Dog Breakfast
eight bits and ANTPogo, from what you've posted it looks very much like a closed issue to the popes, but obviously if there is this investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious over the topic of female ordination, then John Paul II's plan to remove all doubt "regarding a matter of great importance" didn't work.
The doubt that John Paul aspired to remove was uncertainty about what the Church's position was, whether that position was doctrine instead of discipline, and especially whether the Church had authority to legislate freely in this area (Hell no; compare the issue of whether priests can marry, which is discipline, and can be changed tomorrow if any Pope so decides).
In principle, John Paul could be overruled on this by a church council. That could happen someday, but whether there's really any chance of it, I doubt it. I would be suprised if it happened while anybody now living was still around.
If, as and when that happens, it will probably be called something like "Affirming Papal Discernment of Doctrine from Discipline," and will retrospectively proclaim some formal defect in John Paul's finding. That's what Vatican I did when it deep-sixed almost all previous Papal pronouncements on anything, and labeled the housecleaning "Papal Infallibility."
Francis really cannot unilaterally overrule John Paul with any hope of success. Francis' authority comes from the same source as John Paul's ... it just wouldn't work. Church politics isn't so different from secular politics. If Francis wants to shake things up, and given that he can't budge this, then his smart play is to make a show of standing firm on this, getting some political capital for giving away the store on something else, where the store actually is his to give away.
To be fair, though, if the current pope were to say he was being infallible when declaring that women couldn't be priests might just make more people lose belief in that whole idea of papal infallibility, rather than finally remove all doubt that they're barking up the wrong tree.
I notice you're very keen for a Pope to use the rarely invoked, and very narrow,
Papal infallibility prerogative. The (supposed) infallibility inheres in the church; the notion of "Papal" infallibility was instituted to specify the few and limited circumstances in which the Pope can act personally within the corporate infallibility without calling a council.
The actual situation is that a Pope, John Paul, has witnessed the church's existing teaching on this point to be doctrinal in character and infallible. This removes any substantial legal purpose for a subsequent Pope to gild the lily, so to speak. The situation is a little unusual in that there doesn't seem to be conciliar legislation or black-letter scriptural direction from Jesus himself for John Paul to have "witnessed," but JP really did a great job of poisoning the well.
I pictured an imaginary US supreme court that had the power to say infallible stuff, in response to a conference that has been devoting its energies to removing the establishment clause from the constitution, why wouldn't the court uphold the establishment clause and declare their decision infallible? Is that so silly?
It's a different system of law, although the issue comes up wherever law is followed: to what extent can one authority bind a later authority of the same kind? The current Supreme Court has the
power to overrule any previous Supreme Court. The Court is, however, reluctant to do so willy-nilly, since respect for precedent is crucial to the point of having the rule of law.
The application of the Fourteenth Amendment to the First Amendment (that
no American governmental unit can establish religion, including the states, and so the contrary mandate of the Tenth Amendment is voided - in other words, the Union won the Civil War) is court-made law, and fairly recent at that. It "sticks" not because the earlier Court is infallible, but because the legal argument was persuasively made, mainly by Hugo Black. Realistically, whatever its theoretical preorgative to do so may be, a future Court is unlikely to overturn this. An amendment to the Constitution would be all-but required, as a practical matter.
John Paul's witness will stick because, like Hugo Black, he wrapped up his holding about what the law "is" in "bulletproof" language. It will be difficult for a subsequent Pope to overturn John Paul, and as a practical matter, a conciliar enactment would be all-but required.
