Response to a Roman apologist: my defense against an alleged fallacy

Marcus, in a gracious comment on my earlier post here, alleged that he'd found a fallacy in an item in one of my earlier comments on another site. In short, he claims that this comment holds up "cafeteria Catholics" as a major problem with the Roman church.

Simply put, I did NOT cite "cafeteria Catholics" as the problem with Catholicism; my post addressed the problems in the Magesterium, not in the flock (the only time I mentioned the flock, I made it quite clear that the problem was the same with Protestant churches; my intent was to point out that Rome's alleged infallibility had not protected it from the problems Protestants admittedly suffer under). One might justly paraphrase that I wanted to cite "cafeteria Popes and Priests" as the problem.

I admit that I used a list that wound up being very unclear; in particular, when I mentioned "the run-of-the-mill Catholic who listens to and obeys his teaching priest." I should have made it clear that the problems arise when the priest goes beyond established doctrine, as happened with Liberation Theology (I know of one entire convent of nuns that was disciplined for teaching one of the more extreme variants). Again, the mere teaching doesn't disprove the entire church -- but it entirely defeats the argument that merely being in the church removes the need for discernment.

Let me give one specific example of a cafeteria Pope.

Pope Honorius I erred into heresy around 634 (by failing to condemn the heresy of monothelitism, and in fact approving an argument that the monothelitists used); it took until 649 for the heresy to be condemned in council. In that time, a number of people relied on and defended Honorius, and some of them were anathematized by the same council. From 634 to 649, innocent people in the congregations of those pastors of Christ's flock were deceived and divided, because they heard the Pope speak at a time and place when all agreed that he should speak ex cathedra, and at least some of them thought that he WAS speaking ex cathedra, but the church later decided that he was NOT doing so. He was personally fallible, and in fact personally failed. The Church infallibly contests none of this, and it fits with the council's and later Pope's decree (although some notable apologists within the Church have fallibly disputed the details).

So here's the problem. Pope Honorious was speaking for a cause on which he should have spoken infallibly. He was truly a Pope. His letter, according to a site called "The Catholic Encyclopedia" (linked above, I don't know its credentials), met the formal definition of "ex cathedra". In other words, no observer at the time could have decided that he was not speaking ex cathedra without first deciding (by what Roman Catholics mock as "private interpretation") that he was actually wrong. So the Ecumenical church admits that in this case, and I claim in many others, the Pope led people into actual heresy; he personally failed in office, and those who depended on his infallibility found that it failed.

Thankfully, the council, like the Protestant Reformers after them, were not afraid to declare a Pope to be anathema. I'm not claiming that the specific judgement of the council or the Reformers was right or wrong. But I am claiming that to the extent that the Pope and the council and the Reformers (respectively) were seeking and declaring God's truth rather than man's word, they were to be praised and imitated; and to the extent that they were adding man's word to the Gospel of Christ, anathema sint.

-Wm

Response to a Roman apologist: "an objective authority"

This article, unlike most of what I intend to post, will not be heavily concerned with exegesis of the Scriptures; rather, I'll be looking at the historical separation of the Roman, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox churches, and some of the Roman and Protestant church's arguments.
There are two common reactive attitudes from the Protestant world towards Roman Catholic teaching: instinctive opposition, and acceptance of their terms for the debate. This article by the excellent theology blog Parchment and Pen attempts to correct the first problem, but errs on the other side by defining the debate in Roman Catholic terms, as though Protestants needed to accept Roman Catholicism in order to accept Roman Catholics as brethren. I've responded in the comments to the original poster's misconceptions (there are some excellent comments in that discussion, as you'd expect when Beckwith becomes involved in a discussion), so I won't recap here; rather, I'd like to respond to a Roman Catholic commenter, "Micah", who accurately and elegantly distilled the issues in a short post; and unlike the original poster he gives criteria for accepting the Roman church's claims.
The question, to Micah, is whether the Roman Church objectively and exclusively has apostolic authority. After some discussion, Micah made an elaboration, which nicely establishes his claim as requiring three points of proof. He explained that the Roman Catholic Church has objective authority because it has unbroken apostolic succession by holy ordination; because it is a single unified institution; and because it is "catholic" (universal) in not being tied to any particular ethnic origin or nation. He identifies how several other classes of local churches might have one, but lack another of these.
We can examine each of these three alleged marks of a true church to see how closely the Roman church adheres to the standard Micah requires of it. We can then examine the teachings of the Church throughout the ages to see whether it is in agreement with the Roman church on what the marks of the true church are.
The following posts, and hopefully comments, will dive into this issue more thoroughly. I plan to post four more posts in this series, but I will alter these plans based on trackbacks and/or comments.