the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt two)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Humani Generis was a landmark in Küng’s life. He thought it was so wrongheaded that it convinced him the pope, hailed by most Catholics as error-free in his every word and action, was in fact fallible. “For the first time, I was convinced that Pius XII was wrong,” Küng remembered. Then in the middle of his graduate studies in Munich, Ratzinger had reached the same conclusion: This bishop of Rome, like all of his predecessors, was capable of making terrible mistakes. How else to explain so many bad, bloodthirsty popes—“men who would obviously not be picked by the Holy Spirit”—throughout history? It was a parlor game among his classmates: Who was the worst pope ever? Was it Sergius III, elected in 904 after assassinating two of his predecessors and whose favorite mistress gave birth to a son who succeeded him as pope? Or Innocent IV, the thirteenth-century architect of the Inquisition, who approved the use of the rack and other instruments of torture? Or maybe it was Alexander VI in the fifteenth century, reported to have had an incestuous relationship with an illegitimate daughter. He also had a fondness, it was said, for drunken orgies that ended with naked prepubescent boys jumping out of cakes. Popes from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries mounted the Crusades, in which mercenary armies slaughtered more than a million Muslims and Jews.

Power-loving popes had always tried to create the perception that, because they were the successors to St. Peter, they were infallible. But Küng and Ratzinger—and anyone else familiar with the New Testament—knew that this was a misreading of Peter’s biography. The Gospels portray Peter, a Jewish fisherman who abandoned his life on the Sea of Galilee to join the Savior’s wandering band of disciples, as lovable but deeply flawed. Jesus mocked him for his weak character and, as the Savior predicted, a terrified Peter denied his loyalty three times in the hours around the Crucifixion. Besides, as Küng and Ratzinger also knew, the doctrine of papal infallibility held that the bishop of Rome was error-free only in limited circumstances, when issuing the most rare sort of proclamation, known as an ex cathedra decree. And far from being ancient teaching, the doctrine dated back only to 1870 and the First Vatican Council. At that council, many bishops rejected the doctrine but were overruled by the bullying Pius IX, who insisted he needed sweeping new authority because the Vatican was then under threat of invasion by the Italian army. To his credit, after demanding the right to claim infallibility, Pius IX never once invoked it in his teaching documents. In the century that followed, it was invoked by only one pope and on only one occasion—by Pius XII in his widely ridiculed 1950 decree on the Virgin’s assumption into heaven.