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Is John Bugay’s Rejection of Infallibility Infallible?

Is John Bugay’s Rejection of Infallibility Infallible?

Last updated on: March 14, 2017 at 12:13 am by Scott Eric Alt

Is John Bugay’s Rejection of Infallibility Infallible? 2017-03-14T00:13:41-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Pope Pius IX is infallibly unimpressed with the polemical rogue Mr. John Bugay (public domain)

John Bugay, the polemical rogue, has not met the dissident Catholic priest who hasn’t warmed the very tell-tale cockleshells of his red and beating heart. In his phantastical efforts to discredit the Church he rejected of old, he turns to the credible pens of those who also have rejected her. If these dissident priests continue, somehow, to claim they’re still Catholic, all the better as far as Mr. Bugay is concerned.

i. Mr. Bugay’s strange bedfellows

In the latest episode of this long, twilight struggle, Mr. Bugay unearths a 1981 book by August Bernhard Hasler. The title of the book is How the Pope Became Infallible: Pius IX and the Politics of Persuasion. Hasler, who died the year before it was let loose upon the world, was a dissident priest who lost his teaching faculties and was forced to resign from the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. (Unity being impossible without orthodoxy.) How reliable is Hasler? Consider that even the Protestant scholar Mark Powell takes him to task.

August Hasler portrays Pius IX as an uneducated, abusive megalomaniac, and Vatican I as a council that was not free. Hasler, though, is engaged in heated polemic and obviously exaggerates his picture of Pius IX. Accounts like Hasler’s, which paint Pius IX and Vatican I in the most negative terms, are adequately refuted by the testimony of participants at Vatican I.

Hasler’s work, however, is promoted by all the usual suspects. Anti-Catholics love him. They trip smack over their own soles to praise him. Dave Hunt cites him in Chapter 7 of A Woman Rides the Beast, as though his “heated polemic” were the standard text on the subject. John Ankerberg praises Hasler as a “learned Catholic scholar” for his “thorough discussion” of Vatican I. (This means that Hasler says what Ankerberg already believes to be true.) And—proving yet once more that anti-Catholicism makes strange bedfellows—Hans Kung, that other dissident priest who lost his teaching faculties, and who is prone to making outlandish claims, wrote an introduction to Hasler’s dumb book.

Mr. Bugay begins his blog article by quoting that bar and standard for all proof, “a FB friend of mine.” What says Mr. Bugay’s FBF?

It would be Orwellian doublespeak (and arbitrary) to say that a pope can guarantee absolute certainty for an individual on an issue while at the same time reserv[ing] the right to remove the absoluteness of that certainty a[t] any time.

I confess I am ’plexed what The FBF has in mind here. Is there a passage in the Catechism, or some encyclical perhaps, which The FBF, or Mr. Bugay, should direct me to, that says that the Church can declare a doctrine infallible in one century but then claim to be not so sure in the next? When has that happened? Tell us, Mr. Bugay. Tell us, FBF. I long to hear.

More important, however, is The FBF’s weird claim that papal infallibility is “arbitrary.” It is a whim—an invention, we are meant to believe, of Pius IX. It as though The FBF thinks that the pope woke up one morning in 1878; said to himself, “I should be able to do what I will”; and got up a Council to rubber-stamp the idea. The title of Mr. Bugay’s dumb post is “Before Infallibility Was a Twinkling in a Pope’s Eye.” We are meant to believe that, prior to Pius IX, the thought of it never entered the mind of man. Before then, popes behaved themselves, I guess. They trod the earth with lighter step. They looked to it. Even Luther would have loved Leo X.

ii. nothing you can know that isn’t known

But then, at the end of the second paragraph, Mr. Bugay grandly declares: “This very sort of thing”—i.e., the hunger for whim—“was what was at the foundation of the medieval discussions of papal infallibility.” Okay, wait. I’m lost. (This is my usual experience when reading the polemical rogue who writes for Failablogue. He calls it Triablogue, but I think that’s optimistic.) Let me see if I can parse this fit of synaptical gunplay in Mr. Bugay’s brain. Before Pius IX, the thought of infallibility was not even a twinkle in man’s eye; but nevertheless, the subject was an important topic of discussion in the Middle Ages. Have I got that right?

Well, yes, I do understand the man aright. And not only that, says Mr. Bugay, but so unknown was the very idea of papal infallibility in the Middle Ages, that in 1324 (a full 546 years before Pastor Aeternus), Pope John XXII rejected the idea in Quia Quorundam (QQ). (Just so that he could rule as a tyrant.)

