John Bugay’s False Understanding of Infallibility

Last updated on: March 11, 2018 at 1:50 pm by Scott Eric Alt

John Bugay’s False Understanding of Infallibility 2018-03-11T13:50:38-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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

In a recent post (here), the polemical rogue John Bugay begins with a weird question. “Over at Old Life,” he says, “a commentater [sic] asked: ‘At what point are we free to conclude that a corrupt hierarchy points to a false church?'”

Mr. Bugay finds the question very compelling, but I find it dumb beyond the power of words. (Don’t ever be told that there is no such thing as a dumb question. In fact, the world is infested with them, like gnats or tweets.)

At what point are we free to conclude that a corrupt leadership points to a false country? If Mr. Bugay wants to be consistent (and why would he not?), he should come out in support of a schism of states.

“It is not as if” (he goes on) “the sex abuse scandal is the only corruption the hierarchy is involved in.”

Which church are we talking about again? Remember Matt. 7:4-5.

“The corrupt hierarchy” (he goes on) “goes way back in history. They’ve just traded different corruptions.”

Yes, and so it goes. That business about Total Depravity is a funny thing; it effects all of us. Can we conclude that this points to a false earth?

(This is an aside. I always find it odd, dear reader, that a Calvinist—who believes in the doctrine of Total Depravity—suddenly cries foul when he finds it in a Catholic bishop. Perhaps he thinks that this shows that the Church cannot be infallible. But the dogma does not say that the pope, or any other Catholic, is incapable of sin. Pius IX is never impressed with any of this.)

“This is not to say” (Mr. Bugay concludes with a grand sweep of his hand), “that there are not bad Protestant pastors.” How nice of him to concede so much jello. Catholic leaders are “corrupt”; Protestant pastors are merely “bad.” That’s the game with words he plays.

But the question is rather, “how can such a corrupt hierarchy claim, with a straight face, that a holy God will grant them doctrinal ‘infallibility’ under any circumstances at all, much less the ‘particular’ circumstances that they have narrowly defined?”

Well, if we’ve “narrowly” defined it, why should he hold forth so yawningly on his blog about it? Once again, Mr. Bugay misses the point: The Holy Spirit does not guide the Church into all truth to preserve the purity of men; it does so, rather, to assure our unity in one mind and one judgment (cf. John 17:17-21; 1 Corinthians 1:10).

But doesn’t a careful study of the Bible—even Mr. Bugay’s Bible, which has seven whole books missing—tell us that God has a remarkable proclivity for working through sinners? David committed sexual sin, but God still inspired him to write infallible scripture. Sinners wrote the infallible Bible; sinners preserve the unity of the infallible Church. It is no more difficult than that.

Annie Dillard put it best, in Holy the Firm:

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered and generations which forgot. There has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day.

At what point are we free to conclude that a bunch of inane posts points to a false blog?

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