Women having those problems in the usa doesnt justify to any sane person going to north Korea instead
Women having those problems in the usa doesnt justify to any sane person going to north Korea instead
To me when I see you repeat that he's not a dem I see that you don't want to think of actual answers. Cause then you'd be forced to acknowledge the trump train wreck. Most democrats are actually pretty conservative. And trump is a never ending buffet of actual harm. Yes there are retarded views of dems but there are retarded views of republicans, especially from the man himself.
Just given trump nailed the coffin by borrowing money with tax cuts. Thats reason alone to not support him from any responsible adult. Republican presidents have been doing that for the last 50 years. You know its gonna take a responsible Democrat to dig us out of this, as it always does
Also I didn't see you chime in on my cstholicism and orthodoxy early church thread. You are going to great lengths to rationalize papal infallibility when its not even a teaching that was expressed in the early church, or much at all for well over a thousand years
I do appreciate your detached outsiders skeptical perspective. Its healthy to be challenged. Ive given lots of reasons on this site for why I choose to be Christian (such as chirtian miracles and jesus in ndes and chritisn philosophy) and believe in near death experiences. Such as my evidence for afterlife thread. I could see maybe being skeptical about some things, but ultimately not believing anything at all is skepticism for the sake of skepticism, and not completely a rational position itself
Consider a country's constitution.
Suppose a constitution says:
«“The government may do X.”»
A century later the supreme court says:
«“The government may not do X.”»
The court cannot simply say:
«“This is not a contradiction because we have now discovered that the original constitution secretly meant something else.”»
It has to provide an interpretation based upon the text, historical meaning, structure, precedent, and principles of interpretation.
And even then, people can legitimately argue that the court has changed the law rather than merely interpreted it.
Catholic doctrinal development faces a similar problem
Do you think if slavery for debts owed is fine morally, and perpetuating the slavery is moral... is this still moral? Should children of debt slaves be held into slavery into perpetuity? The current teaching that slavery is intrinsically immoral doesnt apply to any of this stuff?
Your problem is that you are so far down the rabbit hole with the church, that you cant look at this stuff objectively
Also Florence said those in original sin go to hell. And popes have consistently taught that babies are born in original sin. And the consistent understanding is that unbsprized babies go to hell or limbo. You do fancy footwork to get around this stuff. I admit the normative rule and the grace rule could be different in a legit way, but where do we draw the line rationalizing every apparent contradiction?
See above
Also my view on non Christians being condemned is the same as the catholic church. Knowingly rejecting jesus is the basis for condemnation. And, its not so much that they cant advance in the afterlife, its that they aren't proactively saved by the covenant of jesus with the father
Show me where the catholic church made distinguishment between pure interest and usury back when Catholics believed for practical purposes that charging interest is a sin.
Your problem is that you try to rationalize absolutely anything that looks like a contradiction. I did cede issues to you, in that if a person plays games philosophically you can justify any apparent contradiction. But where does that ever end? And, still, looking at it most objectively, it looks like the church taught one thing then taught another, on many many issues
Im non denomination but id consider liberal Catholicism. Basically Catholicism without papal infallibility. I actually have some really developed and informed thoughts on the merging of Catholicism and orthodoxy and protestantism into a grand theory, but the theology and logic runs deep
Cause north Korea is a beacon of woman's rights and women's interests?
Of course I know you compulsively say ridiculous things and that you just do it and cant really help yourself
It would be more precise to lay blame on our bankruptcy on the tax cuts of the last 50 years, as our debt would be manageable without that, but the main driver of the corresponding spending, is the military. Basically, us having a military thats not funded by taxes
Given we spend way less on welfare than other developed countries, and our federal Healthcare spending is on par with the rest of the developed world (we have a bloated private sector healthcare spending too but that's irrelevant cause our government Healthcare spending is similar), I think what we can conclude is both that we can't have nice things like other countries cause we have a bloated mikitary... and the thing thats really bankrupting us, is our desire to have a massive military and not being willing to pay for it, and instead borrowing the money so that we can throw money at rich people.
Of course it should be noted, this is all a republican driven problem
I saw dude post this and thought id get ya alls thoughts. These are all separate ideas but its stated in one statement...
"Socially enforced monogamy has, far and away, been the most effective mechanism for extracting disposable male utility ever conceived. Without enforced monogamy, every single civilization has collapsed as too many men opt out."
Theres a lot to unpack there
Rape me
https://youtu.be/4TsqlT0rfJI?is=DfyWXwCCr-2Je3pl
Hiven you didn't actually list accomplishments, I assume you are doing what the rest of the republican party does, and are basing what you said, on "vibes"
Elon Musk says, "After they eat the rich, they will starve." Backwards. The rich do not feed society; workers do. Farmers grow food, drivers move it, nurses heal, teachers teach, builders build, coders code, and labor keeps the world alive. Billionaires mostly own, extract, and profit from what others produce. If the rich vanished, work would continue. If workers vanished, the rich would have nothing to exploit.
Grab em by the loophole
The Magic-Hat Problem: Can Catholic Infallibility Protect Itself from Contradiction?
There is a powerful argument against the Catholic doctrine of papal and ecclesial infallibility that is often obscured by an overly narrow understanding of what the doctrine actually claims.
The argument is not simply:
«“Popes have said contradictory things.”»
Catholicism has an obvious response to that objection: not everything a pope says is infallible.
Nor is the argument:
«“Catholic theology has developed.”»
Catholics are perfectly entitled to believe that doctrine can develop while remaining faithful to the apostolic deposit.
The deeper problem is this:
Who gets to decide whether an apparent contradiction is actually a contradiction?
And even more importantly:
What prevents the Catholic Church from using its own authority to redefine the status or meaning of an earlier teaching whenever that teaching becomes inconvenient?
This is what I will call the Magic-Hat Problem.
The metaphor is simple. Imagine a magician who claims that his hat can never produce the wrong object. Whenever something apparently wrong comes out of the hat, however, he explains that it was never really the hat's fault: perhaps the object wasn't actually produced by the hat, perhaps we misunderstood what came out, perhaps the object has a deeper meaning, or perhaps the rules governing the hat have been misunderstood.
Eventually the question becomes not whether the magician can explain every individual trick, but whether there is any possible observation that could falsify his claim.
That is the challenge Catholicism faces with infallibility.
