The Church Infallibility

Jesus seemed confident, though, that His Truth would be preserved. He said, “Heaven and earth will pass away – but my words will never pass away.” How did He know? What mechanism did He put in place to make sure His truth would come down to us, pure and un-distorted?

The answer is that He gave His Church a teaching office with His authority and with the power of infallibility. And that means we can be confident of knowing His truth, after all these years. 

Infallibility is a word that’s very often misunderstood. It does not mean that the Pope and the bishops will be perfect or sinless. Impeccability means a person will never sin. Jesus gave the Church’s teaching authority the gift of Infallibility. Infallibility means preservation from error when officially declaring the truth about faith and morals.

What does that mean? If means if you want to be sure you’re not making a mistake about the truth that Jesus revealed, you have to put yourself under the guidance of the Magisterium, the successor of Peters and the Apostles, the Pope and the Bishops united to Him when they speak definitively on a matter of faith and morals.

Infallibility doesn’t mean the Church can only repeat Jesus’ exact words. It means the Church can explain His unchanging truth in new ways, applying it to new situations so that every generation can understand and live it.

When the Church began using the word “Trinity” to describe the Three Persons in One God, it was introducing a new word—not one found in the Bible or used in the earliest centuries. But the word itself simply made explicit what the New Testament reveals: that there is one God in three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Not only does the Church have the mission of preaching the Gospel to new times and new places, but she also has the mission of responding to new objections and challenges.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Church has had to respond to the challenges of the sexual revolution, which claim that it’s okay to use contraception, or engage in homosexual acts, or pretend to change your gender.

Again, no one in the Christian world had really ever made these claims before, so the Church has had to carefully craft arguments based on Christ’s truth, showing why these false views of human sexuality were wrong. Christ knew His Church would face these challenges, and so He entrusted her with the gift of infallibility, enabling her to reliably defend the truth and refute any claims that contradict the Gospel.

Across centuries, cultures, and countless languages, the Church continues to proclaim the same truth. And she can do so with confidence because Christ gave her the gift of infallibility through the pope and the bishops united with him. That’s why the Church can preach to the whole world, with clarity, authority, and confidence.