[ noun ] the quality of never making an error <noun.attribute>
Infallibility \In*fal`li*bil"i*ty\, n. [Cf. F. infaillibilit['e].] The quality or state of being infallible, or exempt from error; inerrability.
Infallibility is the highest perfection of the knowing faculty. --Tillotson.
{Papal infallibility} (R. C. Ch.), the dogma that the pope can not, when acting in his official character of supreme pontiff, err in defining a doctrine of Christian faith or rule of morals, to be held by the church. This was decreed by the Ecumenical Council at the Vatican, July 18, 1870.
I know that each of us, as Benjamin Franklin suggested, should be careful to doubt a little his own infallibility. ...
But carrying 49 states appears to have given him a perilous illusion of infallibility, an illusion nourished by the sycophantic White House staff of his second term.
The move by the 82-year-old prelate, who has rejected the revisions of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, caused the first formal break with the Vatican since the so-called Old Catholics rebelled in 1870 over the doctrine of papal infallibility.
The schism created by the consecrations and resulting excommunications was the first major split in the church since the so-called Old Catholics broke with Rome in 1870 after the doctrine of papal infallibility was proclaimed.