---
1. What Catholicism actually claims
The Catholic position is much stronger than the caricature that “Catholics think every pope is always right.”
The Church explicitly distinguishes ordinary papal statements from infallible definitions.
Vatican I taught that the pope is infallible when, acting as supreme pastor and teacher of all Christians, he definitively teaches a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church. Such definitions are said to be irreformable in themselves.
The modern Code of Canon Law states the same principle and adds an important qualification: a doctrine is not to be considered infallibly defined unless this is “manifestly evident.”
So far, this seems reasonable.
But Catholicism goes further.
The Church also teaches that the bishops united with the pope can exercise infallibility through an ecumenical council or through the ordinary and universal Magisterium. The Catechism says that infallibility extends to doctrines necessary for preserving and explaining the deposit of faith, including relevant moral doctrines.
Therefore the Catholic claim is not merely:
«“A pope sometimes says something that cannot be wrong.”»
It is:
«Christ established a teaching authority in His Church that is divinely protected from definitively teaching error in faith and morals.»
That is an enormous claim.
And precisely because it is an enormous claim, the Church must be able to explain apparent historical contradictions in a principled way.
---
2. The Catholic escape route
Suppose we discover this:
Earlier Catholic teaching:
«X is morally permissible.»
Later Catholic teaching:
«X is morally impermissible.»
The Catholic has several possible responses.
Response 1: The earlier statement was not infallible.
This is often the first response.
Perhaps the earlier pope was merely giving a theological opinion.
Perhaps he was making a prudential judgment.
Perhaps the statement was disciplinary rather than doctrinal.
Perhaps he was addressing a particular historical circumstance.
This is perfectly legitimate in principle.
The Church itself recognizes different levels of authority. Canon law distinguishes between infallible teaching and authentic but non-definitive teaching, to which Catholics nevertheless owe religious submission.
But now comes the problem.
If the earlier statement was authoritative enough that Catholics were expected to accept it, but it was nevertheless capable of being wrong, how do we know which authoritative teachings are protected from error?
The Catholic answer is that the Church tells us.
But that leads to the next problem.
---
3. Response 2: “We didn't really mean X”
Suppose the earlier statement clearly appears to teach X.
The later Church teaches not-X.
The Catholic can say:
«“The earlier statement didn't really mean X. It meant a more nuanced proposition Y, which is compatible with our present teaching.”»
Again, this is legitimate in principle.
Language changes.
Historical circumstances matter.
Technical theological terminology matters.
And genuine doctrinal development sometimes consists in making implicit distinctions explicit.
But there is a limit.
If virtually any apparent contradiction can be resolved by discovering that the earlier statement “really meant” something compatible with the later statement, then the Church possesses an extraordinary interpretive advantage:
It is both the defendant and the judge in its own doctrinal trial.
The Church makes the present interpretation.
The Church determines the authoritative meaning of the past.
The Church determines whether the past statement was definitive.
And the Church determines whether the present statement represents development rather than reversal.
That is the core problem.
---
4. The Catholic system becomes difficult to falsify
Consider a hypothetical example.
A pope says:
«“X is morally permissible.”»
A century later another pope says:
«“X is morally impermissible.”»
The first pope was wrong.
Catholicism says:
«“Impossible. The first pope wasn't speaking infallibly.”»
Fine.
But suppose someone responds:
«“But the first pope spoke as pope, addressed the entire Church, invoked Scripture and Tradition, and commanded Catholics to accept the teaching.”»
The Catholic can still say:
«“It was authoritative, but not infallible.”»
The critic asks:
«“How do you know?”»
The answer:
«“Because the later Church has determined that it wasn't infallible.”»
Now suppose the critic says:
«“But the earlier Catholics understood it as authoritative.”»
The answer:
«“They misunderstood its level of authority.”»
Suppose the critic produces another quotation.
The response can again be:
«“Different historical context.”»
Another quotation:
«“Different terminology.”»
Another:
«“Prudential judgment.”»
Another:
«“Disciplinary teaching.”»
Another:
«“Development.”»
Another:
«“The earlier statement concerned principle A, while the modern statement concerns application B.”»
Individually, every one of these distinctions might be legitimate.
But collectively they create an epistemological problem.
What historical evidence could ever establish that the Church really contradicted itself?
If the answer is “only if the Church itself admits it,” then the doctrine is close to unfalsifiable.
---
5. The problem becomes even stronger because Catholicism recognizes authoritative non-infallible teaching
There is an important detail that actually strengthens the objection.
Catholicism does not simply divide teachings into:
- infallible;
- worthless.
There is an intermediate category.
Canon 752 says that Catholics owe religious submission of intellect and will even to teachings on faith and morals that are not intended to be definitive.
This means a pope can teach something that is not infallible but nevertheless authoritative.
That creates a fascinating problem.
Suppose Catholics sincerely submit to a papal moral teaching for several centuries.
Then the Church substantially changes it.
The Catholic can say:
«“The original teaching wasn't infallible.”»
But the critic can reasonably answer:
«“Then your Church required Catholics to submit religiously to a teaching that was capable of being substantially wrong.”»
That doesn't necessarily disprove Catholicism.
But it weakens a particular intuition that Catholics often have about the Magisterium.
The Magisterium is not simply a machine that reliably outputs propositions labeled “true” or “false.”
There are degrees of authority.
And those degrees themselves are interpreted by the Magisterium.
That is precisely where the epistemological difficulty arises.
---
6. The “deposit of faith” creates the deeper problem
Catholicism tries to solve this by saying that the Church does not invent doctrine.
Vatican I explicitly taught that the Holy Spirit was not promised to Peter's successors so that they could reveal new doctrine, but so that they could faithfully guard and explain the apostolic deposit.
This is a very important limitation.
The pope isn't supposed to be receiving new revelations.
He is supposed to preserve something already given.
That gives us a criterion:
The later teaching should genuinely belong to the same apostolic deposit.
But now ask:
Who determines whether it does?
The Magisterium.
And who determines what the earlier teaching meant?
The Magisterium.
And who determines whether the later teaching is a development rather than a reversal?
The Magisterium.
This is where the circle appears.
The Church says:
«“We are infallible because Christ protects our teaching.”»
We ask:
«“How do you know that this particular teaching is protected?”»
The Church answers:
«“Because the Church teaches that it is definitive.”»
