Papal primacy and infallibility

The Vatican Council of 1870 defined two things about the bishop of Rome, and they are frequently run together. The first is primacy of jurisdiction: that the pope has immediate and ordinary authority over every church and every believer, not merely a right of appeal or a first place among equals. The second is infallibility, and the council fenced it in tightly. The pope teaches infallibly only when he speaks ex cathedra, from the chair of Peter, acting in his office as pastor and teacher of all Christians, and defining a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church.

Everything outside that description is untouched. Papal opinions on politics, science, prudential judgement and church discipline are not covered. Encyclicals as such are not covered, though they may restate what is already held infallibly. The pope's personal holiness is emphatically not covered, a point Catholic apologists make with reference to the tenth-century papacy, which was disreputable by any standard.

The practical result is a very short list. The definition of the Assumption of Mary by Pius XII in 1950 is the one exercise universally agreed to satisfy the conditions since 1870. The Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in 1854, is regarded as an exercise of the same charism before it was formally described. Some theologians count a small number of other statements; there is no official register, which is itself a source of argument.

Catholic theology also holds that the ordinary and universal teaching of the world's bishops in union with the pope is infallible, which covers far more ground than papal definitions do. Infallibility, on this account, is a property of the church's teaching that the papal office exercises in a particular mode rather than a personal privilege of one man.

The claim developed slowly. Rome's prestige in the early centuries rested on being the church of Peter and Paul and the capital's see, and other churches consulted it; the language of jurisdiction over them is later. Eastern churches accepted a primacy of honour and place Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem alongside Rome in a pentarchy of ancient sees. What they did not accept was that Rome could decide for the others.

The Eastern Orthodox objection is therefore double. Universal jurisdiction, they hold, makes the pope a bishop over bishops, which contradicts the collegial structure they read in the early councils; and infallibility locates in one person a guarantee the East attributes to the whole church, discerned over time and recognised by reception rather than declared in advance. The 1870 definition, coming as it did after 1054 and after the failed reunion councils of Lyons and Florence, made reconciliation substantially harder and prompted a Western secession as well: the Old Catholic churches formed in refusal of it.

The Protestant objection is prior and simpler. If Scripture is the final norm, then no office can be exempt from correction by it, and the Reformers argued that the papacy had in fact taught error, on indulgences among other things. The dispute is not really about whether Peter was prominent among the apostles, which the texts plainly show, but about whether his prominence was an office transmitted to a particular see.

Oriental Orthodox churches, separated since the fifth century over christology, share the Eastern objections. Anglicanism, having rejected papal jurisdiction in the sixteenth century, has since produced ecumenical statements exploring what a universal primacy might look like if it were not defined as it was in 1870. Recent popes have themselves invited proposals on the question, without altering the definition.