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The Church holds her teachings to be infallible beyond merely those doctrines that have been dogmatically defined extraordinarily by a pope or ecumenical council.
The so-called ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church is held to be infallible too, and in fact the ordinary manifestation of infallibility.
The common consensus of the bishops throughout the world and over time is held to be infallible regardless of whether a Pope or Council has extraordinarily defined the teaching.
This is to avoid a positivistic notion of Truth and belief.
Like extraordinary definitions, the ordinary magisterium may propose teachings both de fide credenda and de fide tenenda, and the latter may advance to the status of the former, and both are held to be infallible.
John Paul II, for example, clarified that the reservation of ordination to males only is infallible by the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium, without going so far as issuing a separate extraordinary dogmatic definition.
Far from meaning that Catholics are thus free to question this teaching, it means that it is infallible and unchangeable, demands supernatural faith, and one who denies it is a heretic.
It has been suggested that the reason that John Paul did not simply define it extraordinarily was in order to not weaken the understanding that the ordinary magisterium is also infallible, to remind Catholics that it is not merely the extraordinary definitions that are infallible and irreversible as if doctrine were positivistic — that it holds " only if the pope says so with a particular formula ".

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