Dr. J. Budziszewski

You know, to just have them under his thumb.

Mm-hmm.

Now, there have been periods in the history of the Catholic Church where that kind of thing has been a problem, where the local king or baron claimed to have the right to appoint the bishop or something like that.

But we've always struggled against that, and the chair of Peter has always been an enormous resource there.

So that was never plausible to me, although I was attracted to this Orthodox spirituality.

I hate to use that word because it's usually taken in a Hallmark card sense, you know what I mean.

Oh, I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual.

I was attracted to Orthodox spirituality.

I admire Orthodoxy greatly, but I never could have become Orthodox.

It still looked like the only candidate was the Catholic Church.

Despite the chaos, because I think that's what happens.

Sometimes people...

Oh, yeah.

But chaos under authority, even if the authority is not always well used, even if sometimes it's lax or doesn't do things it ought to do, you know, is different than chaos with no authority.

There's at least an instrument that could put into... There's an instrument that could, and over the history of the church, over the history of the church...

The Holy Spirit has always kept the church from falling into irrevocable error.

I won't say the Holy Spirit has always kept the church from falling into some stupid error about this or that, but into something irreversible.

It hasn't ever declared a heresy as something to be infallibly believed, right?

That hasn't happened.

And I don't believe it will.