Why there is a need for a magisterium

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2011/11/we-dont-need-no-magisterium-a-reply-to-christianity-todays-mark-galli/


also from comment  38     here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/02/on-the-usefulness-of-tradition-a-response-to-recent-objections/#comment-47329:

the Magisterium consists of the entire college of bishops in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Ordinarily, the infallibility of the whole Church is expressed when the members of the episcopal college agree “on one position as to be definitively held” (Vatican II, Lumen Gentium §25). That agreement can be synchronic, diachronic, or both, but it requires only consensus, not unanimity, on matters directly pertaining to the deposit of faith. This is called the infallibility of the “ordinary and universal magisterium” (IOUF), as distinct from the infallibility of the “extraordinary” magisterium by which ecumencial councils, or popes unilaterally, define dogmas formally. It was by means of the IOUF that the Church maintained the apostolic deposit of faith whole and entire for nearly three centuries before there ever was either an ecumenical council or a unilateral definition by a pope meant to bind the whole Church.

Moreover, the IOUF is still the primary means today by which the faithful are enabled to recognize the difference propositions expressing divine revelation as such from what is only a matter of theological opinion. That’s because the full content of the deposit of faith, which is transmitted to us by Scripture and Tradition, can never be exhaustively expressed in a finite list of formally defined propositions, even though some such propositions are needed when responding to heresy with the greater clarity and explicitness required. This is why, as Blessed John Henry Newman argued, the “sense of the faithful” is also indispensable for understanding what the inerrant faith of the whole Church is.

Of course there is sometimes debate among Catholic theologians about just which non-dogmatic propositions have been infallibly taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium. The most recent examples of that are the Church’s teachings on women’s ordination and contraception. In 1994 and 1995, Pope John Paul II and then-Cardinal Ratzinger, as head of the CDF, together made clear to the whole Church that the former’s statement “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women” has been “infallibly taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium.” Such a ruling, as far as I know, was the first of its kind, and it settles the matter definitively, despite what heretics and the ignorant believe. As to contraception, the Vatican–including the last few popes–has indicated sotto voce that the long-established teaching is “definitive and irreformable.” I have no doubt that it is, but most Catholics don’t know that, because no pope has made such a statement with the same degree of authority as JP2′s statement on women’s ordination. That’s probably because the Vatican is not ready to handle what would undoubtedly be the most massive wave of outrage the Church will have seen in centuries. But the time will eventually be ripe.

also here from comment 88 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/01/holy-church-finding-jesus-as-a-reverted-catholic-a-testimonial-response-to-chris-castaldo/

The mouth of Christ, speaking to us, is authoritative.

If the body of Christ is in some sense present on the earth, then His mouth is in some sense present on the earth, and when His mouth speaks to us, it is authoritative.

What part of the body of Christ is His mouth? If we cannot say to the hand or to the eye that “we have no need of you,” then surely we cannot say it to His mouth, either.

A peculiar way of looking it at it? Surely.

But I think one way of looking at the difference between Catholic ecclesiology and the various Protestant ecclesiologies is to observe that the former takes seriously the notion that Christ has an ongoing visible presence on the earth which is miraculously spread through all those who consume Him: You are what you eat, and each of us is called to “put on Christ,” to have “Christ in us” and to “be in Christ.” The Old Testament said that we were not to drink the blood of animals, noting that the life of the animal is in the blood. Just so: We are higher than the animals, and called even higher to participation in the divine nature, so it is unfitting to drink the blood of animals, and take in a lower animal life, or to drink the blood of mere fallen men and take in the life of mere fallen men (which requires harming them, besides). No, we are called to take into ourselves the life of God…which requires drinking the blood of God. We are called to become part of the one loaf which is Christ by partaking of that loaf. As a Hebrew is cut off from his people if he refuses to eat the Paschal lamb, so we are not of the People of God if, having been offered the Lamb of God, we refuse to partake of Him.

But if we partake of the bread of life and the blood of the New Covenant, we eat the heavenly manna and are nourished, and take the life of God into us, and become saints: Little Christs. He is in us, and we are in Him.

And when we are persecuted as the early Christians were persecuted by Saul, the Lord says to our persecutors as He said to Saul, “Why are you persecuting Me?” Not, you notice, “My followers” or “My adopted little brothers and sisters,” but “Me.” For the body of Christ is Christ: Hit one of the baptized and you hit Jesus Christ. We are not Gnostics that we should put up a radical divide between the body and the soul of a person. They are both the person. If we are the body of Christ then we, collectively, are Christ.

This then is the body of Christ in the world: A body visible in the baptized, which Christ intends to be capable of speaking authoritatively for Him. He has hands still at work in the world, visibly; He has feet still at work in the world, visibly; He has a mouth still speaking in the world, audibly.

