Actually, I'm not as interested in what Natural Law has to say as I am interested in the official Catholic Church position.
I'm waiting patiently.
Silly boy.
Don't you know that NL IS the Catholic church. He's NEVER wrong about Catholic doctrine or his interpretation of the CCC. Everybody else is, but NL never is.
Come to think of it, I don't recall that he's ever admitted that he's been wrong about anything.
It must be tough being so perfect living in such an imperfect world.
So rest assured, that if NL tells you it is so about the Catholic church, you can consider it written in stone.
Prior to the solemn definition of 1870, Pope Pius IX, with the support of the overwhelming majority of Roman Catholic bishops,
After Pius IX insisted on having himself declared infallible in 1870, Cardinal Henry Newman, his cause up for canonization, wrote: 'We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a pope to live twenty years. He becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts and does cruel things without meaning it.'
Many people don't realize how novel the idea of infallible popes is. It was only proclaimed at the instigation of Pope Pius IX at the First Vatican Council in 1870, about whom his private secretary, Monsignor Talbot said:
'Theology was not Pius' forte.' and 'As the Pope is no great theologian, I feel convinced that when he writes, his encyclicals are inspired by God.' Complete ignorance was no bar to infallibility, he said, since God can point out the right road even by the mouth of a talking ass.'
It was Pope Pius IX (pope from 1846-78) who initiated the infallibility movement. Pope Pius IX called Vatican I Council which met 93 times between December 8, 1869, and September 1, 1870. He was Machiavellian in his approach. In pursuit of the enactment of the doctrine, he violated the very tenet of Christian ethics: “The end never justifies the means." The realization that the end of Roman Catholic domination over the government of the worlds and their citizens was coming to an end. Theologian Hans Küng: "Pius IX had a sense of divine mission which he carried to extremes; he engaged in double dealing; he was mentally disturbed; and he misused his office." (For his critique, his license to teach theology in the name of the Catholic Church was revoked in 1979.)
“...So repressive were the agenda and official procedures; so one-sided and partisan were the selection of main theological experts and the composition of both the conciliar commissions and the conciliar presidium; so numerous were the means of pressure (moral, psychological, church-political, newspaper campaigns, threatened withdrawal of financial support, harassment by the police) to which the bishops of the anti-Infallibilist minority and the Infallibilist majority were exposed; so varied were the forms of manipulation applied, at the pope's behest, to advance the definition before, during, and after the Council that...as painful and embarrassing as it may be to admit, this Council resembled a well-organized and manipulated totalitarian party congress rather than a free gathering of Christian people.”
"How the Pope became Infallible: Pius IX and the Politics of Persuasion- 1979." Father August Bernhard Hasler, Catholic priest, historian, and former staff member of the Vatican's Secretariat for Christian Unity . In his book, Hasler described Pope Pius IX:
"* Insane, dishonest* Used coercion (financial pressure on the bishops) and intimidation, slave driver (“bullied the bishops directly, “drove the bishops mercilessly”
* The council was not permitted to postpone or recess under any circumstances, despite meeting in the harsh summer heat and in the middle of a malaria epidemic which caused a number of bishops to fall seriously ill. Upon learning of the spreading disease among the ranks of his bishops, Pius reportedly declared "Che crepino pure" (Let them croak)
* Pius stacked the council. (There were 96 consulting positions, and among them 59 were filled by Italians (his biggest supporters) and just 37 to officials from other countries. Out of those last 37, a mere 6 had any prior experience working with the Vatican.) * “Other bishops, like Bishop Henri Manret, openly called Pius IX a liar, so the charge was not at all unusual or suspect.”
* “Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe told a friend:” ‘In my entire life, I have never met a man who was less particular about the truth than Pius IX.” “He never admitted to the things he had done in his efforts to have infallibility declared an official Church dogma.”
* “Bishop Felix Dupanloupe wrote in his diary: "I'm not going to the Council anymore. The violence, the shamelessness, even more the falsity, vanity, and continual lying force me to keep my distance." * “Bishop Lecourtier from France, who was so discouraged that he threw his notes into the Tiber river and simply went home only to have his bishopric taken away for his trouble, complained:
An imposing minority, representing the faith of more than one hundred million Catholics, that is almost half the entire Church, is crushed beneath the yoke of a restrictive agenda, which is contradicts conciliar traditions. It is crushed by commissions which have not been truly elected and which dare to insert undebated paragraphs in the text after debate has closed. It is crushed by the absolute absence of discussion, response, objections, and the opportunity to demand explanations; by newspapers which have been encouraged to hunt the bishops down and to incite the clergy against them.
* “Pius had the council convened in Saint Peter's Basilica. What's wrong with that? Well, that place has some of the worst acoustics possible, making it incredibly difficult for anyone to actually hear what was going on, especially for the more elderly members.
Bishop Hefele wrote on this: "I now sit right next to the Secretary's desk, in the immediate vicinity of the cardinals...but often I can't hear what is being said from the speaker's platform."
* “...the pope exacerbated it by refusing to allow any copies of the speeches to be printed, preventing the cardinals from actually taking the time to study them carefully. Moreover, small group discussions in which issues could be debated and collectively reviewed were expressly prohibited - later, even large groups were banned. ...Finally, only committee members were given permission to reply to a speech immediately after it had been given - coincidentally, all committee members supported infallibility.”
If the pursuit of papal infallibility were within the scope of scientific research, the use of a flawed "methodology" would have dictated a rejection of the results of the “study”. In fact, the empirical evidence listed in the cases in Section D below of this Section illustrates that the conclusion achieved by Pius IX would be undeniably null and void. Hans Küng, The Catholic Church, A Short History p.113 Remarkably, this time saw the creation of the doctrine of papal infallibility which is not to be found in the Decretum Gratiani, in Thomas Aquinas, or in the words of the anonist popes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries... The assertion of papal infallibility was to bind all subsequent popes once and for all to the decree by Pope Nicholas III in favor of the Franciscan order. But this early doctrine of the infallibility and irreformability of papal decisions, at first not taken particularly seriously, was finally condemned in a bull of John XXII in 1324 as the work of the devil, the father of all lies, to be warmed up again only by the conservative publicists and popes of the nineteenth century.
When the fathers of Vatican I defined the pope's infallibility, they showed a contempt for history, preferring their own fables and fantasies. As if dogma is able to rise above the stone facts of history. As if dogma can fashion its own history. 'The very first thing dictators do, ' said Gerald Stern, 'is to efface memory.' Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, my choice of the most brilliant novel of the 20th century, 'The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.'
http://www.catholicshaveachoice.com/Against%20Papal%20Infallibility.htm