Quotes from the Pope’s recent interview with Fr. Spadaro, published in English translation in America Magazine —

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

“The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.”

“The complaints of today about how ‘barbaric’ the world is — these complaints sometimes end up giving birth within the church to desires to establish order in the sense of pure conservation, as a defense. No: God is to be encountered in the world of today.”

“And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together.”

“When the dialogue among the people and the bishops and the pope goes down this road and is genuine, then it is assisted by the Holy Spirit. So this thinking with the church does not concern theologians only.”

“We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”

“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists — they have a static and inward-directed view of things.”

“My authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative. I lived a time of great interior crisis when I was in Cordova. To be sure, I have never been like Blessed Imelda*, but I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.”

The Pope quotes St. Vincent of Lerins: “ ‘Even the dogma of the Christian religion must follow these laws, consolidating over the years, developing over time, deepening with age.’ ” Then he says:

“St. Vincent of Lerins makes a comparison between the biological development of man and the transmission from one era to another of the deposit of faith, which grows and is strengthened with time. Here, human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens.

“Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth. Exegetes and theologians help the church to mature in her own judgment. Even the other sciences and their development help the church in its growth in understanding. There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong.”

“The church has experienced times of brilliance, like that of Thomas Aquinas. But the church has lived also times of decline in its ability to think. For example, we must not confuse the genius of Thomas Aquinas with the age of decadent Thomist commentaries. Unfortunately, I studied philosophy from textbooks that came from decadent or largely bankrupt Thomism. In thinking of the human being, therefore, the church should strive for genius and not for decadence.”

— Pope Francis is not a conservative Catholic; he is an orthodox liberal Catholic. His criticism of errors among conservatives is long over-due in the Church. It has reached a point in many groups within Catholicism where conservatives think that they are the Magisterium, or they think that there can be no errors in their understanding of the Faith. A liberal Pope is just what we need to correct the errors on the far right among Catholics.

I note in particular the Pope’s criticism of some of those Thomists who try to base the entire Faith on an interpretation of St. Thomas’ work. This is not possible, for St. Thomas is not the Christ, and his works are not infallible.

As for his assertion that “all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief,” this teaching is found in Vatican II.

The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment in matters of faith when ‘from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful’ they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. (Lumen Gentium 12)

But this type of infallibility is simply an expression of the infallible Living Tradition. It is not an exercise of the Magisterium by the body of the lay faithful, nor is it a new type of infallibility apart from Tradition, Scripture, Magisterium.

*In my eschatology, the Miracle of Garabandal (which is also the third secret of Medjugorje) occurs on the feast day of Blessed Imelda and the vigil of the Feast of our Lady of Fatima, the evening of May 13th in 2016.

Ronald L. Conte Jr.
Roman Catholic theologian and
translator of the Catholic Public Domain Version of the Bible.