Brian Tierney is the author of an excellent work, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages. For those who wish to study the papacy and its development, this is a must-read.
In his discussion of the infallibility of the papacy as defined in 1870, Peter Chirico, a Catholic priest and scholar, wrote the following in response to Tierney and others:
Brian Tierney has shown that this teaching was first formulated by Pietro Olivi (c. 1248-1298) for what were basically political reasons. From this he concludes that the doctrine can be discarded; for it is post-biblical.
In reply to this, I would say that the initial formulation of a doctrine by a theologian and the intrinsic grounds of its justification are two different things. Tierney assumes that a doctrine has to be present in some way in the Scriptures for it to belong to the deposit of faith. The consistent position of this work is that what is revealed exists often only potentially in the early Church (as an oak in the acorn); later it exists implicitly in the operation of the Church; and the explication of that deposit may come centuries and even millennia later. However accurate Tierney’s historical research may be, the dogmatic conclusions he draws about the nonrevealed nature of the teaching of infallibility do not follow . . . Now many who have undertaken to investigate the history of infallibility (like Küng and Tierney) assume that for a doctrine to be of divine faith it must be articulated in the sacred books, or it must be reducible to articulation from two or more scriptural articulations, or it must be implicit in the actions performed by the scriptural Church. Further, one must be able to trace the understanding of the doctrine through history from the scriptural beginnings. These assumptions, it seems to me, are too facile. They would rule out what I have called “second-order dogmatic meanings,” that is, doctrines which articulate the recurring processes by which first-order doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity come into existence.
The contention here is that the teaching on infallibility is such a second-order dogmatic meaning. It did not appear and could not have appeared in the beginning. First came experience of God in Christ and the effort to live out in the implications of the basic experience of the Resurrection. Then, after a more or less lengthy period, the recurring relationships between man and man, on the one hand, and between man and God, on the other, were articulated. Only after a further period were the doctrines I have called “ontic” articulated. Finally, doctrines such as infallibility represent summations of the conditions under which relational and ontic teachings have come into being. They are thus thematizations of what are already abstract processes. They articulate what is common to the genesis of all certitude in the Church.
The origin of infallibility means that it could not have emerged early. It is a most general doctrine; and, as is well known, the most general teachings inevitably emerge last. It required almost two thousand years of acting and philosophical reflection for the Church to begin even in a rudimentary way to grasp the conditions of infallibility; and the end is not in sight. (Peter Chirico, Infallibility: The Crossroads of Doctrine [Theology and Life Series 1; Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1983], 226-27, emphasis added)
Chirico is forced to argue (1) that the dogma of papal infallibility developed, a la Newman’s development hypothesis, from a seed to the oak tree, over two thousand years. The problem is that the various councils, Vatican I especially, does not allow for the development hypothesis to be applied to papal primacy and papal infallibility. I discussed this at:
Further, Chirco is forced to (2) reject the material sufficiency of Scripture, the mainstream Catholic view of the nature of Scripture, and something popularized by Yves Congar in Tradition and Traditions, which teachings:
The Catholic theory of “material sufficiency” says that the whole content of Revelation is present in Scripture if only implicitly, and denies that extrabiblical tradition offers any separate revelational material. It asserts totum in Scriptura, totum in traditione, as opposed to partim in Scriptura, partim in traditione. However, this does not necessarily mean that what is in Scripture cannot be illumined or amplified by what is in extrabiblical tradition, any more than it means the opposite could not occur. What is implicit in either one may be comparatively explicit in the other. (Philip Blosser, "What are the Philosophical and Practical Problems with Sola Scriptura?" in Robert A. Sungenis, ed. Not by Scripture Alone: A Catholic Critique of the Protestant Doctrine of Sola Scriptura [2d ed.; Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2013], 29-100, here, p. 78 n. 112)
