Pope Benedict XV’s Spiritus Paraclitus says:‘Yet no one can pretend that certain recent writers really adhere to these limitations. For while conceding that inspiration extends to every phrase -- and, indeed, to every single word of Scripture -- yet, by endeavouring to distinguish between what they style the primary or religious and the secondary or profane element in the Bible, they claim that the effect of inspiration -- namely, absolute truth and immunity from error -- are to be restricted to that primary or religious element. Their notion is that only what concerns religion is intended and taught by God in Scripture, and that all the rest -- things concerning “profane knowledge,” the garments in which Divine truth is presented -- God merely permits, and even leaves to the individual author’s greater or less knowledge. Small wonder, then, that in their view a considerable number of things occur in the Bible touching physical science, history and the like, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress in science. Some even maintain that these views do not conflict with what our predecessor laid down since -- so they claim -- he said that the sacred writers spoke in accordance with the external -- and thus deceptive -- appearance of things in nature. But the Pontiff's own words show that this is a rash and false deduction. For sound philosophy teaches that the senses can never be deceived as regards their own proper and immediate object. Therefore, from the merely external appearance of things -- of which, of course, we have always to take account as Leo XIII, following in the footsteps of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, most wisely remarks --we can never conclude that there is any error in Sacred Scripture….’
Here the Pope confirms that the inspired writers of Holy Scripture had to know the true order of the universe. It also teaches that anything they wrote had to be the ‘unerring truth.’ Does this then not teach that the language they used had to be the truth, given it was the only Biblical understanding of all the Fathers?
Pope Benedict XV continues:
‘But although these words of our predecessor Pope Leo XIII leave no room for doubt or dispute, it grieves us to find that not only men outside, but even children of the Catholic Church -- nay, what is a peculiar sorrow to us, even clerics and professors of sacred learning -- who in their own conceit either openly repudiate or at least attack in secret the Church’s teaching on this point….’-- Spiritus Paraclitus.
Here then, in these all-embracing paragraphs, Pope Benedict XV blows apart every reason given by the Galilean churchmen since 1741 to allow a contrary interpretation of the literal moving-sun revelations in Scripture. Where now the often quoted ‘the Bible is given to teach us, not how the heavens go, but how men go to heaven,’
Topic: Noah's Flood Was Not Worldwide (Catholic Encyclopedia) (Read 6742 times)