I am a Catholic because I love the Church. I don’t want a private religion, I want the Catholic faith, and for that I need to be in communion with the successor of Peter. For how else could I know that my faith is authentic? It was to Peter alone that the Lord vouchsafed the keys and it was in the context of that bestowing that he promised his Church would not fail. Infallibility is intrinsic to the papal office.
Yet I also loathe and distrust the Church with an intensity that surprises even me. Christ may have given the keys to Peter but he certainly didn’t promise his successors would guard them well. Impulsive, volatile, not above telling lies, a traitor, most fallible of men, Peter, you might have thought, was the last person Christ would have chosen. Yet choose him he did. He trusted him, surely, for his intense humanity and true and warm heart.
Catholics often think that when the Pope speaks infallibly it means that we have to believe that what he says is certainly true. This is obvious nonsense. You can’t believe something that is certainly true. If it were you wouldn’t have to believe it, you would know it. Even the Pope can’t declare elementary offences against the dictionary infallible. What does the word mean? Its root lies in the Latin fallere which means to deceive, to dupe, to mislead. To be infallible is not to make pronouncements that are intellectually indubitable but to be truthful, honest, an unfailing friend. Paradoxically, it was Peter’s fallibility, his humanity, that made him infallible.
In emphasising their infallibility so much the popes have dehumanized themselves. Think of the horrible Orwellian parlance in which the Vatican condemns homosexuality. It is "an intrinsic moral evil" and "an objective disorder". Can you imagine Jesus saying that? This is not the language of Christianity but of totalitarian regimes and the Stalinist secret police. It might be argued that such phrases are used not in a pastoral but a legal context. There is no Christian context in which these terms could be appropriately applied to so intimate and personal a matter as a person’s capacity for sexual love.
Nobody is bound to buy a second hand car from a dealer who has already cheated them many times, however honest he might proclaim himself to be. The popes have misled and mortally damaged humanity so often they have, on any reasonable count, disqualified themselves as reliable witnesses to the Gospel. They have taught that since error has no rights deviants can be burnt alive, tortured countless thousands in their dungeons, condemned Galileo on a completely spurious reading of the Bible, permitted slavery, excommunicated anyone who thought the papacy might be better off without the papal states, issued the Syllabus of Errors and signed a concordat with Hitler. Of particular relevance is the Vatican’s apparent support for the fascist regimes in Chile and Argentina during the Cold War – I say apparent because we do not know what went on behind the scenes but then we can only judge on what we are allowed to know - both because these regimes were so recent and so atrocious, but also because they proclaimed themselves to be acting in accordance with the doctrine of National Security "for Fatherland and Church". They believed that they were doing what they did partly in the name of the Church.
You don’t have to be a Marxist to think that it cannot ever be right for Catholics to torture other Catholics in the most horrible ways and then murder them and hide the bodies so their distraught relatives could not even find them - that such horrors should go unrebuked was surely a major failure to preach the Gospel. It is hard to imagine anything more atrocious than burning somebody alive in the name of the Lamb of God. But if you can throw living nuns with their chests ripped open from helicopters into the River Plate in part to defend the faith, why not burn them alive? The popes have done it many times. Can we be sure that they would not permit it again if they could? We cannot. If they have not destroyed their own infallibility they have certainly thrown it away.
But I still want to be a Catholic. I want popes. There is a way out of this. The next pope needs to weep bitter tears of contrition as Peter did. Only then will we be able to follow him as the unfailingly sure guide we believe Christ intended the leaders of his church to be. You don’t have to be infallible to think that a future world of nine billion people well furnished with nuclear bombs and facing anything from two to six degrees of climate change will not be an easy place. We need the leadership a truly humane pope could give. We need one overflowing with Peter’s humanity. Whoever you are, lead us. Inspire us.
