Let's try another one: is "day" in Genesis 24 hours or an indefinite period of time that may be long?
Most here are probably aware the biblical commission allowed either view. So the Church does not require belief in either.
If you were living before the biblical commission answered, would you have held that a "day" has to be "24 hours" and anything else is "modernism"? That is basically a rhetorical question. I'm not expecting a serious answer.
I have met "traditional catholics" who rejected the biblical commission decision as "modernist" because "it's obvious from Scripture and Tradition" that a Genesis day is "24 hours". They simply reject a church decision under Pope St. Pius X because they - with no theology training or credentials - disagree with it. It boggles my mind and makes me wonder where their motive for faith lies.
To understand why Catholics on a forum like CIF have to discuss why there seems to be no agreement about natural matters that appear in the Bible, one has to know when and how this 'modernism' entered the womb of the Church causing traditional understandings to be rejected by so many.
When popes in 1820 were conned, yes, conned, into allowing passages like these
His going out is from the end of heaven, and his circuit even to the end thereof: and there is no one that can hide from his heat.” --- (Ps. 18 (19):1, 6-7).
“Great is the Lord that made him [the sun], and at his words he hath hastened his course” (Ecc. 43:2-4).
to mean that the sun stood still, then we all should know where this modernism started. That is when the catechism of Trent got the 'scientific' boot out of the Church, teachings like this:‘I Believe in God, Almighty Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth. He followed no external form or model; but contemplating, and as it were imitating, the universal model contained in the divine intelligence, the supreme Architect, with infinite wisdom and power – attributes peculiar to the Divinity – created all things in the beginning. He spoke and they were made… The words heaven and Earth include all things that the heavens and the Earth contain; for besides the heavens, which the Prophet has called the works of His fingers, He also gave to the sun its brilliancy, and to the moon and stars their beauty; and that they may be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years. He so ordered the celestial bodies in a certain and uniform course that nothing varies more than their continual revolution, while nothing is more fixed than their variety…. The Earth also God commanded to stand in the midst of the world, rooted in its own foundations [Psa. 103:5: You fixed the Earth upon its foundations, not to be moved forever], and made the mountains ascend, and the plains descend into the place that He had founded for them…. He next not only clothed and adorned it with trees and every variety of plants and flowers, but filled it, as He had already filled the air and water, with innumerable kinds of creatures…. Not only does God protect and govern all things by His Providence, but He also by an internal power impels to motion and action whatever moves and acts, and this in such a manner that, although He excludes not, He yet precedes the agency of secondary causes.’ Catechism of Trent.Now we all agree popes like Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X were good popes, but they were caught up in the dominance of false-science that claimed long-age evolution. I have no doubt the Biblical Commission put out their 'period of time' for day ruling under pressure of these 'scientific' times. Histiory records that never in the history of the Church were so many souls lost to Catholicism than from the mid 1800s onwards.‘Satan uniquely entered the Catholic Church at some point over the last century, or even before. For over a century, the organizers of Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ, Liberalism, and Modernism infiltrated the Catholic Church in order to change her doctrine, her liturgy, and her mission from something supernatural to something secular.’ (Taylor Marshall, October 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews)
‘Naturalism is more than a heresy; it is pure undiluted anti-Christian. Heresy denies one or more dogmas; naturalism denies that there are any dogmas or that there can be any. Heresy alters more or less what God has revealed; naturalism denies the very existence of revelation. What hurls more people into hell nowadays that any other epoch, is rationalism or naturalism.
(The kingship of Christ, Cardinal Pie of Poitiers.)
And that is why today, even among Catholics on CIF we have different versions of God's creation.
Topic: Noah's Flood Was Not Worldwide (Catholic Encyclopedia) (Read 6730 times)