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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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In Our Time: Papal Infallibility

Papal Infallibility

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Papal Infallibility

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that Popes cannot err in exercise of their office

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the idea that Popes cannot err when defining a doctrine, in office, proclaimed at the First Vatican Council 1869-70

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why, in 1870, the Vatican Council issued the decree ‘pastor aeternus’ which, among other areas, affirmed papal infallibility.  It meant effectively that the Pope could not err in his teachings, an assertion with its roots in the early Church when the bishop of Rome advanced to being the first among equals, then overall head of the Christian Church in the West.  The idea that the Pope could not err had been a double-edged sword from the Middle Ages, though; while it apparently conveyed great power, it also meant a Pope was constrained by whatever a predecessor had said.  If a later Pope were to contradict an earlier Pope, then one of them must be wrong, and how could that be…if both were infallible?

With

Tom O’Loughlin
Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham

Rebecca Rist
Professor in Medieval History at the University of Reading

And 

Miles Pattenden
Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson

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