Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: a definition ex cathedra
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Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: A definition ex cathedra
Brother Ansgar Santogrossi, O.S.B., is associate professor of philosophy at Mt. Angel Abbey and Seminary in St. Benedict, Oregon. Within the past year his doctoral dissertation was finished and accepted and he was granted a Ph.D. degree. This is his first article in HPR.
In the theological discussion of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis there has been a dearth of argumentation for the position that the Apostolic Letter contains an ex cathedra definition. The present essay seeks to make the case for the infallibility of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in itself. The citation of sources has been kept to a minimum in order to give greater relief to the essay's overall vision of revelation, faith and magisterium.1
The definition by Vatican I of papal infallibility, Pastor aeternus, is carefully explained by the Report of the Deputation of Faith. A comparison of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (OS) with Pastor aeternus (PA) as explained by this Report with Lumen gentium 25 tends to prove that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis contains an infallible definition ex cathedra of the Roman Pontiff.
OS: "Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of our ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk. 22:32) we declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."
PA: "The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith and morals to be held by the universal Church...."
LG 25: "The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful—who confirms his brethren in the faith (cf. Lk 22:32)—he proclaims in an absolute decision [Lat. defi-nitivo actu] a doctrine pertaining to faith and morals."
OS: John Paul II says at the beginning of the document that Paul VI had already recalled that the non-ordination of women to the priesthood was the position of the Church and an apostolic tradition. Nevertheless there has been a controversy, and the CDF has had to recall and expound the doctrine of the Church with its foundations in Inter insigniores. John Paul II himself has recalled the same doctrine in Mulieris dignitatem.
But these acts by Paul VI and John Paul II had not been sufficient to put an end to the questioning of the tradition received from the apostles. John Paul II says in OS 4: "Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered open to debate."2 With these words which precede the decisive phrase cited above, John Paul II indicates that the doctrine of the reservation of the priesthood to men belongs to the ordinary and universal teaching of the Church already in force.
To recall the decisive phrase of OS: "In order that all doubt may be removed…in virtue of our ministry of confirming the brethren…we declare…that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church's faithful." As the document itself indicates, the declaration of John Paul II comes about in the midst of a situation of contestation of the doctrine of the Church. It is this kind of ecclesial situation which is an appropriate context for a definition ex cathedra according to the Report of the Deputation of Faith concerning PA and according to Pope Pius XI. The Report on PA: "There is contained in the definition the act, or the quality and condition of the act of an infallible pontifical definition….[N]ot just any manner of proposing the doctrine is sufficient even when he is exercising his office as supreme pastor and teacher. Rather, there is required the manifest intention of defining doctrine, or putting an end to a doubt about a certain doctrine or defining a thing, giving a definitive judgment and proposing that doctrine as one which must be held [cf. OS definitive tenendam] by the Universal Church."3
Pius XI, Encyclical Mortalium animos: "[T]he teaching authority of the Church, which in the divine wisdom was constituted on earth in order that revealed doctrines might remain intact for ever, and that they might be brought with ease and security to the knowledge of men, and which is daily exercised through the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops who are in communion with him, has also the office of defining, when it sees fit, any truth with solemn rites and decrees, whenever this is necessary either to oppose the errors or the attacks of heretics, or more clearly and in greater detail to stamp the minds of the faithful with the articles of sacred doctrine which have been explained. But in the use of this extraordinary teaching authority no newly invented matter is brought in, nor is anything new added to the number of those truths which are at least implicitly contained in the deposit of Revelation, divinely handed down to the Church: only those which are made clear which perhaps may still seem obscure to some, or that which some have previously called into question is declared to be of faith."4 The Report of the Deputation of Faith of Vatican I explicitly rejects the idea that a definition ex cathedra must be clothed in a precise juridic form. The Holy See has already made a very great number of definitions with variable forms, says Archbishop Gasser.5 It would therefore be false to say that a definition ex cathedra must always involve a liturgical ceremony (the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption for example) or employ certain juridic formulae. For example, the condemnations of Jansenist propositions as heretical or erroneous in the faith were considered as definitions without the Pope needing to hold a huge ceremony in St. Peter's. Everyone was in agreement that pontifical definitions had been made, so the magisterial controversy within the Jansenist crisis bore either on papal infallibility itself, or on the famous quaestio facti of the presence of heresy in the book Augustinus by Cornelius Jansen.
