Infallible?

“It is amazing that in Article 25 of the Vatican II Constitution on the Church, on this question there is only a reference to the Vatican I statement about the magisterium ordinarium (Denziger, 1712), and not a word about infallibility. In addition there is a reference to a Vatican I schema, but this doesn’t have the slightest dogmatic authority because it was neither discussed nor approved. In that case, where does the view of the infallibility of the episcopate come from? As far as we know today, it was cooked up by the Counter-Reformation theology of the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine and the Roman scholastic theology which followed it. It is understandable that I had also to study this very ‘thesis’ at the Gregorian and painfully prepare it for the examination. However, it is now clear to me that this is no ‘catholic’ (=universal) doctrine but a new Roman special doctrine which does not occur in the theology of the Middle Ages, let alone the church fathers,” H. Küng, Disputed Truth: Memoirs II (Continuum 2008), 151.

“It is almost unbelievable, but nevertheless a fact, that the new teaching about the infallibility of the episcopate was neither discussed nor examined at Vatican II but blindly taken over from counter-Reformation Roman scholastic theology as prepared by the Curia,” ibid. 151.

“The ‘inventor’ [of papal infallibility] is the eccentric Franciscan Petrus Olivi (died 1298), often accused of heresy. With his doctrine of infallibility he wanted all subsequent Popes to subscribe to a decree of Nicholas III in favor of his trend among the Franciscans, which required rigorous poverty. Therefore in 1324 Pope John XXII condemned the doctrine of infallibility as the work of the devil, the father of lies. The consequence is that initially the infallibility of the Pope was a heresy that was condemned!” ibid. 172.

“What about the infallibility of the ecumenical councils? One result of the researches by the Jesuit Hermann-Josef Sieben is that not even Athanasius, the great champion of the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325), believed in it. Indeed the authority of the ecumenical councils had quite a different basis. A council doesn’t have authority simply because according to certain presuppositions it is ‘ecumenical,’ still less because it could produce infallible statements with the support of the Holy Spirit. Rather, it is authoritative insofar as it attests the apostolic faith, insofar as, to use a happy formulation by Athanasius about the Council of Nicaea, it ‘breathes scripture, in short insofar as it is an authentic and credible expression of the gospel,” ibid. 172.

“Even Karl Rahner concedes in a Spiegel interview on 28 February 1972: ‘If I hypothetically, unreally hypothetically, imagine that I had read out the 1870 definition of the First Vatican Council to Jesus in his lifetime, in his empirical human consciousness he would probably have been amazed and not understood any of it.’ The only amazing thing is that we contemporaries with our ‘empirical human consciousness’ should understand something that Jesus the Christ, to whom the whole Christian tradition appeals, would not have ‘understood anything of’,” ibid. 173.