Naw…just need it to be for Mary. I guess that means she is not really the daughter of her parents though.
I asked you a question upthread: you stated that the Pope can be infallible if he says Mary was immaculately conceived — and my question is, can the next Pope be infallible if he says she wasn’t? (And maybe the next next one then says she was?)
I really do not know. The Pope speaking Ex Cathedra (infallible) has happened only twice and both had to do with Mary (immaculate conception and being bodily assumed into heaven).
I suppose a new Pope could reverse it. It’d be a really big deal in the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church’s politics are Byzantine to say the least and I really do not know how that would play out. Might be an interesting idea for a story/movie though.
Those who believe in the dogma of papal infallibility will tell you it will never happen, the Holy Spirit will prevent it. And people who don’t believe in that dogma will tell you the Pope could have been just as wrong about Mary being conceived without original sin ( which is what the IC means - it’s not the same as virgin birth) as he might be about who will win the World Series. So in their view, the teaching could change - just as the teaching about requiring celibacy for most priests* might change since that was never declared infallibly.
* It’s not all priests - married men cannot generally be ordained in the Latin Rite but they can in the Eastern Rite. Married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism can be ordained as Catholic priests.
No, she is really the daughter of her parents. The teaching is not to the effect that she was a virgin birth (like Jesus) but that she was unmarked by original sin.
This has occurred to many people over the past two thousand years, and has been endlessly discussed by theologians. I wouldn’t bother engaging with a passel of godless atheists about it, myself, if you want serious answers. It is an exceedingly important question, unlike the dogmas surrounding Mary, which, to my mind, are not.
How would a world in which we were all born without sin look different from the world we live in?
Aside: autocorrect briefly “fixed” typos in that post so that it read ״…we were all born when trout sin”. Never heard of that denomination!
Where does an encyclical fit into this scheme? Almost, but not quite infallible? (they are far more common)
An encyclical is a particular mode of expressing a teaching — a letter from the Pope addressed to all the bishops of the world. It’s authoritative, but not inherently infallible.
In principle you could have a papal teaching expressed in terms that ticks all the boxes required for infallibility, expressed in a an encyclical. The decree on infallibility doesn’t specify that any particular formal class of document has to be used.
Well, what is in effect here is that IRL a Pope does not simply pull ex cathedra proclamations out of his ass on the spur of the moment (St. John XXIII back in his time even explicitly stated he intended to never use the faculty). Both the official-record applications of infallibility in modern time were done through a Papal Bull/Apostolic Constitution, which means there was staff involved in researching and drafting the document over a period of time, and both the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption were beliefs that had been supported by significant factions of Church Fathers and the faithful for centuries.
This. The whole point of papal infalliblity is that the pope is infallible, not when proclaiming what the pope believes, but when proclaiming what the church believes. So any papal pronouncement with any pretensions to infallibility will be about a long-established belief of the church, and will be explicitly rooted in previously-proclaimed teachings. Mostly, it will resolve a point of dispute that has arisen relatively recently in relation to some long-held teaching.