Nor should it be thought that a "definition" must always be the new explication of a doctrine which up to that point had only been implicitly taught. It has been said along these lines that OS is not a "definition" because the ordinary and universal magisterium has already explicitly taught the doctrine only "confirmed" by OS. But the Report which explains PA does not say that a "definition" must necessarily be the new explicitation of the implicit: "[T]he word 'defines' signifies that the Pope directly and conclusively pronounces his sentence about a doctrine which concerns matters of faith and morals and does so in such a way that each one of the faithful can be certain of the mind of the Apostolic See, of the mind of the Roman Pontiff; in such a way, indeed, that he or she knows for certain that such and such a doctrine is held to be heretical, proximate to heresy, certain or erroneous, etc., by the Roman Pontiff."6 Thus John Paul II has defined the non-ordination of women by attaching the note definitive tenendam to this doctrine. According to the instruction Donum veritatis of the CDF of 1990, this expression signifies the assent which is due to what is necessarily connected to the revealed. The note definitive tenendam is therefore the positive form of the note erronea long attached by popes to propositions which cannot be held without implicitly denying a truth of divine faith. John Paul II has therefore made a definition ex cathedra insofar as he has put an end to a dispute by attaching the theological note in its negative form to a doctrine whose theological note had been debated (of faith or not? irreformable or not? purely disciplinary or not? etc.) for several years.
The history behind a canon of the Council of Trent indicates that the fathers considered that a doctrine already taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium is very much a possible object of definition by the extraordinary magisterium. The Council was thinking of defining the indissolubility of marriage even after adultery. But the Venetian ambassadors pointed out that such a definition would make heretics of the Byzantine schismatics who had long practiced the contrary. Wanting to avoid that, and at the same time wanting to hit the Protestants with an anathema, the Council abstained from defining the indissolubility of marriage; it limited itself to anathematizing anyone who would deny the infallibility of the Church which "has taught and teaches" this indissolubility. Thus the fathers of Trent thought that a doctrine had already been infallibly taught by the Church; at the same time they thought they were in a position to define this same doctrine, which they manifested by knowingly abstaining from defining the doctrine.7 The analogy with the non-ordination of women is obvious: the ordinary and universal magisterium has already taught the non-ordination of women, but nothing prevents John Paul II from having been in a position to define it.
What are the modalities of teaching by the ordinary and universal magisterium (OUM) of the Church? One should begin further up, so to speak, by recalling that the object of faith is the divinely revealed deposit presented as such by the Church. Since the period of divine revelation was closed with the apostolic age, one can reason as follows: every time I inquire about what this deposit contains, it is the case that the Church has already presented it (at least implicitly). I am therefore referred to tradition: at any time, the Church has already presented the revealed deposit for the faith of any person on earth and no other procedure is needed than to find out what she has said. But what is the Church? She is the ensemble of the baptized "from the bishops to the last of the faithful" (cf. Augustine) who confess what God has said. But since the origins of the Church, there have been some baptized persons who say something other than what the other baptized say, and each one assures me that what he is saying is revealed truth. I am therefore directed to the bishops who are the guardians of the deposit insofar as they succeed the first apostolic witnesses. The teaching Church is for each person the ensemble of baptized faithful who have already said the same Word of God (cf. Vincent of Lerins: "what has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone"), but this ensemble of persons has been and is hierarchically structured in such a way that the bishops among them, who succeed the apostles-inspired witnesses, believe the Word in proclaiming it in media ecclesiae whereas the others believe it in receiving it. Otherwise put, the Church has a form or constitution which includes a magisterium at the service of those who believe, such that if one separates himself from what the OUM at any given moment of Church history has taught, one has separated oneself from divine faith. Following the light and instinct of divinely infused faith which makes them recognize the divine Word, the faithful listen to their bishops and believe all that God has revealed and which the magisterium presents as revealed and to be believed. In believing the teaching of the body of bishops who are ordinarily dispersed in space, that is, in believing the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church, one believes the faith of the Church which is the faith of Christ. The daily teaching of the Word of God by the bishops consists first of all in the confession by each bishop of the Credo.
