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70 Method Although the bishops individually do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility , they nevertheless proclaim the teaching of Christ infallibly, even when they are dispersed throughout the world, provided that they remain in communion with each other and with the successor of Peter and that in authoritatively teaching on a matter of faith and morals they agree in one judgment as that to be held definitely (Lumen gentium 25). Based on this text, Ford and Grisez enumerate four conditions for an infallible exercise of the ordinary magisterium: (a) that the bishops remain in communion with one another and with the pope, (b) that they teach authoritatively on faith and morals, (c) that they agree in one judgment, and (d) that they propose this judgment as one to be held definitively. Arguing that these conditions had been met in the case of Humanae vitae, Ford and Grisez claimed that the dissenting opinions of some bishops, theologians, and laypeople did not detract from the authority and universality of Humanae vitae. Their reasoning included a strategy that excluded dissenting opinions. Ford and Grisez argued that maintaining a bond of communion between the pope and bishops was necessary and sufficient for the bishops to share in the Church’s task of guarding, preaching, teaching, and handing on the faith. This is the first condition of infallibility set forth in Lumen gentium. Because of this, dissenting opinions held by bishops not in communion with Rome could not detract from the unity of judgment (the third condition) required for the bishops to teach infallibly. Regarding the second condition, Ford and Grisez asserted that there was nothing in past church documents that would warrant restricting the Church’s prerogative to impose specific moral norms, such as had been done in Humanae vitae. Concerning the fourth condition for infallibility, they claimed that this condition had been fulfilled in the manner in which the bishops around the world taught Humanae vitae. These bishops did not merely demand intellectual assent from the faithful—they also insisted that the teaching on contraception be received and acted upon as “the will of God, which followers of Christ must live up to.”89 In their consideration of the third condition, Ford and Grisez took into account the very real dissent within the Church on this point. Working from the premise that the ordinary magisterium must be universal in order to be infallible, they defined this universality as “the moral unity of the whole body of bishops in communion with each other and the pope, not the mathematical unanimity of the bishops which could be broken by the dissenting voice of any one individual.” Appealing to the example of the Arian controversy of the fourth century, they pointed out that neither before nor after the Council of Nicaea was there a mathematical unanimity among the Church’s bishops regarding the divinity of Christ. They argued that if this condition of universality had been satisfied without mathematical unanimity in the past, it could not now be nullified by a lack of consensus among bishops.90 Ford and Grisez could not deny the reality of dissenting opinions held by some bishops. They did their best to minimize its significance. It is a mistake to speak of these episcopal statements as if they contributed a chorus of episcopal dissent to the dissent of some theologians, who criticized the encyclical and rejected its reaffirmation of the received teaching on contraception. None of the episcopal statements denied the competence of the magisterium to propose specific norms, norms in themselves obligatory, on the morality of contraception. Moreover, none of the episcopal statements explicitly rejects the norms restated in Humanae vitae. . . . The implicit contradiction in 1968 by some bishops of a teaching already infallibly proposed through many centuries takes nothing away from the objective certitude of the teaching.91 They also claim that there was a constant consensus of Catholic theologians in modern times, demonstrated by the manuals of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The following statement, however, reveals how this “consensus” was achieved. The consensus of modern theologians supports the thesis that the received teaching was universally proposed by Catholic bishops, because the works of theologians were authorized by the bishops for use in seminaries, and thus for the training of confessors who communicated Catholic moral teaching to the faithful in the confessional, in premarital instructions, in the preaching missions, and so on. As authorized agents of the bishops—during centuries in which the bishops were careful not to...

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