Albert Cipriani

Dear Mr Darwin,
If I disagreed with the teachings of the Catholic Church, I’d be bearing false witness in calling myself a Catholic. What I disagree with are the Catholic churchmen who wink and nod at all manner of politically correct rubbish. Official Catholic teaching is one thing. Unofficial pontifications are quite another.

The pope recently said as much as that he believes that Adam and Eve evolved. Well, he might just as well as said that he believed in Martians. He was talking as a man, as a wannabe evolutionist. If he was talking as the pope, he would have said that as the pope he was binding me as a Catholic to believe what he said. Not having said that, I can ignore his rambling opinions.

Here is what the Church officially taught:

Pope Pelagius I (557) in an epistle to King Childebert wrote:

Pope Leo XIII, in his Encyclical Letter “Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae” (on Christian Marriage), dated February 10, 1880 wrote:

Catholic theology distinguishes between immediately and mediately. For example, the heavens and the earth were IMMEDIATELY created out of nothing, whereas Adam’s body made of the earth is said to have been created MEDIATELY out of nothing. Immediate formation from pre-existent matter excludes ipso facto secondary causes. There is no other cause than the one efficient cause of Divine Omnipotence. Immediate creation, by definition, is instantaneous and by God acting alone. St. Thomas Aquinas, the supreme Doctor of the Catholic Church, writes:

Again, St. Thomas:

Creation is not change.... For change means that the same something should be different now from what it was previously.... In Creation, by which the WHOLE SUBSTANCE of a thing is produced, the same thing can be taken as different now and before only according to our understanding, so that a thing is understood as first not existing at all, and afterwards as existing. (Summa Theologica I, Q.45 A.2. ad.2.).

Creation is without movement (Summa Theologica I,Q 45, a 2, and 3) and God alone can create, for the first agent alone can act without presupposing the existence of anything: while the second cause (a creature) always presupposes something derived from the first cause. Another way to say it is that creatures are the cause of becoming but God is the cause of being (Summa Theologica, I, Q 104, a 1).

Creation is instantaneous because no efficient causality of a creature entailing a process or time duration is involved. But evolutionary theory requires tons of time. This requirement flies in the face of Lateran IV dogma which teaches that God did it alone, and hence without movement and time. “... because what is created is not made by movement or change (1, Q 45, a 3).... In things which are made without movement, to become and to be already made are simultaneous.... Hence since Creation is without movement, a thing is being created and is already created at the same time” (I, Q 45, a 2, ad 3). Therefore, propositions of theistic evolution are preempted by ex nihilo Creation. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Calzaer

So the Pope isn't half as infallible as we've been led to believe....

MrDarwin

Albert, I understand (as many other skeptics apparently do not) that the doctrine of papal infallibility does not extend to every word uttered by the pope.

That said, are you aware of any other "official" doctrines, teachings, or beliefs of the church that have proven to be false (or at least seriously flawed)?

GodLessWarrior

Geocentrism? ..... :banghead:

lpetrich

Strictly speaking, a pope's only Officially Infallible statements are those made in some official capacity and intended to be Church doctrine.

But this leaves open some wiggle room for deciding whether or not some pope's statement is to be considered infallible.

Calzaer

It basically comes down to "The Pope is speaking infallably unless (A) We don't like what he's saying, or (B) he's contradicted by evidence or a later Pope." They decide whether something was said infallably well after the fact, and can change it at a moment's notice.

Albert Cipriani

Calzaer opines:
If this were true, why did the Church wait for billions and billions of “moments” until the 1800's to define papal infallibility? That supreme act of confidence would be the suicidal stroke that proved Catholicism a fraud had there been one scintilla of truth to Calzaer’s accusation. Yet, no doubt, Calzaer considers the Church intellectually arrogant to claim to be infallible while he is proud to consider his specious counter-claim to be reasonable. “Oh, what fools these mortals be.” – Sigh, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Doubting Didymus

Gotterdammerung, what is it with off topic dicussions on papal infallibility in this forum these days?

All posters: unless it pertains specifically to evolution, keep papal infallibility in GRD. I understand that it is an issue, what with the popes opinion on evoluiton and all, but the general thrust of the conversation should not stray quite this far into the technicalities of catholicism to the exclusion of all else.

Albert Cipriani

Mr Darwin asks:
The top three are:
1) usury
2) geocentricism
3) canonizations

Infallibility applies only to conclusions, not to the potentially erroneous arguments or evidence adduced in support of those conclusions.

The Church condemned the taking of interest as a form of taking unfair economic advantage of others. Her conclusion, even today, is still infallibly true: taking unfair economic advantage of others is a sin against charity.

But as economic theory developed, it turned out that taking interest was not necessarily a form of taking unfair economic advantage of others. Ergo, the Church merely erred in the application of her infallible moral teaching regarding usury, not in that moral teaching itself.

* * *
Geocentricism was never officially taught by the Church, but it was pastorally enforced by Inquisitional churchmen. Today, politically correct churchmen are foisting perverts upon our children and sinfully enforcing a break with all traditional sacramental rituals. So there is precedence for this kind of pastoral error which does not constitute doctrinal Church error.

What further disqualifies geocentricism from consideration as a contradiction of the Church’s infallibility, is that it is a matter of physics, not faith or morals. The fact that the churchmen at the time argued that it WAS a matter of faith is irrelevant. They were wrong on that count as they the churchmen of today are wrong on many counts.

* * *
No doubt, the Church today is declaring many people to be saints that probably are not saints. Since our present pope disbanded the Devil’s Advocate, he’s been able to have a politically correct field day by declaring more new saints than all his predecessors put together.

Theologians are split on whether or not canonizations constitute an infallible exercise of papal authority. Even if they are (we won’t know till we’re in heaven), the mistakes being made today are based upon erroneous evidence and Church infallibility does not extend to evidence.

For example, if the Church declared a man a saint who was later discovered to have buried little boys under his house, the man would no longer be considered a saint and the Church would still be considered infallible because it is not accountable for its erroneous or incomplete evidence. To illustrate further, 2 + 2 = 4 is infallibly true. But if someone comes along at a later date and says that “2” was is a base-3 system, then the truth would be 2 + 2 = 20 – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert Cipriani

Godfrey Daniels!
I just spied your warning Doubting after I posted the above. Sorry. I was only responding to what I'd been challenged to respond to. -- Sincerely, Albert