We ask:
«“How do you know the Church's present interpretation of its historical teaching is correct?”»
The answer again ultimately returns to the Church's teaching authority.
The system has tremendous internal coherence.
But from the outside, it has difficulty supplying an independent criterion.
---
7. The ordinary and universal Magisterium makes the problem even more interesting
Catholicism cannot solve everything by saying:
«“Only explicit papal definitions count.”»
Catholic theology says the ordinary and universal Magisterium can also teach infallibly.
Vatican II says bishops throughout the world, while remaining united with the pope, can infallibly teach when they agree that a doctrine is definitively to be held.
The 1998 Profession of Faith gives a particularly revealing example: it explains that the doctrine reserving priestly ordination to men is to be held definitively because it has been taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.
This is important because it means infallibility isn't merely about detecting certain magical phrases in papal documents.
The Church can look backward and say:
«“This doctrine has been continuously taught and therefore belongs to the infallible ordinary Magisterium.”»
That creates the possibility of retrospective infallibility.
The doctrine was not necessarily identified as an infallible definition when it was first taught.
Later the Church determines that the teaching had been infallible all along.
Again, that may be perfectly coherent.
But it makes the epistemological question unavoidable:
What independent method tells us that the historical consensus really was unanimous, universal, definitive, and protected by the Holy Spirit?
---
8. This is where historical contradictions become important
Now return to the historical examples.
The death penalty.
Slavery.
Usury.
The necessity of belonging to the Church for salvation.
The status of religious liberty.
The treatment of religious error.
The morality of lending money at interest.
The treatment of non-Christian peoples.
The status of unbaptized infants.
Not all of these are equally strong.
Some are clearly matters of theological development rather than direct contradiction.
Some historical statements were never infallible.
Some involve changes in circumstances.
Some involve different meanings of terminology.
But taken together, they reveal a recurring pattern:
The Catholic Church has repeatedly had to distinguish between what earlier generations of Catholics appeared to believe and what the Church now says those earlier Catholics actually meant.
That is not automatically dishonest.
It may genuinely be what doctrinal development looks like.
But it places an enormous burden on the doctrine of infallibility.
Because if the Church really is protected from error, then there should be a discoverable principle explaining why these are developments rather than reversals.
---
9. The death penalty illustrates the problem
The death penalty is especially useful because the Church itself has acknowledged substantial development.
Earlier Catholic teaching permitted capital punishment under certain circumstances.
Modern Catholic teaching says that the death penalty is inadmissible.
The Catholic explanation is that the underlying principle has not changed: legitimate authority may protect society, while modern circumstances make execution unnecessary and inconsistent with the dignity of the person.
Perhaps.
But notice what is happening.
The earlier teaching is being interpreted through the conceptual framework of the later teaching.
The modern Church tells us what the earlier Church “really meant.”
That is exactly what the critic questions.
The critic is not necessarily saying:
«“The earlier pope definitely made an ex cathedra error.”»
The critic is saying:
«“Your method for deciding that he did not make an error depends heavily upon the authority of the later Church to reinterpret him.”»
That is a fundamentally different objection.
---
10. Slavery creates the same tension
The slavery question is even more uncomfortable.
Catholic history contains both defenses or permissions of certain forms of enslavement and increasingly strong condemnations of slavery.
Catholics can—and should—distinguish different historical forms of servitude.
They can also point to Catholic figures who condemned unjust enslavement long before modern abolitionism.
But eventually we encounter a basic moral question:
Was owning another human being morally permissible or not?
If the answer was once “yes, under certain circumstances” and is now “no, slavery is intrinsically evil,” then Catholicism has to explain exactly what changed.
If the answer is:
«“Only unjust slavery was ever condemned, while legitimate servitude was always permitted,”»
then the historical question becomes:
«“Were the institutions historically defended by Catholic authorities actually the kind of legitimate servitude that modern Catholicism means?”»
That is a historical question, not something that can be settled merely by appealing to present doctrine.
The Church cannot simply define the past into conformity with the present.
---
11. “But doctrine develops!”
Yes.
And this is perhaps the most important concession.
Doctrine should develop.
A Christianity incapable of understanding its own doctrines more deeply would be intellectually stagnant.
The question is not whether development happens.
The question is whether development has a boundary.
Imagine:
«A → A'»
That is plausible development.
But:
«A → not-A»
is contradiction unless there is some principled reason why the two propositions weren't actually contradictory.
The Catholic theory therefore requires something stronger than:
«“The Church has a right to interpret its own history.”»
It requires:
«“There exists an objective continuity between the earlier and later teachings.”»
That continuity should not merely be declared.
It should be demonstrated.
---
12. The analogy of a constitution
Consider a country's constitution.
Suppose a constitution says:
«“The government may do X.”»
A century later the supreme court says:
«“The government may not do X.”»
The court cannot simply say:
«“This is not a contradiction because we have now discovered that the original constitution secretly meant something else.”»
It has to provide an interpretation based upon the text, historical meaning, structure, precedent, and principles of interpretation.
And even then, people can legitimately argue that the court has changed the law rather than merely interpreted it.
Catholic doctrinal development faces a similar problem.
The Church is both:
- interpreting the apostolic deposit; and
- determining what belongs to the apostolic deposit.
That is an extraordinarily powerful interpretive position.
---
13. The Catholic response: “Christ gave us the authority”
This is ultimately the Catholic trump card.
The Catholic says:
«“You are trying to judge the Church by an external standard. But Christ established the Church as the authoritative interpreter of revelation.”»
That is a coherent theological position.
But it doesn't solve the epistemological problem unless we can independently establish that this particular institution possesses that authority.
Otherwise the argument becomes:
«The Catholic Church is infallible because Christ gave it infallibility.»
«How do we know Christ gave it infallibility?»
«Because the Church teaches that Christ gave it infallibility.»
That isn't necessarily viciously circular if there are independent historical and theological arguments for the papacy.
But it means the infallibility claim cannot itself be used as its own evidence.
---
14. The Orthodox challenge becomes particularly interesting
This is one reason the Catholic-Orthodox disagreement is so profound.
Orthodoxy can say:
«“The Church is preserved from error, but that preservation does not require a single bishop possessing unilateral infallibility.”»
Catholicism can answer:
«“But without a final teaching authority, who settles disputes?”»