But a new problem arises: certain bishops teach something while assuring me it is in the apostolic tradition, while other bishops tell me the opposite. Who should be believed, if faith comes by hearing (Rom. 10) and if I cannot believe the Gospel itself if I do not believe a Church presenting it without error (cf. Augustine)? The structure of faith which must hear a multitude of teachers—the ordinary and universal magisterium—requires that there be a bishop whose teaching of the faith constitutes a negative criterion for knowing who is a member of the OUM in act and who is not. The cause of the unity of a multitude can only be one. The pope must be infallible in his ordinary teaching in order to constitute the negative criterion of membership of other bishops in the ordinary and universal magisterium. St. Irenaeus implied this when he said, long before the perception of the ordinary/extraordinary distinction, that the churches must all be in agreement with the church of Rome. I therefore conclude that the bishop of Rome is infallible when he teaches something as revealed by God and contained in the deposit which must be believed.
Still more distinctions are nevertheless necessary. Outside of his confession of the Credo, the pope does not very often appeal to the divine faith of those to whom he speaks. Quite often he speaks in such a way that it is difficult to know precisely which things he is presenting as revealed and to be believed by the gift of faith which cannot lead into error. Especially in modern times when the means of communication permit an unending stream of magisterium on a global scale, the pope very often presents the things he says as causes or explanations of one or another revealed object which the Church long ago taught as revealed. Or the pope might teach in a more proper sense of the word, that is, he might present conclusions which he himself draws out from premises of which at least the major is revealed. In the presence of such daily exercises of the magisterium, the faithful Christian to whom Providence and grace grant an exact following of reason and the instinct of faith will believe whatever in the magisterial discourse is intentionally correlated to the infused habit of faith.
Yet to the extent that the OUM of the Church does not appeal directly to divine faith, one must admit that it is not always absolutely clear what is being taught as immediately or mediately belonging to faith. All this manifests a specificity of the extraordinary magisterium of the Pope alone and of dogmatic Councils by comparison with the ordinary teaching by the dispersed bishops: the OUM (including infallible acts of ordinary papal magisterium) does teach infallibly, but it is by its nature less visible for the faithful than the extraordinary magisterium of the Pope alone ex cathedra or of a Council (bishops gathered together with the Bishop of Rome). When the dispersed bishops, each one in his diocese, teach the true doctrine of God and present it as the doctrine entrusted to the universal Church, the instinctus fidei helps the faithful to calmly accept what is proposed to them without raising questions such as "Must I submit to this teaching or not? If so, what type of assent do I owe to this doctrine?" etc. When here and there dissent arises which the arguments and insistence of the bishops concerned do not succeed in quelling, or when here and there priests or bishops or theologians teach errors which trouble the faithful, then one asks "But what does the Catholic Church, which is infallible, teach?" Since it is sometimes difficult to ascertain what all the bishops in communion with the pope at a given time have infallibly (as a group) taught as divine truth on some point, because their activity is spatially dispersed or temporally distant, the Lord has provided the extraordinary magisterium of the pope alone or of a Council. These are more visible to the faithful than the OUM, and they are there in order to judge relatively precise doctrinal questions with clarity.
The extraordinary magisterium is extraordinary because it exists principally in order to bring an end to a situation which ought to be extraordinary, or rather non-existent: disagreement on the revealed deposit in the Church of Christ where all, according to St. Paul, must say the same thing. The pope or the council defines how a disputed thing stands with reference to the revealed deposit by attaching the theological note (heretical, erroneous, s.q.d. a.s., definitive tenendam, de fide) to be held by the whole Church on some thing or its contrary. The essence of a "de-fin-ition" (Greek chores) by a pope ex cathedra or by a council is to manifest divine truth by explicitly signifying the separation between, on the one hand, that which is revealed by God, and on the other hand that which is not thus revealed or which is immediately or mediately contrary to the revealed. This is so that all ortho-dox Christians might be identified and therefore Unum and distinguished from those who are not ortho-dox.
The faithful reception of the OUM could be compared to seeing a statue as a statue. The reception of the extraordinary magisterium is like seeing the statue at the very moment in which the sculptor cuts away marble in order to distinguish that which is, the eidos or form, from what it is not, the rest of the marble. At Caesarea Philippi, St. Peter in effect exercised the ordinary pontifical magisterium when he said "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" in response to a question posed by Jesus to the ensemble of the apostles (the source of the future ordinary and universal magisterium). Jesus himself made an extraordinary definition by attaching the theological note to the faith which had been confessed by Peter: "It is not flesh and blood [natural knowledge] which revealed it to you, but my heavenly Father." A similar structure can be observed in the case of the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin: bishops preached on the Assumption and the vast majority of Catholics believed it by divine faith long before the definition of the Assumption was revealed. But before 1950, even as the bishops taught the Assumption, they did not—at least not all of them—signify the inclusion of the Assumption in the divine deposit taken as a precise body of knowledge entrusted to the Church by God, that is, taken as different from all natural knowledge. So one can see the specificity of the "definimus ut dogma revelatum" by the pope in 1950: to signify the inclusion of the doctrine in the revealed deposit insofar as this deposit is a precise body of knowledge. To define is to distinguish, point out limits: I can possess the knowledge of the eagle and its properties and I can possess the knowledge of the falcon and its properties, but I can also "define" by becoming aware that the eagle is not the falcon. A conscious coming to take things in their difference is one of the ways of being in the truth or manifestness of things. In matters of faith too, to de-fine is the same thing as to distinguish.
