Catholics will sometimes criticize Protestants for being their own popes. Instead of the Church being the judge of true doctrine, Protestants make their private judgment the final authority. Some Protestants have objected that Catholics are equally guilty: They have to use their own private judgment to decide that the Catholic Church is the true church. Aren’t Catholics, then, their own pope, too?
The answer is no. This objection rests on several points of confusion.
First, Catholics aren’t saying that weighing evidence and arguments is bad. The Church has no problem with human reason—some of the greatest philosophers, theologians, and scientists have come (and still come) from the Catholic Church. The Church also acknowledges, and prominently at Vatican II, that people have to make decisions for themselves as rational agents.
Catholics object to the idea that the Church’s own authority cannot possibly be decisive evidence for the truth of its teaching. This is because the Church’s authority comes from and is protected by God. Thus, because God would not allow the Church to definitively teach error, the definitive judgment of the Church would be decisive evidence for the truth of a Church teaching.
But since Protestants don’t see Church authority in that way, they instead rely upon their own private judgment or assessment of the facts. In other words, Catholics’ problem is not that Protestants are using human reason. It’s that they prefer their individual, private judgment over and against the public judgment of the Church, a divinely protected authority. To Catholics, that’s unreasonable.
Here is the second problem with the objection: It does not use “private judgment” in the same way that Catholics do, and so it fails to show any internal inconsistency. When Catholics condemn “private judgment,” they aren’t condemning human reason itself. Private judgment in this context is when you prefer your own evaluation of the evidence over and against a legitimate authority’s judgment. Instead, the latter’s judgment, due to the nature of the authority issuing it, should be compelling.
St. John Henry Newman used the time of the apostles as an example. When the apostles were giving divine revelation, either you submitted to it or you did not. If you came to believe that the apostles were sent by God, you really couldn’t just pick and choose which teachings you would accept based on your own assessment. Newman writes, “There was no room for private tastes and fancies, no room for private judgement.” The same holds true today if the Catholic Church was established by Christ.
Thus, the third and final problem with this objection is clear: Catholics aren’t their own pope, because they have a pope! The Church’s authority is supposed to be enough for a Catholic to affirm Catholic teaching, not his personal evaluation of the evidence.
But a Protestant might object that if, after weighing the evidence, someone decides to trust that Christ established the Catholic Church, then that is an instance where he is relying upon his private judgment and not the Church’s authority. The Church’s authority wasn’t enough to immediately convince him.
This still isn’t private judgment in the sense that we’re using. You aren’t preferring your evaluation of the evidence over and against the Church’s judgment in this scenario, because you aren’t concluding against the Church’s judgment if you convert.
You are, however, reasoning over the Church’s authority in the sense that you are subjecting the Church’s authority to evaluation in your mind. This doesn’t mean that you somehow have greater authority. If God commanded me to do something, but I first stopped to see if it’s truly God speaking, that doesn’t mean I momentarily had more authority than God. God has real authority apart from me, as does Christ’s Church.
Moreover, Protestants are actually being inconsistent here. They also condemn private judgment but have no problem persuading people to accept biblical inerrancy. For example, if a theologian kept relying upon his private judgment over and against Scripture, any Bible-loving Protestant would chastise him for not submitting to God’s word.
And so the final nail in the coffin is that no Protestant would take this objection seriously if it were presented to him regarding Scripture, a legitimate and divinely given authority. Protestants see no inconsistency in condemning private judgment but also persuading people with evidence and arguments to accept biblical authority. The fact that the Bible doesn’t immediately convince people of its inerrancy is no problem for them. But Protestants would affirm that someone should reason differently after he’s accepted the authority of Scripture from how he thought before.