Papacy

The papacy is unusual among religious offices in that its powers are written down and are legally operative.

Under Catholic canon law the pope has full, supreme, immediate and universal ordinary power over the whole church, which he can always freely exercise. In practice: he appoints bishops, and can remove them; he is the final court of appeal, and no appeal lies from his judgement; he can legislate for the entire church by his own act; he convokes ecumenical councils, presides over them and confirms their decrees, without which they are not binding; and he can define doctrine.

The definition of 1870 set out two things that are commonly run together and are distinct. The first is universal jurisdiction, which is the governing power just described and is exercised daily. The second is infallibility, which applies only when the pope speaks as universal pastor to define a doctrine of faith or morals for the whole church, and which has been invoked explicitly on perhaps one occasion since, in 1950. Almost nothing a pope says falls under it, including most encyclicals and everything said in interviews.

Alongside all this runs something no other religious office has: the Holy See is a sovereign subject of international law. It maintains diplomatic relations with most states, signs treaties, and holds a permanent observer seat at the United Nations. This is separate from Vatican City, which is a territory created in 1929 to give the See a physical base after the Papal States were absorbed into Italy.

It is worth noticing when the jurisdictional claim reached its maximum. It was defined in 1870, in the same decade in which the papacy lost its temporal territory entirely. The strongest statement of spiritual authority arrived as political authority collapsed, and historians of the period do not treat that as coincidence.

Rejection of the papal claim comes from two directions and they are unlike each other.

The Orthodox objection is not to the existence of the office. Orthodox churches acknowledge that the bishop of Rome held a primacy of honour in the undivided church and was named first among the ancient patriarchates. What they reject is that primacy of honour became a jurisdiction: that the bishop of Rome may govern other churches, hear appeals from them, appoint their bishops, or define doctrine without a council. On the Orthodox account each autocephalous church governs itself and the whole church speaks only through a council received by the faithful. The 1870 definitions made the disagreement formal, and the fact that Orthodox churches themselves dispute jurisdiction among each other, notably over Ukraine since 2019, shows that the underlying question of who may decide for whom is unresolved on that side too.

The Reformation objection is different in kind. It denies that the office has the standing claimed for it at all, and reads the claim as a historical accretion rather than a development of something apostolic. That is a dispute about origins rather than about the scope of an acknowledged primacy.

There is also an internal history. The definitions of 1870 were opposed by a substantial minority of bishops at the council itself, on the grounds that they were inopportune rather than false, and a number of German-speaking Catholics separated afterwards to form the Old Catholic churches rather than accept them.

Catholic scholarship does not generally contest that the developed office is not visible in the earliest sources. The disagreement is about what follows from that, and framing it as a dispute over the evidence rather than over its interpretation misrepresents both sides.