Orthodoxy can respond:
«“The Church as a whole, through councils, bishops, liturgy, Scripture, Tradition, and reception.”»
Catholicism responds:
«“But then who decides what counts as the authentic interpretation of Tradition?”»
And Orthodoxy responds:
«“The Church does.”»
At this point, both systems face an epistemological problem.
Catholicism has a clearer institutional final arbiter.
Orthodoxy has a less centralized but more conciliar conception of authority.
The Catholic advantage is clarity.
The Orthodox advantage, from the critic's perspective, is that it does not require one bishop to possess the extraordinarily strong charism defined at Vatican I.
The Orthodox may therefore be less vulnerable to the particular “magic-hat” problem of a single institution retroactively determining the infallible meaning of its own historical teaching.
But Orthodoxy has its own problem:
If two Orthodox jurisdictions disagree, who has the final word?
So the Catholic system risks over-centralization.
The Orthodox system risks under-definition.
That may explain why you have found the Orthodox authority structure compelling yet simultaneously troubling: it avoids some of Catholicism's problems while creating another problem—where exactly is the final court of appeal?
---
15. The most devastating version of the argument
The strongest version of the Catholic critique is therefore not:
«“Popes have contradicted themselves.”»
It is this:
«If Catholicism possesses an infallible teaching authority, then it should be possible to identify the protected content of that authority by principles that do not depend entirely upon the authority's later self-interpretation.»
Otherwise the system risks becoming circular.
Suppose an earlier teaching appears to be wrong.
Catholicism says:
«“It wasn't infallible.”»
Why?
«“Because it wasn't definitive.”»
Why wasn't it definitive?
«“Because the Church did not intend to define it.”»
How do we know?
«“Because the Church tells us how to interpret its teaching.”»
What if the historical evidence indicates that Catholics understood it as definitive?
«“They misunderstood the level of authority.”»
What if the words themselves sound definitive?
«“They must be understood in their historical context.”»
What if the context doesn't resolve the problem?
«“It was a development.”»
At some point, the critic is entitled to say:
What would count as evidence that the Church actually got something wrong?
If the answer is “nothing,” then the doctrine of infallibility is not functioning as a hypothesis that can be tested against history.
It is functioning as a rule for interpreting history.
That is the Magic-Hat Problem.
---
16. Yet this does not prove Protestantism
This argument should not be exaggerated.
If Catholicism has a problem, it does not follow that Protestantism automatically solves it.
Protestantism has its own authority problem.
If Scripture is the ultimate authority, who determines its interpretation?
If councils can err, how do Christians settle doctrinal disputes?
Why should one denomination's interpretation prevail over another?
Why accept the canon of Scripture itself?
These are genuine problems.
The argument against Catholic infallibility therefore does not automatically establish Protestantism.
It establishes something narrower:
The Catholic solution to the authority problem may solve the problem by creating another problem—an authority whose own interpretation of its past authority is difficult to independently evaluate.
---
17. Nor does it prove Orthodoxy
The same caution applies to Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy's conciliar model can appear attractive because it avoids placing ultimate doctrinal infallibility in the hands of one bishop.
But the Orthodox world itself contains disagreements about authority, councils, reception, autocephaly, and the interpretation of Tradition.
If there is no pope with universal jurisdiction, there is no universally recognized equivalent of the pope to settle every dispute.
That is not necessarily evidence against Orthodoxy.
But it means that the authority question remains unresolved.
---
18. The real choice may be between different kinds of uncertainty
Perhaps this is the deepest insight.
Catholicism offers:
«A clear institutional authority with a very strong claim to divine protection.»
Orthodoxy offers:
«A more distributed, conciliar authority with less precisely defined mechanisms for final resolution.»
Protestantism offers:
«A radically stronger emphasis on Scripture, but a correspondingly greater burden of individual and communal interpretation.»
None of these systems eliminates the epistemological problem.
They locate it in different places.
Catholicism says:
«“Trust the Magisterium.”»
Orthodoxy says:
«“Trust the Church's received Tradition and conciliar life.”»
Protestantism says:
«“Trust Scripture properly interpreted.”»
The question becomes:
Which location of uncertainty is most compatible with Christ's promise to guide His Church?
---
19. Why the “magic hat” analogy matters
The Magic-Hat Problem is therefore not an accusation that Catholics are dishonest.
Nor does it mean that every Catholic explanation of doctrinal development is an ad hoc excuse.
Many Catholic explanations are historically serious and intellectually sophisticated.
The problem is structural.
A system is epistemically strongest when its rules allow us to distinguish truth from error before we know the desired conclusion.
If the rule is:
«“Whatever the Church definitively teaches cannot be false,”»
that is a strong theological proposition.
But if determining what the Church has definitively taught requires the Church itself to tell us which of its historical statements count, then the system has limited external testability.
That does not make the doctrine false.
But it means that Catholic infallibility cannot simply be demonstrated by pointing to the Church's present consistency.
The Church's present interpretation of its past is part of what is being disputed.
---
20. The ultimate challenge
The Catholic Church says that the Holy Spirit protects the Church from definitively teaching error.
I would therefore pose the following challenge:
Identify an objective criterion, available independently of the present Magisterium, by which we can determine that a historical Catholic teaching was merely disciplinary, prudential, non-definitive, or misunderstood, rather than an authoritative doctrinal judgment that was later reversed.
If such a criterion exists, Catholicism becomes considerably stronger.
If no such criterion exists, then the doctrine risks becoming self-protective:
«The Church cannot contradict itself because whatever it currently teaches defines what its earlier teaching must have meant.»
That is not a formal logical contradiction.
But it is an epistemological problem.
And it may be the most serious problem with the Catholic doctrine of infallibility.
The issue is ultimately not whether Catholics can reconcile two statements.
They often can.
The issue is whether the reconciliation is discovered in the historical evidence or imposed upon the historical evidence by an institution that has already decided that contradiction is impossible.
That is the heart of the Magic-Hat Problem.
And that, in my judgment, is a much more formidable challenge to Catholic infallibility than simply producing a list of quotations in which one pope appears to disagree with another.
Can the Catholic Church Contradict Itself on Faith and Morals?
One of the strongest arguments against the Catholic doctrine of ecclesial and papal infallibility is not that Catholics have changed their minds about incidental matters. Human beings obviously change their minds, and Christians have always had to distinguish between genuine development in understanding and genuine reversal.
