Infallible Popes and Other Old Poops

You know, just when you start thinking, "Hey, we're living in the future!" and get all worked up over all the fantastic technology and stuff (Ha!  My computer froze for hours today after I foolishly agreed to download Internet Explorer 10) you wind up reading a story about how somebody was burned as a witch someplace or that we still have Kings, Queens and a Pope.

Interesting fact about the Pope:  When he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals, he is infallible, according to the theologians of the Catholic Church.  Well, according to them since the First Vatican Council in 1870 anyway. That's when they thought up (or "defined") the doctrine of Papal infallibility, although theologians have since "discovered" many instances of Popes being infallible before they told the people about the possibility.  This, of course, involved a re-interpretation of history.  I'm sure this ties in somehow to the whole child-molesting-coverup thing, but I'm not sure just how.  In any event, it's nice to have a sure thing going for us, although here in Twenty-First Century America neither "faith" nor "morals" seems to be a real hot topic at the moment.  Everybody in the public eye, from Jesse Jackson, Jr. to Cardinal Mahoney to Lance Armstrong to Silvio Berlusconi seems to have decided that moral relativism and expediency will do for just about any situation.

I was reading this morning that, according to the Catholic Church, the doctrine of papal infallibility didn't "just suddenly appear" in Church doctrine.  It was there all along, and it's only the Church's understanding of the doctrine that's evolved to the point that it seemed like a change.  Ditto with the Constitution of the United States of America.  All those rights we used to discover lurking in there, like the "right to privacy," for example, really were in there all along, but we didn't know about them because we didn't know how to look for them.  And all those governmental powers and taxes and things that we keep on discovering were in there all along, too. 

It's the nature of the beast that our "understanding" of everything is continually evolving-- the versions of astrophysics, biology and American history now being taught in schools are very different from those taught a few decades ago.  With history in particular, it's funny how we can keep refining our understanding no matter how far away from the actual events we get.  Which makes you wonder:  Why bother to amend the Constitution, ever?  Why not just amend our understanding of it, instead?  After all, it's been a long time since there were any amendments to the Bible, but there's never been any shortage of prophets and ministers and holy rollers around to tell everybody how they've discovered the hidden truth in there that blew by everybody else for the past two-plus thousand years.  Also, when the Supreme Court does find a new little twist or turn in the Constitution, that's exactly what we have to do--  amend our understanding of the document.  Because that's what the Supreme Court does, apart from deciding close political elections-- it finds those little nuggets in the Constitution that were there all along, but which will change everybody's lives once the Court tells us how wrong we've been.

Pope John Paul II only spoke infallibly once, in 1994, when he announced that women were never, ever going to be ordained as priests, and that, ergo, people should just stop talking about the possibility.  And there you have it, his "legacy."  No more Pope Joans.  Oh, and I also heard that somebody in Latin America put out a comic book based on the premise that when John Paul II died he became a costumed superhero, fighting all kinds of bad guys from Hell.  But he was only the second Pope to speak infallibly since they thought up the doctrine in 1870, so he'll be remembered.
(The other time was in 1950 when Pope Pius XI decided that the Virgin Mary was assumed "body and soul" into heaven when she died.) 

People often talk about the Constitution as a "living" document-- i.e., one that still works more than two centuries after it was written because it was written in vague enough terms to permit its provisions to be applied in situations that the Framers (i.e., the landed gentry who wrote the document) could never have imagined.  Other people are "strict constructionists," which means that you should look at the world through Eighteenth Century eyes when interpreting the law of the land.  They say that if you want to enact laws dissimilar from any already in existence, you have to amend the Constitution, which is a lengthy and difficult process-- effectively impossible when the electorate and their representatives are split down the middle as they are today.

Now, nobody has ever said that the Supreme Court is infallible, but the thing is that if they do get something wrong, it's pretty hard (even for them) to fix.  The Supreme Court's decisions can only be reversed by-- you guessed it, the Supreme Court.  The Court's interpretation of the Constitution is the last word.  Of course, you can get around that... by amending the Constitution, but as noted above, that's not practical in most situations.  So, it's almost like they're infallible, because if they get it wrong, everybody then alive might very well be dead before they can fix it.

Like Popes, Supreme Court Justices never have to retire.  But, unlike Popes, they speak "infallibly" on everything under the sun, from taxes to birth control to voting rights to war powers to advertising to privacy rights to porn.  Because they are a separate, co-equal branch of government, they can look the President and the Congress right in the eye and say, "You're not the boss of me."  As for the voters, they have as much input into the selection of the Supreme Court Justices as they have into the selection of a new Pope in Rome.  Wow.