It is simple. It’s an infallible teaching that the soul is the form of the body. So there’s no such thing as a being which has an animal soul but a human body – that’s theologically impossible.
Ok, show me where this is said, and we can discuss it properly. So far you’ve not provided any quotes on the matter. I’ve read the Council of Vienne’s writing on this, and the CCC’s explaination, and if that is what you are talking about then you’re describing a completely different circumstance than I’m talking about. I already explained that in a holistic sense, you are absolutely correct, but that I’m using biological terminology when saying “human body”. The point that the CCC is making is that humans are not two natures, a human material and a human soul, put together, but rather a union of the two; human nature, by definition, is a human soul and a human body. This is why I’m careful to make the distinction that a hominid with an animal soul is not a human, but rather a human-like animal in biological terms. It says absolutely nothing about the possibility of a hominid body without a human soul, which would be completely non-human by theological definition, but have a human body in biological terms.
The infallible definition to which you seem to be appealing (The first decree of the Council of Vienne) must be looked at in context. It is dealing with the heretical notion that Jesus was a human body with a divine soul, which would mean that He was not “fully man” because a full man is a human body formed by the human soul. If He had had anything other than a human soul, He would not have been human even though he had a human body. Here’s the relevant passage:
Adhering firmly to the foundation of the catholic faith, other than which, as the Apostle testifies, no one can lay, we openly profess with holy mother church that the only begotten Son of God, subsisting eternally together with the Father in everything in which God the Father exists, assumed in time in the womb of a virgin the parts of our nature united together, from which he himself true God became true man: namely the human, passible body and the intellectual or rational soul truly of itself and essentially informing the body.
Notice it doesn’t speak at all about what happens to those parts when seperate, or if they can not exist seperately and therefore in a different form, only that a human is those two parts put together. I’ve never disagreed with this.
HG teaching that God could have miraculously transformed pre-existing living matter into a human body with a human soul does not contradict Church doctrine NOR does it support in any way the utterly absurd idea that there can be beings with human bodies and animal souls.
With all due respect, it seems that you are the one doing linguistic gymnastics here. The theory that Pius XII is saying we are free to explore and hold takes as its central principle that the “human body being made from pre-existing matter” is, in fact, a hominid body without the human soul. A non-human, to be sure, but biologically identical. You seem to be suggesting that Pius XII didn’t know this when he penned Humani Generis, and that he was misled about the arguments of theistic evolution. We are not bound to believing that the human body (in biological terms) was immediately created by God, which is the point of the Catholic Answers tract, which has Impramatur and Nihil Obstat.
Now, if you are refering to an infallible declaration outside of the Council of Vienne, please bring it up so I can review it. I’m hardly closed minded on this issue, and if you can demonstrate that your argument is indeed an infallible teaching, and that this infallible teaching applies to biological terms as well as the theological terms on which we already agree, I will drop my stance in a heart-beat.