The deeper problem is this:
What happens when the Catholic Church appears to teach one thing about faith or morals at one point in history and later teaches something incompatible with it?
Catholicism has an unusually strong answer to this problem. It does not merely say that the Church is generally guided by the Holy Spirit or that the pope is usually a reliable teacher. The First Vatican Council taught that when the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra—when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all Christians, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the universal Church—he possesses the infallibility with which Christ intended His Church to be endowed. Such definitions are described as irreformable of themselves, not merely because the Church subsequently agrees with them.
The modern Code of Canon Law states the principle similarly: the pope possesses infallibility when he proclaims by definitive act that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held. It also says that a doctrine is not to be understood as infallibly defined unless this is manifestly evident.
That creates an important philosophical test.
If a pope or council definitively binds Catholics to proposition A, and a later pope or council definitively binds Catholics to proposition not-A, then at least one of three things must be true:
1. the first teaching was never actually definitive;
2. the second teaching is not actually definitive;
3. or the Church contradicted itself.
The first two possibilities are legitimate Catholic responses. But they also create the central difficulty: how many apparently authoritative reversals can be explained this way before the claim of infallibility becomes unfalsifiable?
I. The Catholic distinction between contradiction and development
Catholic theology has a sophisticated answer to this objection.
The Church says that doctrine can develop without changing its essential meaning. A later formulation may make explicit something that was implicit in an earlier formulation. Circumstances may change. The application of a principle may change. The Church may also distinguish between a universal moral principle and the prudential circumstances in which that principle is applied.
This is an important distinction.
For example, “human life is valuable” does not necessarily determine every question about criminal punishment. Likewise, “Christ is necessary for salvation” does not necessarily mean that every person must have explicit knowledge of Christ in order to be saved.
The Catholic can therefore argue that many apparent contradictions are actually examples of development.
That argument should be taken seriously.
The problem is that development cannot mean simply that any later teaching can be reconciled with any earlier teaching by discovering a more sophisticated interpretation of the earlier words.
Otherwise “doctrine cannot contradict doctrine” becomes almost impossible to test.
The crucial question is therefore not whether Catholics can construct a reconciliation. They often can.
The question is whether the reconciliation is historically and logically persuasive—or whether it amounts to retroactively narrowing the earlier teaching after the Church has already changed its position.
That distinction becomes particularly important in the historical examples.
---
II. “Outside the Church there is no salvation”
The classic example is the Catholic teaching commonly summarized as extra Ecclesiam nulla salus—“outside the Church there is no salvation.”
The early and medieval Church repeatedly used extraordinarily strong language about this principle.
Pope Boniface VIII's Unam Sanctam declared:
«“It is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”»
The Council of Florence's Cantate Domino likewise declared that pagans, Jews, heretics, and schismatics could not attain eternal life unless they were joined to the Church before death.
Modern Catholicism, however, explicitly teaches that people who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel or the Church can nevertheless attain salvation if they sincerely seek God and cooperate with grace. Vatican II's Lumen Gentium teaches precisely this.
The Catholic response is that the two teachings are not contradictory.
The Church remains necessary for salvation, but a person can belong to the Church in an implicit or non-visible manner. The grace by which an apparently non-Christian person is saved is still understood to come through Christ and, ultimately, through His Church.
This is a coherent theological theory.
But it does not completely answer the historical objection.
The question is: is that really what the earlier statements meant?
The problem is that some medieval formulations sound considerably stronger than “the Church is the ordinary means of salvation, while those innocently ignorant of Christianity may be saved by God's grace.”
Unam Sanctam does not merely say that the Church is necessary in some mysterious invisible sense. It explicitly speaks of every human creature being subject to the Roman Pontiff. Cantate Domino speaks categorically about those outside the Church not sharing in eternal life unless they are joined to her.
The later Catholic interpretation therefore requires us to distinguish the literal and historical force of the language from the theological meaning Catholicism now assigns to it.
A Catholic can say that this is legitimate doctrinal development.
But a critic can reasonably respond:
If the earlier formulation naturally communicated a much narrower doctrine to generations of Catholics, and the later Church must reinterpret the earlier formulation to prevent contradiction, then the burden of proof is on Catholicism to show that the later interpretation was genuinely contained in the earlier teaching rather than being introduced later.
That is a serious problem for an infallibility claim.
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III. Unbaptized infants: from condemnation to hope
The case of unbaptized infants is even more revealing because it illustrates the difference between formal dogma and the practical theological conclusions drawn from dogma.
The Council of Florence taught that those who die in original sin alone descend to hell, although with a different punishment from those who die in actual mortal sin. Medieval Catholic theology subsequently developed the idea of limbus infantium, or limbo, as a way of understanding the condition of infants who died without baptism.
Modern Catholicism takes a much more hopeful position.
The Catechism states that the Church can only entrust unbaptized infants to God's mercy and says there is hope that God provides a way of salvation for children who die without baptism.
The Catholic defense is strong here: limbo was never formally defined as dogma.
That matters.
The Church can legitimately abandon a theological opinion without contradicting itself. Catholics are not required to believe that limbo exists.
Furthermore, the Council of Florence's statement about original sin need not necessarily have been intended as a specific definition concerning the eternal destiny of infants.
So this is probably not the strongest example of a direct contradiction.
Nevertheless, it exposes a broader historical phenomenon. For centuries, the Church's theological and pastoral environment strongly encouraged Catholics to think of baptism as essential to escaping the consequences of original sin. Later Catholicism emphasizes God's mercy and the possibility of salvation for unbaptized infants.
The movement is unmistakable even if the formal dogmatic contradiction is difficult to establish.
Therefore, this example should be used cautiously. It demonstrates development and a major change of theological emphasis, but by itself it does not decisively disprove Catholic infallibility.
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IV. Usury: a more serious problem
The history of usury presents a different difficulty.
Medieval Catholic teaching strongly condemned usury. The Third Lateran Council imposed ecclesiastical penalties on unrepentant usurers, while Pope Clement V condemned the claim that usury was not sinful and treated persistent defense of it as heretical. The traditional understanding was closely connected to the idea that taking profit simply for lending money was morally wrong.
Pope Benedict XIV's Vix Pervenit likewise condemned usury and described it as demanding more than what had been lent.
