Hooookay

[kyburg]

Hey bitpig - did you see this one?

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”. At most, they say, they may contain “historical traces”.

Well. How about that.

Comments

[lord-keeper.livejournal.com]

NO comment.......and believe me I had some good ones cooking in my head!

[catsonmars.livejournal.com]

.... =O

[foogod.livejournal.com]

Sounds Dubya needs to go and set the Pope straight again on what it means to be Catholic.

[eve-dallas.livejournal.com]

When we lived in Texas, my kids were high school age to pre-school, but they started talking about how their friends kept saying that it was wrong to believe in evolution. I told them that most of the Old Testament was mostly written in parables and in ways an unlettered people could understand. I also told them that creation according to Genesis and evolution are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I told them that 'day' was just a word used to bracket a certain stage in creation/evolution.

For the second time as an adult, my neighbors all shunned me. The first time was when I told my two oldest girls - ages six and five - as much as I thought they would understand about where babies really come from.

[pseudicide.livejournal.com]

I think it's neat, because i think it pulls the official church policy into line with what most catholics believe, and what tends to be taught at catholic schools these days.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Boy, and they're good at it, too. I know. Believe me!

Idiots. Only thing holding them together is spite.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

What I want to know then, is - how does this tie into that whole Adam and Eve/Original Sin thingie?

Inquiring minds, yanno?

[pseudicide.livejournal.com]

the thing is, i went to catholic school my whole life, and was taught religion class by priests and nuns, and never once was i taught/even heard about original sin. That's something i learned on my own looking up catholic dogma.

Sorry!

[bitpig.livejournal.com]

The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church Two English bishops of the Roman Catholic Church have published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually literally true in a scientific and historical sense.

The article is misleading. The Catholic Church has never taught that the Bible is literally true in scientific or historical terms; such a novel teaching is the product of the Protestant "reformation", not of Cathlic tradition. The Bible is not a scientific text or a historical document; it is a book of spiritual truth. (This is not to say that the Bible does not contain literal scientific or historical truths, of course, merely an acknowledgement of the spiritual purpose of the Bible.)

Here is what the Catechism says about the subject:

The inspired books teach the truth. "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.

[...]

According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."

The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God's plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.

1. The allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ's victory and also of Christian Baptism.

2. The moral sense. The events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written "for our instruction".

3. The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, "leading"). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.

[Link to Catechism]

Continued below...

Re: Sorry!

[bitpig.livejournal.com]

"But what about that whole Galileo thing?" people ask. Well, the Galileo thing was a big mistake: the Pope was 100% wrong regarding the structure of the Solar system, that's for sure. But that's okay -- because the Pope is only infallible in his teachings regarding faith and morals. When it comes to science, art, history, matematics, or cooking, he can be (and frequently is) just as fallible as anyone else. Here's a quote from the Vatican's chief astronomer, Br. Guy Consollmagno, Ph.D. that makes the point better than I can:

[The Vatican runs its astronomy program because they want people to know that]the Church isn't afraid of science, that they like science, that science is great, this is our way of seeing how God created the universe, and they want to make as strong a statement as possible that truth doesn't contradict truth, that if you have faith, then you're not going to ever be afraid of what science is going to come up with. Because it's true.

And the one time in history that they screwed up on this, the Galileo affair, the Church was wrong. And we've admitted it was wrong. How many times has science abused the Church? How often have you heard a scientist apologize to the Church?

[...]

The whole scientific enterprise really does coincide well with Christian theology. The whole idea that the universe is worth studying is a Christian idea. The whole mechanism for studying the physical universe comes straight out of the whole logic of the scholastic age. Who was the first geologist? Albert the Great, who was a monk. Who was the first Chemist? Roger Bacon, who was a monk. Who was the first guy to come up with spectroscopy? Angelo Secchi, who was a priest. Who was the guy who invented genetics? Gregor Mendel, who was a monk. Who was the guy who came up with the Big Bang theory? Georges Lemaître, who was a priest. There is this long tradition; most scientists before the 19th century were clerics. Who else had the free time and the education to gather leads and measure star positions?

[...]

Nobody knows really why Galileo was gone after. You can read all the documents. They're in translation in a marvelous book by Finocchiaro, "The Galileo Affair". For most of Galileo's life he was lionized, he was treated like a hero, including by people in the Church. His book, "The Assayer", has the Church censor saying, "We're honored to live in a time with a man this wonderful." When Galileo got into trouble at the end of his life, it was a real shock. It was a complete reversal of everything that had been said up to that point.

And so the historical question is, why did it happen? And the answer is, we don't know. You can go to amazon.com and find 300 books on Galileo, every one of them with a different answer. Which is to say, there was something going on, and it wasn't simply a science versus religion thing the way that Berthold Brecht describes it in his play. If you relied on "JFK," the movie, to figure out what happened in the assassination of Kennedy, you'd be in as good shape. You've got to remember the Galileo affair occurred at the height of the Reformation and the 30 Years' War. These were really stressful times in Europe. Europe was falling apart. And it was a uniquely bad time for a lot of people in a lot of directions.

Read the whole thing

But the Galileo thing serves to underscore my point. Just as the Bible is correct 100% of the time regarding matters of faith and morals, the Church is correct 100% of the time regarding matters of faith and morals. Just as the Bible is not necessarily correct in what it says on matters of history and science, the Church is not necessarily correct in its teachings on matters of history and science. It's really that simple. Hope this lengthy post clears up any confusion created by the poorly-written Times article.

Re: Sorry!

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't pin the issue on the Reformation; more, I would pin it on people who depend on their next-door neighbor for their moral compasses and don't read a thing or think for themselves. Neh?

But I knew you'd have more to say on the subject - good for you!

(Dude, it's as confusing to be Catholic...looking at it from this angle. SHEEESH.)

Re: Sorry!

[foogod.livejournal.com]

Still, I betcha that's not what Dubya thinks, and everybody knows he's the real authority on the subject of the Catholic faith.

On the subject of the article, it's true that it wasn't worded quite as well as it could be, but that also doesn't mean that what did happen isn't a significant event worthy of noting/reporting. The Catholic church may not teach that the Bible is literally true in these matters, but it also has never (to my knowledge) gone out of its way to actually deliberately explain that they aren't true to anybody except when forced into saying it due to other events or public opinion, and they have benefitted quitely on many occasions from the erroneous assumption many in the public have that the opposite is true. This event is significant because some members of the Catholic church appear to be actually making a point of educating the public about this proactively, rather than quietly letting them believe something that isn't true because it's convenient.

Also, the attitude that the Pope is fallible in non-spiritual matters is a reasonably modern one, in my understanding. The church's position on this was not nearly so liberal in the past (there's also a difference between "the Pope is infallible" and "science is bad". They really aren't the same argument)

But anyway...

Re: Sorry!

[kynn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, even as a non-Catholic, I could see that the spin/slant on this story was so horribly askew and didn't come close to describing a change in the church's policy on "biblical literalism", because Catholics are not and have NEVER been "biblical literalists" in the way that American Protestant Fundamentalists are.