The Catholic Church has tremendous respect for the mystery of God and His truth, a mystery which here on this earth can only be glimpsed at.

In particular, she is extremely conservative when it comes to declaring something as true about God.  In fact, throughout history it is most often the case that she is forced to define what is truth and what is heresy because she is challenged by someone who teaches heresy as truth.  So it is in a defensive posture that the Church works with regard to defining truth and heresy; she does not proclaim in a positive way every single thing that is true about God (as if that were possible for us finite creatures) but rather proclaims that, whatever you want to believe about God, there are certain things that are not true and so should not be believed.

So, even though the truths of the Faith do not change, we come to understand them better over time by the Holy Spirit’s working in the Church.  One example:  Jesus and the Father are one in being, consubstantial.  How do we know?  When was this dogmatically decreed by the Church?  The Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.  What provoked the Pope and the bishops of the Church to convene this Council and decide on this matter?  The teachings of Arius (hence the Arian heresy) that said that Jesus was not the same substance of the Father but rather only of like substance, along the way demoting Jesus to more of a demigod.

First Council of Nicaea

The Bible (the books of which had not even been formally canonized at this time) does not explicitly say they are of the same substance (let alone whether the Holy Spirit is one being with the Father and the Son), and the Arians had an interpretation for every passage of Scripture that seemed opposed to their teaching, so how did the bishops discern the truth?  They did it through the power of the Holy Spirit given to them as the leaders of Christ’s Church and by tapping into the deposit of the Faith entrusted to them through the sacred Scriptures and through the sacred (or Apostolic) Tradition.

One neat thing is that, though a particular teaching may only be declared as true dogmatically at some late time, that belief has always been true, and there is always evidence of it being believed in the history of the Church.  For example, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.  This was dogmatically declared as true in 1854 AD, but when you read the Fathers of the Church, Popes, bishops, faithful Kings, monks, etc. down through the centuries, you hear them speaking of the “immaculate Mother of God” over and over again.  You see art devoted to Immaculate Mary centuries before this dogma was declared dogmatically.

My friend Tom at Ecumenicity posted a few months back about an example of this with regard to praying for the dead.

Oftentimes when a Protestant hears that the Catholic Church declared some dogma in X century their idea is that the teaching was invented at that time or shortly before, when in truth it has been believed since the beginning of Christ’s Church.

I thought of this today when I saw the painting at the back of the latest issue of the Magnificat, Tobiah and the Angel by Verrocchio:

Tobias' namesake! From the Book of Tobit

When was this painted?  How about after the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s when the Catholic Church, in defense against the Protestant Reformers’ assertions, declared that the Book of Tobit was inspired by God and therefore belonged in the canon of Scripture?  No, it was about 100 years prior to Trent before Martin Luther was even conceived!

Does the fact that someone did a painting of a scene from the Book of Tobit mean that it is canonical Scripture?  Of course not; painters can paint scenes from any book they want, inspired by God or not inspired, but obviously over the centuries the great works of art we have are often of scenes from our Christian faith’s history: Christ, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary, Old Testament persons and events (like this one), and so on.  It gives us a glimpse into the beliefs of Christians at different points in time throughout history and helps us to understand better what was believed to be true.

The Church did not have to dogmatically declare what books made up the canon until the 1500s because up until then there had been general agreement on the canon within the Church for over 1,000 years; not until the Protestant Reformers declared that the 7 deuterocanonical books were not inspired did the Church have to act to protect God’s truth from corruption or subtraction.

The deuterocanonicals, like Tobit for instance, contain beautiful stories of God’s providence and love, wisdom complementary to Proverbs, and history that is referenced by Christ in the Gospels!  The sad irony is that our Protestant brothers and sisters, who ostensibly reverence Scripture above every other authority, are missing out on this part of Scripture.

Hopefully these ideas will help you understand that the gift of infallibility to the Church is a negative protection, that is, a protection against teaching error, rather than a command that the Pope and the Church through Ecumenical Councils will always proactively teach every thing which is true about God and the Faith.  That list would be inexhaustible because God Himself, the Source of all truth, can never be fully described by us creatures through any set of teachings.  Rather, God protects the Church from teaching error as truth.  She is the servant of the Truth, not its master.