Modern Catholic moral theology, however, permits interest under numerous circumstances. Catholic institutions routinely participate in modern financial systems in which interest-bearing loans are normal.
The Catholic response is that usury and interest are not synonymous.
That response has considerable historical merit.
Catholic theology distinguished between unjust exploitation of a loan and legitimate compensation for risk, lost opportunities, administrative costs, inflation, or other circumstances. The medieval prohibition therefore need not mean that every possible form of interest is inherently immoral.
But again, the historical question matters.
If earlier authorities described the sin as demanding more than the amount lent, without making the elaborate economic distinctions modern theology makes, then the later distinction represents more than merely a change in vocabulary.
It represents a significant development in the moral analysis of lending.
A Catholic can maintain that the underlying principle never changed:
profit without a morally sufficient reason is unjust; profit accompanied by a legitimate extrinsic reason is permissible.
But the critic can respond that the practical moral boundary has nevertheless moved dramatically.
This illustrates an important point: doctrinal development can be genuine without being evidence of contradiction—but the more extensively the Church must reinterpret the older formulation in light of later distinctions, the harder it becomes to demonstrate that the later teaching was simply the inevitable unfolding of the earlier one.
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V. The death penalty is perhaps the clearest modern test
The death penalty provides perhaps the most philosophically interesting case.
Historically, Catholic teaching clearly permitted capital punishment.
Pope Innocent III required converts to affirm that secular authority could exercise “judgment of blood” without mortal sin. Pope Pius XII explicitly taught that public authority possessed the right to deprive a condemned person of life under appropriate circumstances.
The pre-2018 Catechism likewise stated that traditional Catholic teaching did not exclude capital punishment when it was necessary to protect human lives from an unjust aggressor, although it emphasized that such cases were extremely rare in modern circumstances.
Pope Francis then revised the Catechism to say:
«“The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”»
The Church presents this as a development rather than a reversal.
There is a plausible Catholic argument here.
The earlier Church taught that legitimate authority could execute criminals under certain conditions. It did not necessarily teach that execution was always morally desirable. As prisons became more effective and societies gained the ability to protect themselves without killing offenders, the circumstances justifying execution became increasingly rare.
The Church can therefore argue:
The principle never changed. What changed was the factual judgment concerning whether execution is necessary.
But there is a serious objection.
The older teaching did not merely say:
«“Capital punishment is permissible only because sometimes society cannot otherwise protect itself.”»
It also rested upon a broader understanding of legitimate state authority and the nature of retributive punishment.
The modern teaching goes considerably further. It emphasizes the dignity of the offender and the possibility of redemption and says capital punishment is inadmissible.
Thus, the critic can reasonably ask whether this is genuinely the same moral judgment.
If killing a guilty person is morally permissible in principle, then the question is whether circumstances can make it impermissible in practice.
If killing a guilty person is intrinsically incompatible with the dignity of the human person, however, then the earlier teaching appears to have permitted something that the later teaching excludes.
The Catholic answer depends upon interpreting “inadmissible” as a conclusion about the modern circumstances and contemporary understanding of punishment rather than as an assertion that capital punishment was intrinsically immoral in every circumstance throughout history.
That interpretation is possible.
But it demonstrates precisely why the infallibility controversy persists: the distinction between “development” and “contradiction” sometimes depends upon identifying an underlying principle that was not stated with anything like the clarity of the later formulation.
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VI. Slavery presents the most uncomfortable case
Slavery may be the most morally troubling example because the historical record is difficult to reduce to a simple story.
Pope Nicholas V's Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex authorized forms of enslavement connected with the conquest of non-Christian peoples. The historical Church also existed within societies where slavery was legally recognized and where children born to enslaved mothers could inherit enslaved status.
Later Catholic teaching became increasingly explicit in condemning slavery. Pope Leo XIII's In Plurimis condemned slavery, and modern Catholic teaching treats slavery as intrinsically evil. Veritatis Splendor includes slavery among intrinsically evil acts.
The Catholic defense is that “slavery” is an imprecise English translation of several different concepts of servitude.
Historically, Catholic thinkers distinguished between unjust enslavement and forms of servitude that they believed could be legitimate—such as certain forms of punishment, captivity in war, or contractual labor. The defenders in the DebateCraft discussion make precisely this argument.
Moreover, there were Catholic condemnations of the enslavement of indigenous peoples and Africans long before modern abolitionism. So it would be historically inaccurate to say that Catholicism simply taught “slavery is good” until the nineteenth century and then suddenly changed its mind.
Nevertheless, there remains a serious problem.
Modern Catholic teaching condemns slavery as an attack upon the dignity of the human person. That principle appears difficult to reconcile with historical acceptance of systems in which human beings could be legally possessed, inherited, transferred, or deprived of liberty because of their status or ancestry.
The distinction between “just servitude” and “unjust slavery” may explain some historical cases.
It does not automatically explain all of them.
And this is where the infallibility argument becomes stronger: if the moral status of a human institution can change so dramatically while the Church continues to describe itself as preserving an unchanging moral deposit, what precisely guarantees that the later interpretation is the authentic development rather than the earlier interpretation having simply been mistaken?
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VII. The strongest Catholic counterargument: most of these weren't infallible definitions
The strongest response to this entire argument is actually quite straightforward:
None of these examples necessarily satisfies the strict conditions for papal infallibility.
This is not a trivial objection.
Vatican I did not teach that every papal statement is infallible. Nor did it teach that every disciplinary decision, theological opinion, sermon, papal letter, or prudential judgment is protected from error.
The pope is infallible only under particular conditions.
And the modern Code of Canon Law explicitly says that something is not to be regarded as infallibly defined unless that is manifestly evident.
Consequently, a Catholic can answer:
“Show me a case where a pope actually made an ex cathedra definition of proposition A, and then a later pope made an ex cathedra definition of proposition not-A.”
That is a much harder challenge.
In fact, there are extremely few universally acknowledged examples of papal ex cathedra definitions at all. Catholic theology traditionally identifies the Immaculate Conception and Assumption as paradigmatic cases.
This means that the historical examples above should not be presented as easy mathematical disproofs of Vatican I.
But this defense creates a different philosophical problem.
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VIII. The “infallibility escape hatch”
Suppose the Church says:
“This earlier statement was not infallible.”
Then the critic can ask:
How authoritative was it?
