Friday, October 7, 2022

Robert Spencer (EO) on Pope Innocent I

  

. . . throughout the history of the Church, there have been other papal statements [other than Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, which defined the Bodily Assumption of Mary] in which the pope was clearly intending to discharge his office and define a doctrine to be held by the whole Church. Thus, if the First Vatican Council is to be believed, these, too, must be infallible, protected from error by the Holy Spirit.

 

This claim first encounters difficulty with a statement of Pope Innocent early in the fifth century. St. Augustine relates that Innocent settled a controversy regarding the question of whether or not Holy Communion should be given to infants in no uncertain terms:

 

What was that which the same pope replied to the bishops of Numidia concerning this very cause, becoming he had received letters from both Councils, as well from the Council of Carthage as from the Council of Mileve—does he not speak most plainly concerning infants? For these are his words: “For what your Fraternity asserts that they preach, that infants can be endowed with the rewards of eternal life even without the grace of baptism, in excessively silly; for unless they shall eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, they shall not have life in themselves. “Pope Innocent, of blessed memory, says that infants have not life without Christ’s baptism, and without partaking of Christ’s body and blood. If he should say, They will not, how then, if they do not receive eternal life, are they certainly by consequence condemned in eternal death, if they derive no original sin. (Blessed Augustine, Two Letters Against the Pelagians, 2.7)

 

Was people Innocent speaking ex cathedra? He was responding to letters from two local councils that were considering this question, and thus clearly exercising his authority, acting—as Vatican I put it, “in discharge of the office of Pastor and Teacher of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority.” Was he intending to define, “a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal church”? That is clear as well since he says that infants, as Augustine relates Innocent’s ruling, “have not life without Christ’s baptism, and without partaking of Christ’s body and blood.” This is clearly a doctrine that Innocent believed to be held, or should be held, by the universal Church: infants can’t be cut off from eternal life for not receiving Holy Communion in one jurisdiction and yet free from this risk in another.

 

The fact that Innocent’s statement has apparently not survived outside of Augustine’s writings is immaterial. Augustine is not known to be an untrustworthy witness, although he is known to be at odds with other Fathers regarding original sin for what is known as “ancestral sin” among the Orthodox); and the passage of time is so great that no conclusions can be drawn from the absence of this document in the papal archives, if it is indeed not present there.

 

What is important about Innocent’s statement is that it meets all of Vatican I’s criteria for an infallible statement of the Roman Pontiff. Such decisions, says Vatican I, are “irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church” (Pastor Aeternus, 4). Yet Roman Catholics did not hesitate to reform it, at the Council of Trent over a thousand years later. That Council taught a flat contradiction of what Pope Innocent had taught, “If anyone says that communion of the Eucharist is necessary for little children before they have attained the years of discretion, let him be anathema” (Council of Trent, [session 21] canon 4).

 

Not doubt by the time of the Council of Trent, Pope Innocent’s words had been long forgotten, and the practice of the Roman Church had changed; Holy Communion was no longer given to infants. But if papal infallibility as defined by Vatican I is indeed a divinely revealed dogma, then it had to be a part of the teachings imparted by the apostles to their successors, the first bishops; the Roman Church, like all Christian churches, teaches that revelation ended with the death of the last apostle.

 

That means there is no time limit. Dogmas are divinely revealed, and as such they do not expire. Truth is eternal and changeless. A is A throughout all ages. If Pope Innocent intended to teach a doctrine that he believed should be held by the whole Church, then it would be a doctrine to be held by the whole Church for all time. The infallibility of the Church is held by the apostolic Churches in both the East and the West; it is a recognition of the Lord’s promise that He would send the Holy Spirit, who would not allow the Church to go astray, “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” (John 16:13).

 

The only way out of this for defenders of papal infallibility would be to maintain that Pope Innocent was not speaking ex cathedra. But which parts of the Vatican I criteria for an ex cathedra statement did he not meet? He was responding to letters from local councils who were asking not his personal opinion, but the view of the Pope of Rome on a matter of Christian doctrine. Innocent clearly meant to settle the matter by giving the orthodox view. And when he did so, he characterized the rulings of these local councils as “excessively silly,” and warned that unless infants received Holy Communion, they did not have eternal life.

 

If this was a question of salvation or darnation, it was quintessentially a matter of faith. But if it was indeed such a matter, then the pope’s teaching is contradicted by the later Roman Council, which Roman Catholics consider to be an ecumenical council, and so either the pope or the Council is wrong and therefore not infallible. Yet according to Roman Catholic teaching, both popes and Ecumenical Councils are infallible, and so in this contradiction the Roman Catholic teaching on how infallibility is exercised within the Church is thus revealed to be false.

 

The only other possibility is that People Innocent was referring only to baptism, not Holy Communion, as necessary for infant salvation, for it is the idea that infants need not be baptize that he terms “excessively silly,” and only introduces the question of Holy Communion after that. However, Augustine’s summary statement clearly refers to both sacraments: “Pope Innocent, of blessed memory, says that infants have not life without Christ’s baptism, and without partaking of Christ’s body and blood.” Augustine also speaks elsewhere of the need for infants to receive both baptism and the Holy Eucharist: “If reconciliation through Christ is necessary to all men…This reconciliation is in the laver of regeneration and in the flesh and blood of Christ, without which not even infants can have life in themselves” (Blessed Augustine, Two Letters Against the Pelagians, 4.8).

 

Thus it is clear that Augustine understood that the pope meant to say that both sacraments were required for infants, and that Pope Innocent meant to settle a matter of faith for the whole Church. The contradiction of this teaching on this matter by the Council of Trent destroys the entire edifice of papal infallibility. (Robert Spencer, The Church and The Pope: The Case for Orthodoxy [Uncut Mountain Press, 2022], 48-51, comments in square brackets added for clarification)