But which mouth? Every cell in His body seems sometimes to be yammering, and they’re often contradicting each other. Only if we know which is the right voice to heed, can we be unified in our understanding of the faith…and that unity is non-optional, according to Christ Himself, who desires that we be one as He and the Father are one.

Clearly independent reading and interpretation of Scripture are insufficient to bring about this unity: That is only all the little independent mouths buttressing their opinions in contradictory ways, and it produces the thousands of denominations and the multiplicity of different opinions even within denominations which those denominations’ founders would themselves have called scandalous and heretical. If Jesus was such a fool as to have intended that as an ecclesiology to last for all ages, then He was not God. But He was and is God, and God is no fool, and He knew better. He gave us a way to identify His authentic voice in the world. A visible way. An objective way. A way that works.

I know of no other plausible candidate than the Catholic Magisterium. If it didn’t exist, you’d have to make it up, just to keep the divinity of Christ plausible.

So Christ’s voice still rings out in the world with authority. His body really is His body.

from 482 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2013/03/jason-stellman-tells-his-conversion-story/#comment-58800

 But the teaching of Vatican II was a clear exercise of the “ordinary and universal magisterium” of the Church. By traditional criteria as well as the Council’s own (as set forth in Lumen Gentium §25), the clear teaching of the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church calls for at least “religious assent,” even when it is does not actually meet all the conditions for infallibility. 

comment 532:

 the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, which consists not only of the bishop of Rome, but of all the bishops in full communion with him, teaches infallibly under certain conditions. The broadest of those conditions is this:

Although the individual bishops do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility, they nevertheless proclaim Christ’s doctrine infallibly whenever, even though dispersed through the world, but still maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching matters of faith and morals, they are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held.

That comes from Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, §25. (Since I have referred you to LG §25 more than once in this thread as a key source for describing the CIP, it shouldn’t be necessary for me to do this. But apparently it is. I cannot, after all, expect every scholar to actually read the documents I refer to.)

The above-stated condition was satisfied as the Apostles’ Creed, which originated as an expanded baptismal formula in the Latin Church in the 2nd century, came to be adopted throughout the whole Church by the end of the 3rd century. Yet none of that creed’s affirmations were, or ever have been, unilaterally defined by the papacy as dogma. In fact, given the CIP, the entire deposit of faith was infallibly transmitted from the beginning of the episcopate, with varying degrees of explicitness, solely by the criterion set forth above, until the first “ecumenical” council of Nicaea in 325. And it wasn’t until centuries after that the bishops of Rome even endeavored to define dogma unilaterally.

The most important work of the first Council of Nicaea was to expand the Apostles’ Creed to include, in response to the Arian heresy, the affirmation that the Son is ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί: “consubstantial with the Father.” On the CIP, that expansion satisfies the next condition on episcopal infallibiity, which obtains, as specified by LG §25,

…when, gathered together in an ecumenical council, [the bishops] are teachers and judges of faith and morals for the universal Church, whose definitions must be adhered to with the submission of faith.

Now the bishop of Rome did not convoke that council; Emperor Constantine did. Nor did the bishop of Rome attend that council; he sent delegates. Nor do we have evidence that Rome formally ratified the Nicene Creed in the decades that followed. Yet the evidence we do have pretty clearly indicates that the popes of Rome concurred with it; and in due course, that further expansion of the Creed which emerged from the second ecumenical council, that of Constantinople in 381, was formally adopted into the Roman liturgy in Latin translation and remains there–with one brief clause added in the early Middle Ages–to the present day. Yet at no point have the popes of Rome unilaterally taught or defined any of the affirmations of that text as it emerged from that council.

So ecclesial infallibility, as understood by the CIP, is not limited to the bishops of Rome. In fact, even according to Vatican I, papal infallibility is but an expression of “that infallibility with which Christ willed his Church to be endowed in matters of faith and morals.” Papal infallibility is but a special and rarely invoked case of ecclesial infallibility.

Now I could go on about how and why the doctrine of papal infallibility developed over time, but I doubt such an exercise would be helpful in this discussion, at least at this stage. That’s because, it seems to me, your real difficulty is with the fact that the things I’ve been quoting from LG were never formally taught centuries ago. That’s the sort of objection I expect from an adherent of a non-Catholic but Christian IP. For such people, if a given doctrine D is neither explicitly stated in Scripture, nor explicitly held by the consensus of pre-Nicene writers who revered Scripture, nor readily inferable even from the consensus patrum after that, then D is simply not a legitimate development. That’s the IP issue we need to address before we get to discussing distinctively Catholic doctrines.