Infallibility has its limits

Many of us who cling desperately to our Catholic Church for instruction, inspiration and support prayed that a new Pope would help heal the church's serious wounds and reconnect it more surely to modern realities.

Instead, the cardinals have chosen a good and holy man who, we are told, rather than reform the status quo will reaffirm it more insistently than before. The current challenge of the church is twofold. First, it must continue proclaiming the unalterable and unchallengeable truths of Christ, instructing us to love one another as we love ourselves and to collaborate in improving the world that God created but did not complete. That includes the obligation to be generous to those in need, and to avoid unjust and unnecessary wars that kill innocent people.

To deny these eternal and unchangeable truths of Christ is to renounce the Catholic Church. The second challenge is to reassess the alterable rules made for us by the male descendants of Peter who were and are humanly frail, as he was, and to readjust those rules to better serve the purpose of helping modern Catholics to live fuller and holier lives in this ever-changing world.

This would include, among other things, reconsidering celibacy, women's role in the church and other contentious man-made church policies. The church can do this without abandoning its fundamental commitment to the Gospel of Jesus, and has in fact done it in the past in changing its position on slavery, usury, salvation outside the church and divorce. The church is extremely hesitant about using or even defining the idea that it is "infallible" in its teaching. None of the currently contentious issues has been so designated. In fact, the church asserts its infallibility only under strictly defined limits, and it has happened very few times in church history. The only formal exercise of papal infallibility in modern times was by Pope Pius XII and dealt with Mary, the mother of Christ.

Despite this history, our new Pope's record and the opinion among Vatican watchers offer little hope for meaningful changes or even for a clear admission that its man-made rules are indeed alterable by the church that made and enforces them. But then, ours is a church that continues to entertain the possibility of miracles, big and small and is capable of startling and invigorating changes of course like the ascendance of John XXIII, who gave us the Second Vatican Council that brought Catholicism a bright new enlightenment in the 1960s. Hope springs eternal.

Cuomo, former governor of New York,practices law with Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP.

I don't agree with spreading heresy, but you are simply wrong about him saying "mater si, magistra no". See the link I gave for the story on that: It's a quote from Wills, not Buckley, and it isn't referring to Buckley but to Frank Meyer. The two quotes I gave you from Buckley on the encyclical are written 3-4 months after it was published - that's awfully fast for a memory problem.

http://eutopia.cua.edu/printarticle.cfm?ID=67

On July 29, 1961, a short notice in an NR weekly events column observed: "whatever the final effect (of the encyclical), it must strike many as a venture in triviality coming at this time in history" when communism was rising with its dehumanizing usurpation of the economy, and free market economies in the US, Japan, and Europe were booming. Two weeks later, a single line in NR's gossip column quipped: "Going the rounds in Catholic conservative circles: Mater si , Magistra, no." (Contrary to Fr. Collins' assertion, Buckley wrote no essay with this title, seminal or otherwise). America subsequently condemned NR for these remarks, on grounds that it was presumptuous and disrespectful to even appear to criticize an encyclical. However, as Buckley noted in the August 26 NR, "National Review has made no substantive criticism of Mater et Magistra'. It merely pointed out that "coming at this particular time in history, parts of it may be considered as trivial." He also noted correctly that the encyclical, like other social encyclicals, lays out broad principles and does not prescribe specific votes on US federal entitlement or welfare programs. "There is room for disagreement as to whether a particular social measure is dehumanizing in its tendency; Catholics can disagree on this matter."
On September 23, Buckley published in NR a letter he had written to America editor Fr. Thurston Davis, SJ, which Davis had refused to publish. The Mater si quote, Buckley explained, spoken "by a Catholic scholar in Virginia, was flippancy pure and simple. I take no objection to your denouncing the flippancy as having been in imperfect taste: I am quite prepared to subject myself to the criticism of my elders on such matters."

Thanks, gbc. It turns out it is I who have the memory problem. I apologize. There is no doubt that brother Reid wrote a long piece correcting his brother. I still can't find it, yet - although I did find Joe Sobran's "Le noveau Canard" which refuted the ugly charges of antisemitism against him.

Heck, Buckley was willing to throw anyone under the bus (including his Dad) if it meant currying favor with a certain clique of N. Y. intellectuals.

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