Now, apart from this nonsensical piece of contradiction, it should be said, for the edification of both Mr. Bugay and The FBF, that QQ has not a thing to do with papal infallibility. Let us help the two out. Let us look at what the doctrine is. Let us search out the matter. Let us turn to the text that sets it all down before those who have eyes to see. According to Pastor Aeternus (yes, that’s the text Mr. Bugay should be quoting from, though he does not), the pope exercises his infallibility only when he speaks on matters of faith and morals. There is no mention of any other context for it. Here is the full definition.

We teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.

But how very embarrassing all this is for Mr. Bugay. In QQ, the pope is not speaking about a question of faith or morals, “to be held by the whole church.” Rather, he is speaking about the Rule of the Friars Minor, to be followed by those who enter the order. QQ has to do with changes to how Franciscans live out their charism in religious life; it has nothing to do with the truths of the faith. In the very passage Mr. Bugay quotes, here is what the pope says.

Concerning the rules of [religious] orders, it is lawful for [a pope’s successors] to declare or to change other things. (QQ 6)

No one suspects—well, Mr. Bugay may suspect, but he doesn’t count—that the rules of a religious order constitute infallible dogma. To act as though they do, and that changing them is tyranny, means only that you do not know what you’re talking about and should go home and calm down. They are disciplines, nothing more; they may be changed; the pope has the authority to change them. In his dumb post, Mr. Bugay makes no mention of any of this. But that should come as no shock to us.

Perhaps borrowing the idea from Hasler (like an apt scholar, he does not tell us the source of the quotation, so I am left to guess), Mr. Bugay describes John XXII’s view of infallibility (which does not apply here) as “an improper restriction of his rights as a sovereign.” In other words, John XXII wanted to discard the dogma so that he could do as he pleased. Why, next he’ll be changing the rule of the Dominicans! or the Cistercians! or even, save us, the Poor Clares! does eternal truth mean nothing to this jackanapes? what kind of man tramps on the poor Poor Clares? Mr. Bugay tells us all this, even though The FBF described the dogma (which does not apply here) as itself “arbitrary.” So without papal infallibility (which does not apply here), the pope is just an arbitrary sovereign; with it (and it does not apply here), the pope is just an arbitrary sovereign. And John XXII rejected the idea (which does not apply here), even though it would not be dreamed up for another 546 years. Do I have all that right, Mr. Bugay?

Dear reader, the only consistency here is hatred of the Catholic Church.

iii. consistency, foolish or otherwise, no hobgoblin of mr. bugay’s mind

But given the basis of Mr. Bugay’s critique, one would think he’d be grateful for the doctrine of infallibility. It is the one thing that prevents a pope from changing doctrine to suit his own whims, or the bullies of a secular age. If the dogmatic teaching of Pope John B. is infallible, Pope John C. can not change it. Protestantism has no such safeguard, and thus—in one of the most infamous examples—the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 became the first Christian convocation to give its imprimatur to the use of contraception. The moral teaching of all who had come before was, overnight, wrong. And of course, they well may have been—if they were only fallible in the first place.

Sects of Protestants, far and wide, are now giving the stamp of whim to gay relationships, gay “marriage,” and even gay clergy. Mr. Bugay’s own sect of the PCA, I trust, is not one of them. But who can tell us that some future assembly of the PCA will not do that very thing? What stops them? The only recourse someone like Mr. Bugay would have in that case would be to go into schism. There is talk now about dividing the PCA in three. Why not four? Five? Eighteen? 629? 33,000? Protestantism makes no guarantee of infallibility; thus whether the liberalizers are right, or Mr. Bugay is, can’t be known by mortal man. What’s to stop each of you from being his own sect?

Such whimsy does not come of infallibility. It comes of Protestantism. Yes, the arm can twist itself off the starfish; and it has. But it’s no longer Catholic. It’s Protestant. Now, we do have our dissident members. (Look no further than Hasler and Kung. Or, for that matter, Pelosi and Biden.) And we do have our issues with the exercise of Church discipline. We have our internal disputes on such matters as the liturgy. But it is clear what the Church teaches, and it is clear that our doctrines do not change and can not change. That is not being arbitrary; it is being faithful. It is how we know that Hasler and Kung are heretics and not just members of a different Catholic sect.

Mr. Bugay can make no such guarantee regarding his sect’s teaching. Not even when it comes to infallibility itself.

***

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