With respect to the subject of this essay, the vast majority of Catholics together with their bishops knew long before OS that the ordination of women is at least mediately contrary to the revealed deposit which is both theoretical and practical (fides et mores). What John Paul II has done by OS is to infallibly signify, with the theological note definitive tenendam, the mediate but necessary opposition between the "ordination" of women and the deposit revealed to the Church.
What this essay has said about the ordinary pontifical magisterium would imply that if OS does not contain a definition, its teaching is nevertheless infallible on account of its references to Peter confirming the brethren in faith and to the divine constitution of the Church. Would it have been possible for St. Irenaeus to read OS and not take it as an expression of the faith of the Roman Church with which all the churches must be in agreement?
But this essay has argued that the decisive phrase of OS is also a definition. One should note what John Paul II did not say in the decisive passage of OS. He did not say "we confirm that this judgment has already been definitively proposed by the ordinary and universal magisterium." The decisive passage of OS does not bear on this question which is in the domain of "dogmatic facts." Rather he declares a divine thing (or an act of Christ) and he declares that this thing is definitive tenendam. Through the context provided by Pastor aeternus of Vatican I, the Report of the Deputation on Faith for Pastor aeternus, LG 25, and the practice of the Church attested to by an event during the Council of Trent and by Pius XI, it is manifest that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis contains an ex cathedra definition.
1
See M.L. Guérard des Lauriers, Dimensions de lafoi, Paris: Cerf, 1952; Yves Congar, Sainte Église, Paris: Cerf, 1963, pp. 360, 371-72; Francisco Marin-Sola, L'évolution homogène da dogme catholique, Fribourg, 1924; Bruno Neveu, "Pou-voir et savoir dans l'Église", in Communio (French language edition) (20) 6, 1995, pp. 111-137. See also by Bruno Neveu L'erreur et sonjuge, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993.2
The Latin text has "temporibus tamen nos-tris diversis in partibus disputabilis habetur" (AAS 86,7,5 Iulii 1994, p. 548). The English translation (Origins 24,4, June 9, 1994, p. 51) perhaps alters the pope's intended meaning here when it says "considered still open to debate."3
"The Gift of Infallibility: The Official Relatio on Infallibility of Bishop Vincent Gasser at Vatican Council I, tr. with commentary by James T. O' Connor, Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1986, p. 73-74. I have modified O'Connor's translation of the phrase "seu fluctuationi finem ponendi circa doctrinam quandam seu rem definiendi." The passage continues: "This last point is indeed something intrinsic to every dogmatic definition of faith or morals which is taught by the supreme pastor and teacher of the Universal Church and which is to be held by the Universal Church. Indeed this very property and note of a definition, properly so-called, should be expressed, at least in some way, since he is defining doctrine to be held by the Universal Church."4
In The Papal Encyclicals, v. 3 (1903-1939), ed. Claudia Carlen, The Pierian Press, 1990 (4 vols.), p. 317.5
"We define: the dogmatic judgments of the Roman Pontiff are infallible. Therefore let us also define the form to be used by the Pontiff in such a judgment. It seems to me that this was the mind of some of the most reverend fathers as they spoke from this podium. But, most eminent and reverend fathers, this proposal simply cannot be accepted because we are not dealing with something new here. Already thousands and thousands of dogmatic judgments have gone forth from the Apostolic See; where is the law which prescribed the form to be observed in such judgments?" The Gift of Infallibility, p. 47.6
Ibid., p. 74.7
See J.M.A. Vacant, Études théologiques sur les constitutions du Concile du Vatican, t.2, Paris: Delhomme et Briguet, 1895, p. 117-118.© Ignatius Press, 1999, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, P.O. Box 591810, San Francisco, CA 94159-1810, 800-651-1531.
