Challenging the CDF infallibility claim
FRANCIS A. SULLIVAN, S.J. taught ecclesiology at the Gregorian University in Rome for 36 years until 1992, and is author of Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (Paulist, 1983). We quote from his essay in America (12/9) and The Tablet (12/23).
APPEAL TO A LONG-STANDING tradition of the past might not suffice as proof that a doctrine has been taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium. What has to be clearly established is that the tradition has remained constant, and that even today the universal body of Catholic bishops is teaching the same doctrine as definitively to be held. How can this be demonstrated?
...Official documents have proposed three ways of establishing that a doctrine is taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium: consultation with all the bishops, the universal and constant consensus of Catholic theologians, and the common adherence of the faithful. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has not invoked any of these criteria in support of its assertion that the doctrine excluding women from the priesthood has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium.
The changes in church doctrine that have actually taken place in the course of history show that a tradition could hold firm until advances in human knowledge or culture obliged the Church to look at the question in a new light. Through honest reexamination of its tradition in this new light, the Church has sometimes come to see that the reasons for holding to its previous position were not decisive after all. There is no denying the fact that many of the reasons given in the past to justify the exclusion of women from the priesthood are such as one would be embarrassed to offer today. No doubt, better reasons than those have been presented in the recent documents of the Holy See.
The question that remains in my mind is whether it is a clearly established fact that the bishops of the Catholic Church are as convinced by those reasons as Pope John Paul evidently is, and that, in exercising their proper role as judges and teachers of the faith, they have been unanimous in teaching that the exclusion of women from ordination to the priesthood is a divinely revealed truth to which all Catholics are obliged to give a definitive assent of faith. Unless this is manifestly the case, I do not see how it can be certain that this doctrine is taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium.
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