While God’s truth is eternal, the understanding of that Truth has developed and will continue to develop.
I will not presume to understand how a past Pope thought and can only conjecture. However, the last Pope was very clear about women not being subordinate and our present Pope did not then and does not now disagree. If the subjection of women is doctrine it would be in the CCC.
On the CCC:
. “On 11 October 1992, Pope John Paul II presented the Catechism of the Catholic Church to the faithful of the whole world, describing it as a “reference text”[1] for a catechesis renewed at the living sources of the faith. Thirty years after the opening of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the desire for a catechism of all Catholic doctrine on faith and morals, which had been voiced in 1985 by the extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, came to fulfilment.”
The above is in the Introduction to the Compendium to the CCC.
vatican.va/archive/compendium_ccc/documents/archive_2005_compendium-ccc_en.html
Dear severus68,
Hello again and thankyou for your reply.
You will need, dear sister, to adduce solid irrefutable evidence to show that the encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI have been
officially abrogated and no longer form part of the ordinary magisterium of Holy Mother Church. It is not sufficient to appeal to our current Catechism, which may very well be “a sure norm for teaching the faith”, but that does not mean nor imply that it is the
only valid source of teaching. Our Church nowhere teaches this. The onus is upon you to demonstrate where the teaching of St. Paul relating to the headship of the husband and the subjection to the wife has been officially set aside and declared no longer valid in the 21st. century.
How long are the teachings Paul VI, H.H.JPII or Benedict XVI good for, dear sister? Thus if a pontiff does not issue another encyclical on birth prevention for say the next century, at what point are the faithful no longer obligated to obey Humanae Vitae and Evangelium Vitae? If the magisterial teachings of the pre-Vatican II Popes go bad after a certain period of time, then would not the same apply to the post-VII Popes. Consider the case of the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which is still valid and good today and that the CCC cites said Catechism over 20 times. Indeed, it refers to it as “a work of first rank as a summary of Christian teaching” (para. 9).
What I think we need to guard against, dear sister, is the tendency among some Catholics, even those of a conservative bent, to ascribe a sort of creeping infallibility to almost everything uttered/written by the post-VII Popes, whilst choosing, often for polemical reasons, to not accept as authoritative and binding, anything said by the pre-VII pontiffs, almost dismissing it as culturally conditioned and irrelevant. Now that is clearly not the approach of an authentic Catholic mind and neither is it showing a pious reverence for Sacred Tradtion.
This novel opinion that the teaching of the current Church Catechism contains the entire deposit of faith, is untenable, for what are we to make of the papal encyclicals that have been published subsequent to the publication of the CCC? Are they also irrelevant until and unless they have been integrated into some revised edition of the Catechism?
Finally, this strange notion that all that matters is what is new, or that what has been taught by the Magisterium in times past as truth is now false, is a grave attack upon our most holy religion. As our Holy Father remarks, a tree without roots dies:
latinmassmagazine.com/art…Ripperger.html
God bless and goodbye for now, time for my supper. Thankyou for your courteous posts, dear sister.
Warmest good wishes,
Portrait
Pax
