By Prof. Januarius Asongu
Religious institutions speak about truth with an authority few other institutions claim. The Catholic Church, in particular, understands itself as entrusted with divine revelation and guided by the Holy Spirit in preserving and teaching the truths necessary for salvation. Yet the history of Christianity also contains uncomfortable moments when the Church has had to acknowledge that Christians—including theologians, bishops, ecclesiastical institutions, and even popes—have sometimes judged wrongly, acted unjustly, or failed to recognize truths that later generations came to see more clearly.
Papal apologies therefore deserve more attention than they normally receive. They are usually understood as acts of repentance or reconciliation. But they are also epistemologically significant. When the Church apologizes for the past, it is implicitly acknowledging that sincere conviction, theological reasoning, institutional authority, and even longstanding practice do not automatically guarantee that human beings have correctly understood or applied the truth.
Two cases are particularly instructive: the Galileo affair and the Church's historical entanglement with slavery.
In 1992, Pope John Paul II addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences following years of investigation by a commission he had established to reconsider the Galileo controversy. Galileo had been condemned in 1633 after defending heliocentrism—the proposition that the Earth revolves around the sun. The controversy involved complicated scientific, theological, biblical, and institutional questions, and popular retellings sometimes oversimplify it as a straightforward battle between science and religion.
Nevertheless, John Paul II acknowledged serious errors in the way the affair had been handled. Theologians of Galileo's time, he observed, had failed sufficiently to distinguish between the Bible and particular interpretations of the Bible. More significantly, he insisted that the Galileo affair contained a “lesson which remains valid” for the Church.
That sentence deserves serious attention. If a historical ecclesiastical error can teach the Church something about future judgments, then the Galileo affair is more than an embarrassing episode to be safely confined to the seventeenth century. It becomes a warning against epistemic overconfidence.
The recent apology of Pope Leo XIV concerning slavery makes the issue even more consequential. Leo has acknowledged the historical involvement of Christians and ecclesiastical institutions in systems of enslavement and asked forgiveness for the Church's failures. Slavery presents an especially disturbing problem because Christianity possessed within its own theological tradition principles capable of challenging the institution: the creation of human beings in the image of God, the universal dignity of persons, the commandment to love one's neighbor, and the fundamental equality of human beings before God.
Yet Christians lived with slavery for centuries. Some defended it. Others benefited from it. Biblical texts were invoked to justify it. Ecclesiastical institutions sometimes participated in systems that we now recognize as profoundly incompatible with human dignity.
How could people committed to truth fail to see something so morally consequential?
Critical Synthetic Realism (CSR) offers a useful way of approaching this question. CSR maintains that objective truth exists while simultaneously insisting that human access to truth is mediated, historically situated, incomplete, and fallible. Human beings do not cease being epistemically limited simply because they are religious. They interpret revelation through languages, cultures, intellectual traditions, political arrangements, psychological dispositions, and inherited assumptions.
This condition is what I describe as epistemic fracture: the distortion and limitation affecting human knowing even when human beings sincerely seek truth.
The Church is not magically exempt from this condition.
This does not require abandoning the Catholic conviction that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit. Nor does it mean that every doctrine is merely provisional or that truth itself changes with history. We must distinguish between truth itself and our apprehension of truth. Reality does not become relative because our understanding of it develops.
The Galileo and slavery controversies therefore do not prove that every Church teaching is mistaken. Nor do they logically disprove the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility. Neither the condemnation of Galileo nor the Church's historical accommodation of slavery constitutes an ex cathedra dogmatic definition of the kind contemplated by the First Vatican Council.
But that response cannot end the discussion.
The deeper issue is that ecclesiastical authorities have sometimes possessed considerable confidence in judgments that history subsequently revealed to be seriously defective. Galileo demonstrates the danger of theological judgment extending beyond its epistemic competence. Slavery demonstrates something perhaps more troubling: moral blindness can coexist with possession of theological principles from which a better moral judgment could have been reached.
This distinction suggests that Catholic theology should differentiate ecclesial indefectibility from ecclesial epistemic impeccability. The Church may remain faithful to its divine mission without assuming that every historical judgment made by its representatives perfectly apprehends the implications of revelation.
Indeed, papal apologies make little sense without such a distinction. To apologize is to acknowledge that something should have been understood or done differently.
This has implications for how the Church exercises doctrinal authority today. The lesson should not be skepticism, but humility. Before elevating disputed theological conclusions into irreversible dogmatic formulations, the Church should remember Galileo. Before assuming that prevailing Christian moral judgments perfectly express the Gospel, it should remember slavery.
There may be things about which Christians today feel remarkably certain that future generations will recognize we failed to understand adequately.
That possibility should not frighten the Church. It should humble it.
Critical Synthetic Realism therefore proposes neither relativism nor theological agnosticism. It proposes something deeply compatible with the Christian understanding of the human condition: epistemic humility before truth. We affirm that truth exists. We seek it courageously. We defend what reason and revelation genuinely warrant. But we also recognize that no historical community of human beings possesses the mind of God.
Perhaps one of the most powerful things a Church committed to truth can occasionally say is not simply, “We know.”
It is also: “We were wrong. We have learned. And therefore we must listen more carefully to the truth.”