If the pope was speaking to the entire Christian world about salvation, morality, slavery, punishment, or economic ethics, and Catholics were expected to take him seriously, then the statement was presumably not meaningless.
Catholicism itself has levels of teaching authority between ordinary theological opinion and an ex cathedra definition. Vatican II teaches that bishops united with the pope can teach infallibly when they definitively agree on a matter of faith or morals, and Catholic theology also recognizes the ordinary and universal magisterium as capable of infallible teaching.
Thus the problem does not disappear merely because a particular quotation fails the technical test for ex cathedra infallibility.
The Catholic Church claims something broader than:
«“The pope has occasionally made two correct definitions.”»
It claims that Christ has given the Church a reliable teaching office capable of definitively preserving the deposit of faith and morals.
The question therefore becomes:
How can Catholics identify which historical teachings belong to that protected deposit without relying on the Church's present judgment about what its past teaching must have meant?
That is the circularity problem.
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IX. The danger of retrospective reinterpretation
Imagine a hypothetical church that says:
«“Whenever we make a definitive moral teaching, it cannot be wrong.”»
Suppose it later changes its teaching.
It then says:
«“Our earlier teaching was not actually definitive.”»
That is logically possible.
But imagine that this happens repeatedly.
The church can always protect itself from falsification by classifying the earlier teaching as non-definitive.
At some point, however, the critic is entitled to ask whether the doctrine of infallibility is doing any explanatory work.
A robust doctrine of infallibility should ideally allow us to say in advance what kind of statement cannot be wrong.
Otherwise, “infallible” risks becoming equivalent to:
«“Whatever the Church finally teaches definitively is what the Holy Spirit was protecting.”»
That is not quite a contradiction, but it is epistemically circular.
And this is particularly important because Vatican I's doctrine was not merely that papal definitions happen to be correct. It claimed that the pope possesses a divinely instituted charism of infallibility when he defines doctrine concerning faith and morals for the universal Church. Those definitions are irreformable in themselves.
The more difficult it becomes to identify what actually counts as a protected definition, the less useful the doctrine becomes as an independent test of truth.
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X. “Development” cannot mean “anything can become its opposite”
There is an important philosophical limit to doctrinal development.
Suppose someone originally teaches:
«“X is morally permissible.”»
Later he teaches:
«“X is morally impermissible.”»
He cannot simply say:
«“I have developed my understanding of X.”»
There must be some explanation of why the two propositions are not contradictory.
Catholic theology recognizes this. Genuine doctrinal development must preserve continuity with the deposit of faith.
But that raises the question:
What counts as sufficient continuity?
Consider the death penalty.
Old:
«Under certain circumstances, the state may legitimately execute a criminal.»
New:
«The death penalty is inadmissible because of the dignity of the person.»
One can construct a reconciliation.
But it is equally possible to argue that the moral conclusion has changed.
Likewise with slavery:
Old:
«Certain forms of human servitude are legitimate.»
New:
«Slavery is intrinsically evil.»
Again, one can distinguish different meanings of “slavery.”
But if the historical institution involved hereditary ownership and deprivation of liberty, the distinction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
The same pattern appears with usury and salvation.
The question is therefore not whether a clever theologian can produce a reconciliation.
Almost any two historical propositions can be reconciled if sufficiently many distinctions are introduced.
The more important question is whether the reconciliation preserves the ordinary meaning, historical context, and practical force of the earlier teaching.
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XI. What the Catholic position gets right
A fair critique should acknowledge that Catholicism has a genuine answer to these problems.
The Church has never claimed that every theological opinion is infallible.
It has never claimed that every disciplinary practice is permanently binding.
It has always distinguished doctrine from prudential judgments.
It recognizes legitimate doctrinal development.
And the Catholic tradition contains substantial examples of moral development that do not necessarily constitute contradiction.
The DebateCraft respondent is therefore correct to insist that simply juxtaposing two quotations does not prove contradiction.
Historical context matters.
Latin terminology matters.
The precise object of a doctrinal statement matters.
Whether a pope intended to make a definitive universal judgment matters.
Whether a proposition was merely theological opinion matters.
Whether a later statement addresses exactly the same proposition matters.
These are all legitimate considerations.
But these qualifications should not be allowed to become an automatic escape from every historical difficulty.
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XII. The deeper argument: the problem is epistemological
Ultimately, the strongest objection is not:
“I found five quotations that contradict one another.”
It is:
“Your doctrine of infallibility creates a very high burden of proof for distinguishing genuine development from genuine reversal, and historical Catholicism sometimes appears to meet that burden only by retrospectively reinterpreting its own earlier teaching.”
That is a more powerful argument.
It does not require proving that Boniface VIII, Eugene IV, Clement V, Pius XII, or Nicholas V were each speaking ex cathedra.
Instead, it asks whether the Catholic system provides an objectively identifiable boundary between:
- a doctrine that can never be wrong,
- a doctrine that Catholics must definitively accept,
- an authoritative but reformable teaching,
- a theological opinion,
- a prudential judgment,
- a disciplinary rule,
- and a historically conditioned application of an eternal principle.
Catholicism has developed an elaborate hierarchy to answer these questions. The 1998 Profession of Faith, for example, distinguishes doctrines formally revealed by God from teachings that must be definitively held because they are necessary to preserve and explain the deposit of faith.
But that elaborate structure itself raises the question of how we know which historical statements belong in which category.
And here the Catholic is ultimately forced to appeal to the present Magisterium.
The Church tells us what the Church meant.
That is a powerful internal mechanism for maintaining doctrinal continuity.
But from outside the system, it can appear circular.
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XIII. What would actually prove a contradiction?
The most intellectually honest conclusion is therefore more modest than saying:
«“These five examples conclusively prove that Catholicism is false.”»
They do not.
A genuinely decisive contradiction would require something like this:
1. A pope or ecumenical council definitively teaches proposition A as a matter of faith or morals for the universal Church.
2. The teaching is sufficiently clear that its object and meaning are manifest.
3. The proposition cannot reasonably be interpreted as compatible with not-A.
4. A later pope or ecumenical council definitively teaches not-A concerning the same object and under the same relevant conditions.
If such a case could be established, papal or ecclesial infallibility would face a direct logical contradiction.
But the historical record is more complicated than that.
