The Vatican

I use the imprecise term the "Vatican" teaches instead of the "Church" teaches because I do not believe that teachings of Church leaders are necessarily teachings of the Church. I use the term Vatican as a placeholder for any belief that could count as a teaching of the magisterium. First, as I said in a prior post, "Related to this issue is the question of what counts as a teaching of the Church. If the Church is the People of God with the hierarchy playing an important leadership role, what is the status of hierarchal teachings that are not accepted by the faithful (recognizing that the question of what counts as acceptance could be very difficult to ascertain on some issues and easy on others)? I am unsure. Consider this passage from Lumen Gentium, “The entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One,(111) cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole peoples' supernatural discernment in matters of faith when "from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful" (8*) they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. It is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God.(112).”

    Second, as I said in another post, Of course, whatever the degree of authoritativeness of the objective conscience view, it does not purport to be an infallible teaching of the Church, and the issue before us is the degree to which one is required to assent to such teachings. There is a pastoral issue here that I think is of great importance. Father Sullivan, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church 171-72, makes this point extremely well in my opinion:

 “I am convinced that it is important for Catholics to be aware of the difference between infallible and non-infallible teaching by the magisterium, and of the corresponding difference between the kinds of assent that each of them calls for. Ignorance of these differences can have several unhappy consequences. One is that Catholics who have actually fulfilled their obligation to practice docility regarding such teaching, and have been really unable to give their interior assent to it, may still feel themselves guilty of disobedience to the pope because they do not follow his teaching on a particular point. Another is that Catholics who do accept such teaching may judge all others who do not, to be disobedient or disloyal, and may be scandalized to know that even priests or theologians have reservations about certain points of ordinary papal teaching.

    “The tendency to obscure the difference between the infallible and the non-infallible exercise of magisterium, by treating papal encyclicals as though they were practically infallible, has, I believe, been largely responsible for the fact that many people, when they learn that encyclicals are not infallible after all, jump to the conclusion that one need pay no attention to them. If people have been led to think of the infallibility of the pope as the basic motive for giving their assent to his teaching, it is not surprising that when this motive is no longer available, their assent will fail as well.”