty with that conclusion is that this minimalist interpretation of the definition was not at all clear to the more than one hundred and fifty minority bishops who opposed a definition at the council...