Believing the Pope is right no matter what — isn't that dictatorship?

🔥The question: “Do Catholics believe the Pope is a perfect man and obey him unconditionally?”

🛡️The Church's answer: No. A pope can sin and can misjudge, and we don't believe his interviews, private opinions, and administrative decisions are all correct. Infallibility applies to the Pope, as pastor of the whole Church, only in those limited cases where he definitively settles a teaching on faith and morals as one that all the faithful must accept. It also applies when the bishops of the world, together with the Pope, definitively teach the same faith. This is not a power that makes the Pope perfect or produces new revelation; it is the grace that keeps the Church from abandoning the core faith received from the apostles.

🧐If they press further: “Then can the Pope's ordinary teaching be ignored?” — That isn't right either. You have to look at the nature of the teaching and the degree of its authority and listen seriously. But it isn't accurate either to turn every statement into doctrine of the same rank.

✨In one sentence: “The Pope isn't a perfect man, and not everything he says is infallible. Infallibility is the grace that protects the Church in the limited cases where faith and morals are taught definitively.”