What the examples demonstrate more securely is that Catholic doctrine has undergone substantial changes in formulation, application, theological interpretation, and moral judgment.
The controversial question is whether those changes represent legitimate development or contradiction.
And that question cannot be settled merely by saying “the Church says it is development.”
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XIV. The fundamental challenge to Catholic confidence
The deepest challenge, therefore, is not that Catholicism has changed.
Christian doctrine necessarily develops in the sense that Christians come to understand old truths more clearly.
The deeper challenge is this:
If the Holy Spirit prevents the Church from definitively teaching error in faith and morals, why has the historical Church sometimes spoken about faith and morals in ways that later Catholics find necessary to qualify, reinterpret, contextualize, or substantially revise?
The Catholic answer is that the earlier teaching must be understood correctly.
The critic responds:
But who determines the correct interpretation—the historical Church that originally taught it, or the modern Church that has inherited it?
If the historical meaning is decisive, some apparent contradictions become difficult to avoid.
If the modern interpretation is decisive, the doctrine becomes increasingly dependent upon retrospective reinterpretation.
That is the central tension.
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Conclusion
The Catholic doctrine of infallibility is stronger and more sophisticated than the simplistic caricature that “Catholics believe everything every pope has ever said is infallible.”
They do not.
The technical doctrine is considerably narrower. Vatican I specifically limits papal infallibility to circumstances in which the pope, exercising his office as universal pastor and teacher, definitively teaches a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church.
That qualification means that the historical examples of salvation, unbaptized infants, usury, capital punishment, and slavery do not automatically constitute formal disproofs of papal infallibility.
Nevertheless, they expose a serious philosophical difficulty.
The Catholic Church claims not merely that its present teaching is correct, but that Christ has provided it with a divinely protected teaching authority. Yet when historical teachings appear to conflict with later teachings, the Church frequently resolves the problem by distinguishing terminology, context, scope, circumstances, levels of authority, or implicit principles.
Sometimes those distinctions are entirely convincing.
Sometimes they appear strained.
And when they become sufficiently numerous, an important question arises:
Is the Church demonstrating that it never contradicted itself, or is it demonstrating that a sufficiently flexible system can reinterpret its earlier statements so that contradiction is never officially acknowledged?
That is the real challenge.
The issue is therefore not whether Catholic doctrine has developed. Development is compatible with Christianity and, properly understood, is unavoidable.
The issue is whether development has an objective boundary.
If “development” means that the Church may clarify, deepen, and apply an unchanged truth, then Catholicism remains intellectually coherent.
But if “development” can include moving from one substantive moral judgment to its opposite while subsequently discovering that the original teaching “really meant” something compatible with the new position, then the concept threatens to become unfalsifiable.
And that is why the historical record raises a legitimate question about Catholic infallibility:
If the Church truly possesses a divine guarantee against teaching error in faith and morals, we should expect not merely eventual theological reconciliation, but a sufficiently clear continuity between what the Church once definitively bound Christians to believe and what it definitively binds them to believe today. Where that continuity must repeatedly be reconstructed after the fact, the Catholic claim to infallibility becomes considerably less self-evident.
The historical cases therefore do not by themselves establish that Catholicism is logically contradictory. But they do establish a substantial burden of explanation for Catholicism: it must show that the differences between past and present teaching are genuine developments of an unchanged deposit of faith rather than instances in which the Church's understanding of faith and morals has actually changed.
That is a much harder claim to demonstrate than simply asserting that the Church cannot contradict itself.
“magic hat theory” of the Catholic Church is essentially your way of describing the problem you see with claims of ecclesial authority and doctrinal infallibility.
As I understand your idea:
The Catholic Church can sometimes act as though it has a “magic hat” from which authoritative answers can be pulled whenever a theological question arises.
A teaching can be declared or treated as official, binding, or part of the Church's authoritative teaching, even when there is substantial uncertainty about whether it really represents the apostolic faith.
Later, the Church can clarify, modify, reinterpret, or even substantially reverse the practical theological implications of what had previously been taught.
The difficulty, in your view, is that the appeal to the Church's authority can become somewhat self-validating: “We know this is authoritative because the Church says so, and we know the Church has the authority to say so because Christ gave the Church that authority.”
That makes you skeptical of the idea that the ordinary magisterium is automatically protected from significant doctrinal error merely because something has been consistently presented as official teaching.
Your position isn't that nothing can be known through the Church. Rather, you seem to distinguish between the Church's genuine authority and the much stronger claim that every sufficiently authoritative-looking formulation necessarily possesses infallible divine protection.
You're wary of treating the institutional Church as though it possesses a literal theological “magic hat” that guarantees every sufficiently official doctrinal pronouncement.
The deeper philosophical point behind your theory is probably: authority doesn't eliminate epistemic uncertainty. Even if an institution really has divine authority, human beings still have to determine which statements actually carry that authority, what they mean, and whether later interpretations genuinely preserve or alter the earlier teaching
Mental illness may be like a damaged radio receiving a perfectly good signal. The signal itself hasn't necessarily disappeared; the damaged receiver introduces static, distortion, and interference, so the resulting sound no longer accurately reflects the original broadcast
Get a thread goin that's back to the basics of politics
I like to ragebait too... but i always do it in the privacy of my own home
I would expect trump is to blame for americans getting explosive diarrhea
article i see on google "is trump to blame for americans getting explosive diarrhea?"
Is the whole premise of the article trump derangement syndrome or do you think there might be something to this speculation?
I guess I could find the article for yall?
??
I read the important parts and skimmed the less important parts. That last study i just pasted has it all that ive been arguing... credible witnesses to out of body stories, credible examples of it, and a sheer large number of examples, while arguing to discount the fact that there are no or next to no essentially false hits. This is plain evidence, but apparently ya all skeptics dont like common sense plain evidence and think you're being slick being obtuse about it. Apparently its staring us in the face plain as day and apparently you guys prefer the retarded view that humans are nothing other than elaborate flesh robots who regularly Hallucinate elaborate afterlife stories when they die. I guess whatever floats your boat
Thanks I agree
https://cominghomechannel.substack.com/p/anomalous-cognition-and-veridical
The link for the last post.
Details tons of super credible out of body experiences with credible witnesses. Talks about the science involved along with credibility of people involved and what it means to be anomalies and anecdotal. Basically my bottomline. Only dressed up way more academically