The Roman Catholic doctrine that the Pope—as the "Vicar of Christ" and holding the "key of St Peter"—cannot err when he speaks on matters of faith and morals ex cathedra ("from the throne"). The idea has been swimming around in Roman Catholic circles for some time but was officially promulgated only during Vatican I, the Roman Catholic council called by Pope Pius IX(r1846-78) in 1869-70. The fact that it took the Roman Catholic Church so long after its founding to enact such a doctrine more than suggests that it is not something they take seriously either. The official pronouncement came at a point in history when secular societies in the West, influenced increasingly by rationalism, were giving up the idea of absolute authority, and more specifically, when the Catholic Church itself came under siege as the Italians fought to establish their national independence. In the process the Church lost almost all of its territory on the peninsula and came to be confined the the "tiniest nation" in the world, Vatican City (only 44 hectares). In protest Pope Pius refused to leave the City, declaring himself "the prisoner of the Vatican." His convocation of the Council and pronouncement of infallibility could be seen as a desperate response to these circumstances as a way of re-asserting Rome's authority among the faithful in their congregations.
The doctrine of papal infallibility was, and remains, poorly defined, and this has cause not a little problem for Catholic theologians. One of them who received the sharp end of this was the German theologian at Tübingen, Hans Küng, who raised questions about it in the 1970s and raised an international furore when he was censored by the Church for it and other vague defined issues just before Christmas 1979. His "canonical commission" was withdrawn and he lost his licence to teach Catholic theology (a deal struck the following allowed him to teach continue teaching at Tübingen under secular rather than Catholic auspices). Nonetheless, he remains "a Catholic and a priest."
Patrick Toner, "Infallibility." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. This article provides a Roman Catholic view of the subject.
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A. J. D. Farrer, "How the Infallibility of the Pope was Decreed," The Baptist Quarterly 6.8 (1933):325-357.
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