.....Looks like some pretty clear qualifications to me. The Pope has to be (a) speaking in his supreme authority as "Pastor and Teacher of All Christians," (b) he has to be defining (that is, teaching definitively), (c) to the whole church, (d) a doctrine concerning faith or morals.
Is that your interpretation of what Vatican I taught? Is one's individual infallibility in interpreting that document as common as dirt and available to anyone who has said the magic words before reading Vatican I for themselves?
Cordially,
It obviously does not fit with the understanding of the word in common use throughout history. Apparently the is a peculiar special decoder ring definition of the word that Protestantism says applies to each Protestant individual but somehow not to any individual Pope or other Catholic.
Catholic doctrine on Papal infallibility is clear, long established, profusely documented, and the subject of numerous books by Catholic theologians and others, both pro and con.
More to the point is how any Protestant can argue against any form of Catholic infallibility, Papal or other, when all of Protestantism is based on individual interpretation of any and all Scripture.
Seeing Protestants focus so intently on attacking Catholics and Catholicism rather than on bringing home the 99 of their own sheep who are so obviously widely scattered begs the question, how can folks who claim to be able to infallibly interpret Scripture ignore so much of it ?