Wait... What?

Was the infallible Pope still infallible if he lost his mind or his faith or both? 

The Vatican had seen its share of scandals and aberrant Papal behavior in its two thousand year history. There have been popes who engaged in every kind of sexual promiscuity and deviancy, popes who squandered the Churches’ fortunes on lavish and garish excesses that would have made Donald Trump gasp, almost bankrupting the Church of Jesus Christ, popes who have ruthlessly ordered their political enemies murdered, popes who had sanctioned the torture of those who voiced any criticism of institution or its’ occasional excesses, popes who had started holy wars where millions were slaughtered and popes who had covered up the rampant sexual abuse of children by priests that stretched back to the first century.

Papal infallibility is a doctrine that appears nowhere in the New Testament. The 19th century doctrine states that when it comes to formal beliefs of the Catholic Church, the pope is preserved from the possibility of ever committing a mistake. The pope’s word on matters of scripture is, in effect, the word of God and Jesus. 

The doctrine of papal infallibility was formally adopted as official Catholic dogma at the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870 and was, therefore, a very recent formal creation. The only caveat to this doctrine is that the infallible teachings of the pope must be based on, or at least not contradict, sacred tradition or sacred scripture.

It had pretty much always been assumed that the Pope was the alpha interpreter of the New Testament. But the First Vatican Council left no doubt and literally no room for argument. “Because he said so!” became the be-all and end all for inquiring Catholic minds. He is always right and that’s the end of that. So, for example, if the pope were to interpret what has always been accepted as a clear biblical admonition against homosexuality which states, “a man who lies with another man shall be stoned” to mean that gays should smoke pot before engaging in sexual relations, that would be the correct interpretation ipso facto and a billion Catholics would just have to learn to live with it.

Infallible, is a novel in which I ask the question of what would happen if the pope hit his head and woke up from the injury suddenly reinterpreting everything? What would happen  if (God forbid?) the pope started to sound alarmingly like a secular humanist? If he is  infallible, the Church is stuck with him. There is no 25th Amendment for popes. Infallibility would be a Donald Trump wet dream.

This episode is a preview of the book, Infallible, and will hopefully get you to think about the unthinkable. 

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This episode explores the philosophy of "that's impossible" beginning with Jimmy Johnson's claim that EXTENZE helped him attain phallic adequacy. Figurative impossibility, conditional impossibility, and intrinsic impossibility are distinguished. Finally, the idea of mutually exclusive moral concepts is explored by an examination of theodicy and the Canaanite genocide.