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Properly speaking, both types of magisterium are infallible, but in each case their infallibility rests with the pope. No Pope, no infallibility.
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Bishops still teach during such periods, of course. But they enjoy no infallibility, even in consensus, because the source of ordinary infallibility is removed.
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So yes, as you can see, the Church is severely wounded without a Pope. Ergo the urgency with which she has always elected a new one, even from her earliest days.
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This was interesting to read, and well done by Mithrandylan and Stubborn.
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I would like to add for newcomers to the concept that the word
Magisterium is a Latin word, literally meaning
the Teaching Office of the Church. (As already mentioned.)
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In Latin, a teaching office is neither male nor female; it has no gender. In Latin a person is either male or female, and cannot be neuter. That's the way Latin is. If the word were male, it would be "Magisterio" and if female, "Magisteria" or "Magisteriae." Since
Magisterium is neither male nor female, it cannot apply to a person. Consequently it makes more sense to see that
Magisterium cannot refer to one man or a group of men who hold office in the Church. Since Vat.II it has become commonplace for the word to be misunderstood in this way and it would seem there has been a deliberate effort of Modernists to inject a new meaning into the word. The use of the phrase
"living Magisterium" is another aspect of this deception, by which the living Magisterium can change from day to day or over time, depending on the whims of the current occupants of the authoritative office in question.
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It helps to know that in Latin there are nouns that can be either male or female in specific cases, and when that happens the male gender is used, never the female, even though in a specific case the male gender noun could be applying to a female person. This concept is entirely lost on modern day feminism activists who have rebelled against this principle, accusing our ancestors of having a sexist agenda opposed to the good of women (literally, the female sex). Therefore when traditional literature says "mankind" or "God gave something to man," it applies equally to men and women and children.
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Notice we do have a universal word for boys and girls (children), and we have "people" for males and females of all ages. But we would have to say "adults" for men and women without distinction. There is something poetic lost in the translation when "man" is replaced with "a person," and "mankind" is replaced with "people."
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Then,
"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" would become,
"One small step for a person, one giant leap for people." Kind of falls flat, no?
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It helps to know that in Latin, there are three genders for nouns. That means that words have different ending letters that reflect which gender applies: male, female or neuter. In this case the letters "-ium" are the key indicators of the gender that applies, because Latin nouns ending in "-ium" are neuter gender, which is necessarily neither male nor female. Other languages, even Romance languages (based on Latin derivatives) apply gender to all nouns, for example Spanish, in which is found female tables (la mesa), chairs (la silla), houses (la casa) and geographical features (la ciudad); while male political offices (el presidente), tools (los hermientos), weapons (el navajo), and some mechanical components (el alambre). There are entities in Spanish that can be either male OR female, such as weather patterns (El Nino, or La Nina).
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