The Infallible Pope?
By Miles McKee

If the successor to Peter is infallible then all Popes must be infallible! If Rome has an infallible teacher, then the Roman Church is infallible. That must mean, therefore, that she has never changed her position on any matter. Yet in church history we discover that at the Sixth Ecumenical Council, held in A.D. 680-681, a Bishop of Rome, Pope Honorius, was condemned for having embraced and promoted heretical teachings. This pope had embraced and promoted the heresy that Christ had only one will, the divine. This error, properly known as montheletism, does violence to the dual nature of Christ in that it totally disregards the fact that, as the divine/human savior, Christ Jesus, had two wills. So did Pope Honorius speak infallibly on matters of faith? He should have done so, if the “successor to Peter” is infallible.

Furthermore, the Council of Trent condemned popes Innocent I and Galacius I. There goes apostolic succession out the window, never mind infallibility. Consistency of belief and a deposit of truth in the Roman communion can be found as easily as a blind man can find a black cat in a dark room.

Surely, if Papal Rome is the guardian of the truth and has such a stalwart record of consistency of belief, we should expect her to have been constant and unswerving in her doctrine of Papal infallibility. However, this nonsensical doctrine was not officially adopted until the First Vatican Counsel of 1870. It was an old idea, which had been resisted by, surprise, surprise, many of the popes. For example Pope “John XXII did not want to hear about his own infallibility, he viewed it an improper restriction of his rights as a sovereign, and in the bull Qui quorundam (1324) condemned the Franciscan doctrine of papal infallibility as the work of the devil.” (How the Pope Became Infallible by Roman Catholic historian Bernard Hasler pages 36 and 37)

Why did such as Pope John XXII resist the idea of infallibility? Because they thought that the idea of papal infallibility could actually limit Papal power! Think about it, if infallibility was introduced, popes could not just run around the place overthrowing what other popes had decreed.

And just who originally came up with the brainchild of papal infallibility? Again, surprise, surprise, it was the invention of one Peter Olivi, a Franciscan who was more than once accused of heresy. Olivi liked the idea of papal infallibility because he wanted to ensure that future popes would not overthrow a ruling, favorable to his view of poverty, made by Pope Nicholas III (1277-1280).

Furthermore, in 1633 the infallible pope, Urban VIII condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth went round the sun. But, in 1741, the infallible Benedict XIV commanded the Holy Office grant an imprimatur to the first edition of the Complete Works of Galileo.

In 1905 the infallible pope, Pius X, condemned most mainstream biblical scholarship as heresy and insisted that the Bible must be seen as literally true and that the Latin Vulgate was the final version. In 1943 the infallible Pope Pius XII both reversed most of that first pope’s teaching on the Bible and then ten years later canonized him as a saint.

In 1958 a 77 year old cardinal was elected to be Pope John XXIII, and was given access to the secret Vatican files about himself, including a hand-written note from the above canonized pope saying that he was unsuitable for promotion and was suspect of heresy. Pope John smiled and quirked, “Yes, but now we are infallible!”