Last week’s New Republic remembered a horrendous event–the 1858 seizure by papal police in Bologna, Italy, of a six-year-old Jewish boy whose nanny had sprinkled him with water behind his parents’ back. The church, which had encouraged the “baptism,” refused to return the boy, and he grew up to become a monk.
McClory is a former priest who teaches journalism at Medill and until recently was a Reader staff writer. What drew him to his recondite subject was the Vatican’s 1995 announcement that the ban on the ordination of women must be considered an infallible teaching. “I had this emotional feeling, like a lot of Catholics do, that infallibility settles everything,” McClory said. “That when push comes to shove an infallible doctrine is not arguable, not appealable, not changeable in any way.” Yet McClory’s head told him the Vatican was wrong. The announcement had been made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that guards orthodoxy, whose roots run to the Roman Inquisition. And some theologians were arguing that the CDF had abused the doctrine of infallibility, which perhaps had worn out its welcome. Obviously there was much here to understand that McClory didn’t, and he set out to educate himself.
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“Absolutism does not belong in laws,” he replied, “but it doesn’t belong in church laws either. You can be an absolutist, but you can’t be that way when you don’t have certainty. People like things to be black and white in some areas of life. They say, ‘At least with the church there’s not that degree of relativity.’ But there is relativity. God is a mystery. The church is a mystery. Jesus is a mystery. We can act as if we have an absolute grasp on things, but human language changes, our understanding of truth changes–and you can’t attach complete absolutism to anything human.”
McClory said, “I was stunned when I read it originally.” After all, it had been Ratzinger’s CDF that declared it “infallibly” true that women could not be ordained.
“My book is kind of a popularization,” McClory acknowledged, “so scholars will say it’s superficial. Most books on infallibility are unintelligible. There are huge footnotes and distinctions upon distinctions.”
I called Melvin Claxton, who wrote the Tribune’s series, “Fire Sale: America’s Unchecked Gun Market,” with William Gaines. I asked Claxton about his undercover tactics.
