Pope Francis condemned the “very strong, organised, reactionary attitude” in the US church and said Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.
Pope Francis has blasted the “backwardness” of some conservatives in the US Catholic Church, saying they have replaced faith with ideology and that a correct understanding of Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.
Francis’ comments were an acknowledgment of the divisions in the US Catholic Church, which has been split between progressives and conservatives who long found support in the doctrinaire papacies of St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, particularly on issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.
You’re flat out wrong when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church - I don’t know enough about Islam to say whether you’re right about that.
In church doctrine, Matthew 16:18 and 16:19, and again in Matthew 18:18, give ultimate authority to St Peter (the first Pope) and all the Popes that followed him.
Essentially the Pope can decide whatever, and it just is. Tomorrow the Pope could decide that gay marriage and abortion are a-okay, and they would be a-okay as far as heaven is concerned.
He might get lynched and the next Pope reverses it, but that mechanism for change exists, and has been used many times in the past - one notable recent one was when the Pope decided dogs go to heaven, so now dogs go to heaven.
Source: ex-Christian who was very involved within the Church institution.
It (the infailibility of the pope) is also the reason of the great schism of 1054, when orthodoxy split from catholicism, officialy naming themselves ‘the orthodox catholic church’ (meaning basically the catholic church that has the right dogma; people mostly drop the ‘catholic’ from conversation nowadays though).
In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t do much good, eastern orthodoxy is just as corrupt and power-hungry as catholicism.
