Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/870

 INFALLIBILITY

790

INFALLIBILITY

and admitted the supremacy of the West-Saxons over all the country held by the English south of the Thames. By successive conquests, Ine added several districts to the western provinces of his domain, and after a bitter war conquered Geraint, King of Corn- wall, and built a fortress on the Tone, at the site of the present Taunton. Throughout his entire reign Ine was particularly solicitous for the welfare of religion and religious establishment, founding many monasteries and endowing those already in existence. The Abbey of Glastonbury was erected by him, with the funds, it is thought, which came from the were- gild collected from Withred. Other monastic estab- lishments which were recipients of his bounty were those at Malmesbiiry, Wimbome, Nursling, Tisbury, Waltham, and Sherborne.

Worn out by his long rule, Ine determined to abdi- cate in favour of iEthelheard and Oswald, and to make his peace with God. In pursuance of this project, he convened the Witenagemot and formally announced his alitlication. With his wife he pro- ceeded to Rome, to watch and pray at the tomb of the Apostles in the gui.se of a poor and pious pilgrim. While there he founded a hospice or home for English pilgrims, in the district known as Burgus Saxonum, the modern Borgo. Some historians trace the founda- tion of the English College at Rome back to this hos- pice. The memory of the hospice .still lives in the Church of San S])irito in Sassia, formerly S. Maria in Saxia; it Ls thought that King Ine and his Queen, Ethelburga, lie buried in this church or in the atrium of St. Peter's. They died blessing God that they had been allowed to lay their dust in the consecrated soil of Rome.

AnqloSoxon Chron., ad ann.6SS-728: Lingxrh, History of Ennliinil. Liii; Mon. Hist. Brit., 723-5: Did. \'at. Biog.,s.v.; Diet. Christ. Biog., s. v.

St.\kley Quinn.

Infallibility, (in general) exemption or immunity from lialiilily to error or failure; (in particular) in theological usage, the supernatural prerogative by which the Church of Christ is, by a special Divine assistance, preserved from liability to error in her definitive dogmatic teaching regarding matters of faith and morals. In this article the subject will be treated under the following heads: I. True Meaning of Infallibility; II. Proof of the Church's Infallibility; III. Organs of Infallibility — (A) CEcumenical Councils; (B) The Pope; IV. Scope and Object of Infallibility; V. What Teaching is Infallible?

I. True Meaning of Infallibilitt. — It is well to begin by stating the ecclesiological truths that are as- sumed to be established before the question of infalli- bility arises. It is assumed (a) that Christ founded His Church as a visible and perfect society; (b) that He intendetl it to be absolutely universal and imposed upon all men a solemn obligation actually to belong to it, unless inculpable ignorance should excuse them;

(c) that He wished this Church to be one, with a visible corporate unity of faith, government, and worship;

(d) and that in order to secure this threefold unity, He bestowed on the .\postles and their legitimate succes- sors in the hierarchy — and on them exclusively — the plenitude of teaching, governing, and liturgical powers with which He wished this Church to be endowed. And this being assumed, the question that concerns us is whether, and in what way. and to what extent, Christ has made His Church to be infallible in the exer- cise of her doctrinal authority. It is only in connexion with doctrinal authority as such that, practically speaking, this question of infallibihty arises; that is to say, when we .speak of (he Church's infallibility we mean, at least primarily and principally, what is some- times called active as distinguished from passive in- fallibility. We mean in other words that the Church is infallible in her objective definitive teaching regard-

ing faith and morals, not that believers are infallible in their subjective interpretation of her teaching. "This is obvious in the case of individuals, any one of whom may err in his understanding of the Church's teaching; nor is the general or even unanimous consent of the faithful in beUeving a distinct and independent organ of infallibility. Such consent, indeed, when it can be verified as apart, is of the highest value as a proof of what has been, or may be, defined by the teaching au- thority, but, except in so far as it is thus the subjective counterpart and complement of objective authorita- tive teaching, it cannot be said to possess an absolutely decisive dogmatic value. It will be best therefore to confine our attention to active infallibility as such, as by so doing we shall avoid the confusion which is the sole basis of many of the objections that are most per- sistently and most plausibly urged against the doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility. (See below II, C.)

Infallibility must be carefully distinguished both from Inspiration (q. v.) and from Revelation (q. v.). Inspiration signifies a special positive Divine influence and assistance by reason of which the human agent is not merely preserved from hability to error but is so guided and controlled that what he says or WTites is truly the word of (lod, that God Himself is the princi- pal author of the inspired utterance; but infallibility merely implies exemption from liability to error. God is not the author of a merely infallible, as He is of an inspired, utterance; the former remains a merely human document. Revelation, on the other hand, means the making known by God, supernaturally, of some truth hitherto unknown, or at least not vouched for by Divine authority; whereas infallibility is con- cerned with the interpretation and effective safeguard- ing of truths alread}- revealed. Hence when we say, for example, that some doctrine defined by the pope or by an oecumenical council is infallible, we mean merely that its inerrancy is Divinely guaranteed according to the terms of Christ's promise to His Church, not that either the pope or the Fathers of the Council are inspired as were the writers of the Bible or that any new revelation is embodied in their teaching. It is well further to explain (a) that infallibility means more than exemption from actual error; it means exemption from the possibility of error; (b) that it docs not require holiness of life, much less imply im- peccability in its organs; sinful and wicked men may l)e Ciod's agents in defining infallibly; (c) and finally that the validity of the Divine guarantee is independ- ent of the fallible arguments upon which a definitive decision may be based, and of the possibly unworthy human motives that in cases of strife may appear to have influenced the result. It is the definitive result itself, and it alone, that is guaranteed to be infallible, not the preliminary stages by which it is reached. If (iod l)estowed the gift of prophecy on Caiphas who condemned Christ (John, xi, 49-52; xviii, 14), surely He may bestow the lesser gift of infallibility even on unworthy human agents. It is, therefore, a mere waste of time for opponents of infallibility to try to create a prejudice against the Catholic claim by point- ing out the moral or intellectual shortcomings of popes or councils that have pronounced definitive doctrinal decisions, or to try to show historically that such de- cisions in certain cases were the seemingly natural and inevitable outcome of existing conditions, moral, in- tellectual, and political. All that history may be fairly claimed as witnessing to under either of these heads may freely be granted without the substance of the Catholic claim being affected.

II. Proof of the Church's Infallibility. — That the Church is infallible in her definitions on faith and morals is itself a Catholic dogma, which, although it was formulated cecumenically for the first time in the Vatican Council, had been explicitly taught long before and had been assumed from the very beginning with- out question down to the time of the Protestant ref-