MARLPIT PRESSIndependent PublisherHow Catholics Answered George Salmon
Salmon’s book remained important enough to draw substantial Catholic replies more than sixty years after its first publication.
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Jeremiah Murphy’s seven-part reply
In 1901 and 1902 Jeremiah Murphy published a seven-part series, “Dr. Salmon’s ‘Infallibility,’” in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record.
The scale of the response shows that Salmon had become a recognized object of Catholic rebuttal rather than a forgotten Victorian polemic.
The Catholic Encyclopedia
The Catholic Encyclopedia treated Salmon as one of the subtlest recent opponents of infallibility and directly addressed his argument from private judgment.
Its answer distinguished the fallibility of the believer’s process of recognizing an authority from the objective infallibility of the authority’s definitive teaching.
B. C. Butler and the 1950s revival
An abridged Salmon returned to circulation in the early 1950s. Basil Christopher Butler reviewed it in The Tablet in 1952 and then developed a book-length reply.
Butler’s The Church and Infallibility appeared in 1954. His surviving correspondence shows that the renewed apologetic circulation of Salmon was one reason he thought a substantial answer was needed.
The core Catholic response
Across these replies, a recurring defense is that Salmon often attributes to infallibility consequences Catholic doctrine does not claim. The Church need not answer every question immediately, every disciplinary judgment need not be infallible, and not every papal statement is protected from error.
That answer has real force against some of Salmon’s examples. It leaves open his second-order questions about how definitive acts are identified, how doctrinal development is recognized, and how the Church’s authority is known.
Research basis
This note draws on Salmon’s 1888 book, contemporary reception, Catholic replies, Trinity College Dublin and Royal Society biographical material, and the source-critical George Salmon research dossier prepared for the Marlpit Press edition.
- George Salmon, The Infallibility of the Church (John Murray, 1888)
- George Salmon’s 1888 preface
- First Vatican Council, Pastor Aeternus (1870)
- Alfred Plummer, The Churchman (January 1889)
- Jeremiah Murphy, Irish Ecclesiastical Record (1901–1902)
- Catholic Encyclopedia, “Infallibility”
- B. C. Butler, The Church and Infallibility (1954)
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The Infallibility of the Church · George Salmon biography · Christianity & Theology · All research notes