DAY 335
CHALLENGE
“Catholics may claim that they rely on Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium, but the Magisterium has the final say. What Catholics really believe in is solo magisterio (“by the Magisterium alone”). It could make up anything, and Catholics would have to believe it.”
DEFENSE
This claim does not stand up to analysis.
First, the Magisterium is not itself a source of the Faith. Its function is to proclaim and clarify what is found in Scripture and Tradition, which together “make up a single sacred deposit of the Word of God” (CCC 97). Scripture and Tradition thus represent the source upon which the Magisterium must draw. It can’t simply “make up anything.”
It could not, for example, say the Faith requires us to hold that a UFO crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, that Lee Harvey Oswald was or wasn’t responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, or that the Great Wall of China is made of marshmallows. Scripture and Tradition say nothing about these matters, and so the Magisterium cannot proclaim them as articles of faith.
Second, the Magisterium is limited by what Scripture and Tradition do say. To cite just a few examples, they make it abundantly clear that God created the world, that Jesus is the Messiah, and that the afterlife is real. Consequently, the Magisterium can’t teach contrary to these points.
Third, the Magisterium is limited by its own history. Every time it infallibly settles an issue, that teaching is “irreformable” (incapable of being changed). It can be further clarified and supplemented, but it cannot be reversed. Consequently, what the Magisterium is potentially able to teach in the future is limited by what it has infallibly taught in the past.
It may be rhetorically useful for those critical of the Catholic Church to claim that the Magisterium can simply teach anything, but this is not the case. There are practical, real-world limits to what it can and cannot say. Even apart from the perspective of faith, the scope of what the Magisterium can teach has definite limits.
And from the perspective of faith, it is even more limited, for Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would guide his Church “into all the truth” (John 16:13), thus making it “the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).
TIP
See also Day 315.