Papal Infallibility

One of the distinguishing features of the Roman Catholic Church relative to other branches of Christianity is the Church's assertion that, under very limited circumstances, people are capable of speaking without possibility of error. You can read more about that here:
Papal infallibility

In this case, the category of "people" is restricted to the Pope, and the limits of those circumstances are a bit more constricting than you might expect. The claim is that infallible statements only occur when the Pope speaks ex cathedra to define that a doctrine concerning faith or morals that must be held by all in the Church. One of my friends described speaking ex cathedra as "The Catholic equivalent of Super Saiyan;" more rigorous definitions exist in the Catechism and on Wikipedia.

The result is that infallibility is invoked very rarely, and if you encounter Catholics who believe that everything the Pope says is unquestionable (I haven't actually met any such people, but people on the internet claim this happens), they're probably confused. Pope Pius XII made the only statement that fits all the criteria of infallibility since the doctrine was rigorously asserted during the first Vatican Council in 1870, affirming the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in 1950. Before Vatican I, Pope Pius IX's definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is the only teaching that Catholic theologians agree was infallible. As the current Pope Emeritus put it more recently, "The Pope is not an oracle..."

Understanding how things work is hard. People have been working relentlessly for as long as we've lived on the Earth to find ways to discern truth in a universe that seems really weird and counterintuitive most of the time. The idea of Papal infallibility is that there's another avenue by which our minds' can be graced by truth about the reality we live in. Arguments whether or not it might be true are beyond the scope of this blog (though I sometimes touch on them at my other one), but I find the idea fascinating that humans can, through reliable but sometimes fallible methods of reasoning, reach a point where they can say in confidence that truth can, in some limited, intermittent way, shine clearly, and the optimism about humanity embedded in the idea is lovely. As usual, these are just observations (and some blatant reposting from Wikipedia). The real interesting argument is outside the scope of this post.