The Amazing Mr. X Plays Riddle Me This, Riddle Me That

Last updated on: March 10, 2017 at 12:41 am by Scott Eric Alt

The Amazing Mr. X Plays Riddle Me This, Riddle Me That 2017-03-10T00:41:39-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Pope John XXIII unimpressed with Mr. X’s riddles (public domain)

Rather than do the right and brave thing and address my rebuttals to every last one of his six objections to the unbroken succession of popes, TurretinFan decides to plow on as if nothing had happened and invent a seventh.

“Well, okay,” he says. “And what about John XX?”

Now, this kind of thing, when you get right down to it, is no more than an attempt to turn anti-Catholic claims into a game of Riddle Me This. Can you throw your opponent for a loop? Well, what about this pope? Well, what about that pope? So it goes with TF; who, because of his anonymity and his bold persistence in strange arguments, is known on this blog as the Amazing and Undaunted Mr. X of Calvinism.

Apart from his opening, and aimless, remarks about how pseudo-Catholics Joe Biden and Garry Wills are great big fans of Pope John XXIII, the point of Mr. X’s blog article is to go searching back through this list of popes for a missing John. Brandishing his magnifying glass, Mr. X uncovers some real discrepancies indeed.

[B]etween John XIX and John XXI you won’t find a John XX. Why not? Because John XXI made a mistake. He thought that several of his predecessors had been off by one in their count of the number of pope Johns. He thought that there was a [P]ope John between John XIV and John XV, who had not been properly identified. So, he was trying to correct it. Yet he was mistaken.

You would almost think that Mr. X had identified the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll. Readers of the blog may remember this earlier article; in it I quoted Vatican I’s definition of the dogma of infallibility to the show that the charism is restricted to “doctrine[s] concerning faith or morals” (IV.9). But lest we think that Mr. X has misread Pastor Aeternus and thinks it says “a doctrine concerning faith or ordinals,” he admits that that is not his claim. Well, well, then. So what is his claim? Let us read on.

My point is broader. If the pope cannot figure out which pope John he is, do you really think he can define dogma infallibly? Likewise, if the popes John themselves cannot figure out the chain of succession, so as to know which ordinal number goes with their name, what makes you think that this chain of succession is historically reliable and has any real meaning?

So Mr. X tries to convict the papacy on a technicality. And therein hangs a tale. For time and again, the Protestant apologist reveals just how dim is his basic understanding of the point of papal infallibility. The reason God gave the pope this charism in the first place—the only reason—was to protect the Church from error in faith or morals. When defining ordinals, neither the purity of Church teaching, nor the unity of Christians, is at stake. The Holy Spirit does not protect the pope from error when he counts numbers. It is not a question of: If the pope is infallible in large things, he must also be infallible in small things, all the way down to pointless trivia. It is not as though, to be of any use, infallibility has to also mean that the pope knows the exact number of jelly beans in the jar; or drops of water in the Pacific Ocean; or the number of paces between the Tiber River and Mr. X’s left pinky toe. By no means. Rather, infallibility is a charism that the Holy Spirit grants the pope only under very specific circumstances and for very specific purposes. To claim otherwise is a fundamental misunderstanding of the doctrine, and the purpose, of infallibility.

And if Mr. X really means to suggest that a missing ordinal between John XIX and John XXI means that there was a gap in the succession where John XX would have been, then I submit to you that he’s playing you for a sucker for sophistry.

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