The consensus of the church and papal infallibility: a study in the background of Vatican I

10. Conclusion

   Conclusion 23 It is clear that the Gallican and papalist ecclesiologies, as we find them expressed in the authors studied here, entail radically different views of the consensus of the Church, as what is naturally included in the former is naturally excluded from the latter.The basic difference can be stated briefly.In the papalist view the successor of Peter really is a benevolent and paternal absolute monarch in ruling and teaching, and there is no need for the involvement of the faithful of any rank in this task. In the Gallican view the primatial authority, recognized as genuine and essential , is exercised in conjunction with the rest of the episcopate in a way that today would be called collegial and consensual . For the papalist authors studied here what is given from the beginning is the almighty primatial Power established by the divine founder of the Church and conferred on one man alone. This is the supreme, and really divine, Power to rule and teach the entire community, and specifically to effect and maintain its unity of faith. All revolves around this Power and all is deduced from this Power. Once understanding the nature and purpose of this tremendous Power, you can and necessarily must deduce from it in rigorous logical order all other aspects of the structure and functioning of the whole Church. Uphold-  ing and revering this majestic and benevolent Power is the prime and central concern of all the members of the Church, who should be grateful that God has wisely and magnanimously provided this Power to sustain and guide their faith community. The papalist standpoint does not recognize as legitimate any questions about the participation of the members of the Church, including the entire episcopate, in the making of decisions about policy or doctrine.The instinctive tendency of this view is to perceive any suggestion about the involvement of the community as infringement on the Power, as some kind of attempt—overt or devious—to evade or depreciate the Power. For this reason the suggestion is rejected out of hand as being self-evidently wrong.There is no need even to discuss its possible merits because any discussion might imply some deficiency in the sovereign Power established by Jesus, and probably a lack of faith in the gentle Savior himself. Thus a proposal that a doctrinal definition of the Roman Pontiff needs the consensus of the community , and specifically of the world episcopate, is as obviously mistaken as any other failure to accept the plan of God.The great error of the Gallicans is to try to impose human conditions on the divine institution of the primacy. For the Gallican authors whose work we have reviewed here what is given from the beginning of Christianity is the whole community, which needs and has a number of ministers.The congregation of the faithful is not an unstructured one, and it is not at all a democracy. It is a fully structured, hierarchical, and indeed monarchical institution. This ecclesiology genuinely accepts papal primacy, a specifically Roman primacy, not merely of honor but of jurisdiction over the whole Church, and at no time intends to minimize or depreciate papal authority .This view and the papalist view differ only regarding the prerogatives entailed in the primacy. Bossuet, Tournely, and the other Gallican authors say that only the Church,meaning the hierarchy as a whole, can infallibly decide an important question of faith, not the Roman Pontiff by himself. For them the consensus of the Church has been an essential part, from the beginning, of a community of Conclusion  faith endowed by its founder with bishops as well as a pope, and is not a mere “human condition” concocted later by persons who are not sincere when they say that they accept papal primacy. Yves Congar summed it up with admirable succinctness when he said of the ecclesiology of mainstream Gallican theologians: “One can, I believe, characterize it in the history of ecclesiological doctrines as the will not to let the pole Ecclesia be absorbed by the pole papacy.”1 The Gallicans believed, he continued, that the divinely established authority of the Church is shared between the power of the episcopate and the power of the pope in such a way that “neither can be validly exercised without the other.”2 Both are essential and neither should be reduced to a merely nominal role. Bossuet,Tournely, and the others...