OK David, no hurry.
Yes I have, with Providentissimus Deus. Here is the passage that I have a problem with; . . .
Indeed, so harmful was this passage that Pope Benedict XV’s encyclical on Scripture: Spiritus Paraclitus of 1920, had to correct the damage it did to exegesis, and the targets it gave to modernists in the years after it. Here is that correcting passage: . . .
‘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 every 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 the 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.’
Interesting that for all the claim to be reconciling the Church’s pronouncements, you yourself put them at war with each other. Let the reader note too that Cassini has no problem with later papal decrees allegedly correcting earlier ones, but he denies to us that papal decrees can correct those from Roman congregations. I say that if you claim that Benedict XV had to correct the allegedly “harmful” enyclical of his predecessor, then you have no grounds to complain if we state that later papal decrees corrected a decree of the Holy Office which was not even signed by the Pope.
Now, the passage you cite from
Providentissimus Deus is certainly interesting, but I had in mind this passage specifically. Pope Leo XIII cites St. Augustine and then comments:
To understand how just is the rule here formulated we must remember, first, that the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately,
the Holy Ghost "Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation."Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science. Ordinary speech primarily and properly describes what comes under the senses; and somewhat in the same way the sacred writers-as the Angelic Doctor also reminds us - `went by what sensibly appeared," or put down what God, speaking to men, signified, in the way men could understand and were accustomed to.
Cassini, you yourself have admitted that this applies to geocentrism. I quote here your own words:
in 1893, Pope Leo XIII produced his all encompassing encyclical letter on the Bible, Providentissimus Deus. In it, as well as setting out all the rules, advice and warnings as to how the Scriptures should and should not be interpreted, in a paragraph entitled ‘natural science’, gave approval to an exegesis that had been advocated first by Galileo. This new hermeneutics allowed certain interpretations of the Fathers to be ignored; ‘for it may be that, in commentating on passages where physical matters occur, they have sometimes expressed the ideas of their own times, and thus made statements which in these days have been abandoned as incorrect.’ . . . . **The only interpretation of note in the history of the Church that the encyclical could be referring to was the fixed sun/moving earth heresy.
**
I agree completely with your last sentence. I disagree very strongly with the rest of what you have to say there, which I did not include because I consider it scandalous, that what Leo XIII put out in a papal encyclial was Masonic and part of a Satanically inspired plot to undermine the Church.
Suffice it to say that you admit that in this section of a papal encyclical, which was affirmed verbatim in another papal encyclical from Pius XII, the Popes teach that in these matters
the Holy Spirit did not put any such details of the physical universe into sacred Scripture at all. Rather, He inspired the writers to use figurative language – the sun rises, the sun sets, the sun goes up, the sun goes down – to describe things according to their appearances. There is no error in Scripture whatsoever – there cannot be, of course, because the Church teaches that Scripture cannot err – for even “eminent men of science” use such figurative language even to this day and do not thereby consider that they are speaking falsely.
If information about the “essential nature of the things of the visible universe” was not put into sacred Scripture by the Holy Spirit, then these cannot be matters of faith and morals. The views of the Fathers do not bind in matters not of faith and morals (as Leo XIII says). And therefore, it cannot be contrary to the Faith to hold differing views on matters of cosmology.
If one takes to heart what Leo XIII says – the Holy Spirit did not put details of the physical universe into sacred Scripture at all – then Leo XIII and Benedict XV can be seen as saying the same thing, not at all as one correcting the other. I will have more to say, but in my opinion this by itself is sufficient.
