Woodward interview
I was listening to the Hugh Hewitt show and he was interviewing Kenneth L. Woodward about an article on Romney that had a lot of Mormon bashing in it. Woodward has been responsible for Newsweek’s Religion section since 1964 and he identified himself as a Catholic. In part of the interview Hugh was asking him the difference between some aspects of Mormonism and Catholicism and Woodward went on to explain that infallibility was something that has only been invoked once in the last 150 years and this happened in the 1950s.
Now I am not surprise to hear that people responsible for religions sections of the MSM would know so little about their faith. For one he event gets the common misunderstanding wrong. Normally people will claim that there has only been two acts of infallibility since Vatican I defined it. This would of course be the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950. So to say there is was only one case is to get even this wrong. The truth is that the Pope uses the charism of infallibility every time there is a canonization. The language used in a canonization is "we declare and define that Blessed N., is a saint" which triggers the Church's gift of infallibility. It would be true to say that there have been only two dogmatic declarations since Vatican I, but not that these were the only case of papal infallibility.
Then of course there is the fact that infallibility was something that came into play many times in the history of the Church especially in regards to Church councils. The dogma of infallibility was only defined in 1870 and many think that it didn't exist for then, but this would be like saying that Jesus wasn't divine until the 1st Council of Nicea.
Mr. Woodward could not even come up with any differences between Mormon prophets and when the Church invokes its gift of infallibility. There is a large gap between development of doctrine and the defining of one and the abrupt changes that have occurred in Mormonism.
All I can say is that if Kenneth L. Woodward is as knowledgeable of other faiths as he is about his own then that explains the Newsweek coverage.
Hugh's post on the subject
Jimmy Akin's post on infallibility.
Update: I made a glaring error since the Immaculate Conception was defined before Vatican I and so there has only been one dogmatic declaration since Vatican I.
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Thanks for posting this. I learned a lot.
Actually, as the dates you list reveal, the Immaculate Conception (1854) was infallibly defined before Vatican I defined Infallibility (1870).
I love listening to Hugh Hewitt but his take on religion is not one of those reasons. Earlier today he claimed to be both Presbyterian and Catholic which, as an orthodox Catholic, is sounds a little like saying a traffic light is red and green at the same time.
He also said the good music for Easter is in all the Protestant services. Whatever. I mean if your idea of good music is an hour of Amy Grant with the sub-woofers turned all the way up, then maybe.
Personally, I would rather listen to blenders make love with live squirrels.
Uh, Stubby, Hugh was born and raised a Catholic and converted to the Presbyterian brand of Christianity as an adult, so he is entirely correct that he is/was both Catholic and Presbyterian.
As a catholic, unless you go to high mass at your local cathedral, most of the good music is at prostestant churches. The stuff you're talking about is at congregational churches and the like, not what are classically defined as 'protestant'.
Anyone who get's their information on religion from Newsweek has got to be kidding.
StubbleSpark, Hugh is a Presbyterian as am I. We are also both catholic is the sense of the Apostles' Creed ("the holy catholic church"). You, I should guess, are a member of the ROMAN Catholic Church...meaning the part of the catholic ("worldwide") church under the authority of the Bishop of Rome.
I also find it difficult to believe that you think that the Easter portions of Handel's Messiah or Bach's Easter Oratorio sound like blenders making love with live squirrels!
I will agree with you, however, that Amy Grant falls considerably short when compared with Gregorian Chant http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Epistle_for_the_Solemn_Mass_of_Easter_Day.ogg
Well we'll have to agree to disagree on that Bird... As far as the Church is concerned there's nothing universal about methodism and only Anglo-Saxons refer to the Catholic Church as "Roman" anyway so your point is moot. You might claim to be "catholic" (whatever that means to you) but I doubt it will agree with any idea of what that means to the Church Fathers.
Uh, the pope does not exercise infallibility when he canonizes. Over the past centuries, a few theologians have postulated that he does but others have disagreed and the issue has never been formally addressed or defined by any pope or council.
Canonization is fundamentally a liturgical act: adding a person's name to the role of people who receive formal liturgical veneration. Liturgy for the most part falls under discipline, not doctrine, hence, cannot be subject to infalliblity.
Furthermore, a decision to canonize rests on fallible historical judgments combined with the divine corroboration of a miracle, but determining which miracle claims are authentic and which are not depends on fallible human scientific judgements. That's why most theologians would say canonizations are not infallible and why no pope or council has ever insisted they are.
Some Traditionalists like to claim that canonizations are exercises of infallible magisterium, but it's just not true.
Wouldn't JPII's 1994 Apostolic Letter "Ordinatio Sacerdotalis" in which he addresses the male-only preisthood also be considered an infallible statement?
"...Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."
Trubador,
Jimmy Akin deals with it here. Jimmy thinks the answer is no, as does, much more importantly, then-Cardinal Ratzinger in a 1995 response to a dubium on the matter. The whole post is long, but very much worth reading.
I guess I should have prefaced my comment about Protestant music by saying that I have not ever attended a Presbyterian service. I am sure they are very nice but I would have never guessed that Handel and Bach were in fact Presbyterians ^_^
As far as Hugh's claim to being some sort of hybrid Presbo-catholic is concerned, I still think that stinks of have-cake-eat-it-too-ism -- a popular grind at your theological cafeterias but not anywhere where theology is understood to be a study of objective truth.
I used to be Baptist and I do not refer to myself as a Catholic-Baptist because I have enough respect for both traditions to treat them separately. So Hugh wants to sound cool like some lame-o college student at a cocktail party who tries to impress the ladies by revealing he is both Irish AND Cherokee.
Whatever.
From this side of the Tiber, it would make more sense if this was the middle of the Cold War and he declared himself a Communist-Republican. In the end, he has the free will to denominate himself literally as a traitor-patriot but no amount of declaring on his part will make a truth appear from the fabric of the convenient lie that one can be a convert to ecumenicalism.
Perhaps the reason he still looks so longingly back over his shoulder is that deep down he knows he did not convert because he was swayed by a profound and deeply moving theological truth but, like most converts from Catholicism, it was a matter of convenience -- a desire for a less hard-core brand of Christianity.
At one point in his conversion he had to have changed his fundamental understanding of "Church" from the historically Christian idea "the hierarchical body of believers and teachers Christ himself started when He walked this earth and that still exists today" to the Protestant ecclesial-agnostic concept of an amorphous community that may or may not be the one in which I presently worship.
As far as the ROMAN Catholic designator is concerned, I find that quite laughable. As if anyone ever referred to "Presbyterian-Catholic" or "Lutheran-Catholic" churches as being synonyms for the universal Church instituted by Christ for the salvation of men on earth.
Trying to make the world's largest and historically most significant group of Christians sound incidental by tacking on the nominator "Roman" is a pathetic stretch that is not going to make any Catholic I know demure.
Dennis Martin raises valid and important points.
The idea that canonizations are infallible is the opinion of some theologians but isn't certain by any means, so we shouldn't be too dogmatic and matter-of-fact about it.