Radio Replies Vol 5 - Catholic Apologetics Online

That is not a reasonable expectation. Cardinal Newman wrote in his book "The Development of Christian Doctrine," published in 1845, that if God has given an infallible revelation of Truth, as Christians believe, reason demands a Church divinely-safeguarded in its official and essential teachings against erroneous doctrines. He spoke, not of a new revelation, nor of any positive inspiration, but only of a providential protection against the Church committing herself officially to erroneous teachings. In 1864, after he had become a Catholic, he published his "Apologia pro Vita Sua," in which he said that the Church is a vast assembly of human beings whose thoughts about the implications of their religion involve intense and varied operations of reasoning, the action and reaction of human ideas refining and moulding one another until eventually they are brought into such unity as faith requires by the superhuman power of the Holy Spirit. Newman wrote in such terms six years before the 1870 Vatican Council met, the proceedings of which illustrated what he had anticipated, namely, both the role of human reason and the final outcome through the assistance of the Holy Spirit for the good of the Church in her ultimate and official definition of Papal Infallibility. When the text of the Definition then given was published in England on July 23, although he himself had not thought it opportune to define the doctrine, Father Newman (he was not made a Cardinal until 1879) wrote next day, July 24, in a letter that in the terms in which it had been defined: "I personally have no difficulty in admitting it."

The Catholic doctrine does not imply that the Pope is endowed with any special faculty to be exercised at will and whenever he likes. The Catholic Church is held to be infallible in the sense that she can never cease to be true to the teachings of Christ and of the Apostles. She cannot fall into error in her official "Articles of Faith", declared to be binding on all the faithful. This is in virtue of Christ's promise to be with her "all days even till the end of the world" (Matt., 28:20) and that of the perpetual assistance of the Holy Spirit (Jn., 14:16). The ordinary means of preserving the faith of the whole Church is by the influence of the Holy Spirit within the souls of all members of it, including the bishops who have care of the flocks entrusted to them. Guidance by papal definitions is not an ordinary, but an exceptional and extraordinary means. As to the nature of the Pope's infallibility, that belongs to him only in virtue of his office. If, granted Papal Supremacy, he could officially define as part of the Christian Faith an erroneous doctrine the whole Church would be led into error — a catastrophe excluded by the promised protection of the Holy Spirit. Only if and when he defines a doctrine in virtue of his office as supreme head of the Church is his preservation from error infallibly guaranteed by the Holy Spirit for the sake of the Church. This does not mean that the Pope is a kind of inspired oracle or endowed with some sort of miraculous clairvoyance enabling him to provide infallible decisions automatically on any and every problem that happens to arise. It is one thing for the Pope not to be able to define what is wrong; quite another to be able to hand out infallible definitions whenever he pleases. Never has the Church taught that Papal Infallibility is to be understood in that sense, and no Catholic has to believe it in that sense.

The Pope himself does not claim that he is. As a matter of fact, he is personally far more often fallible than infallible. I do not mean that he is far more often mistaken than he is right. I mean that he is far more often able to be mistaken, even though in fact he is not mistaken, than he is absolutely and completely unable to be mistaken. I must confess that I do not like the expression "personal infallibility of the Pope," taking those words at their face value. The Pope is not infallible as a man. He is not infallible as a priest. He is not infallible as a theologian. He is not infallible as a bishop. The Pope is kept infallible, not by any personal characteristics but by the Holy Spirit, and that only on the rare occasions when making official decisions in virtue of his position as supreme head of the Church on earth, intending those decisions to bind the whole Church as matters of faith. The decisions could concern doctrines, moral principles, the canonisation of Saints, or other items so intimately connected with the Christian Faith as to be practically part of it. I think you will agree that all this sounds, not like personal infallibility, but rather like a very impersonal infallibility in virtue of the office itself which he happens to hold.

The Pope exercises his ordinary authority as supreme head of the Church by means of many decisions for which infallibility is not claimed, but to which nevertheless all Catholics owe reverent obedience. Even in these decisions the Pope is bound in conscience not to act impulsively, but only after due reflection and prayer. Much more is this required where it is a question of a solemn definition involving the very faith of all Catholics throughout the world. Here he will consult experts on Scripture, theology, philosophy, history, science, sociology, on any subject directly or indirectly connected with the matter under consideration. No one, Catholic or non-Catholic, if the Pope does make an infallible definition, will be able to say that it was an ill-informed one. Even so, all this inquiry is outside the notion itself of infallibility. That resides in the protection of the Holy Spirit rendering him unable in fact, as Pope, to teach false doctrine to the Universal Church as its supreme head on earth. In an extreme case, were the Pope on the verge of solemnly defining a doctrine opposed to the Christian Faith, and there were no other way of preventing it, he would drop dead before doing so. However drastic the measures necessary, God would see to the protection of His Church in all essential Christian teachings.

To think in such a way is to let imagination run riot. A Catholic with the basic gift of faith really means the declaration in the Apostles' Creed: "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church." If, before Papal Infallibility was defined by the 1870 Vatican Council, a Catholic had thought differently, he would have realised that this was only his personal and fallible opinion; and that, in promulgating the definition, the Church and not he must undoubtedly be right. The Catholic knows that in accepting such defined doctrines he is yielding to the authority appointed by Christ, the only compulsion being the basic convictions of his own conscience. Cardinal Newman wrote in his "Apologia", in regard to the 1854 definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that he had not heard of one Catholic having difficulties in accepting it whose faith on quite other grounds was not already defective.

Substantially the doctrine clarified by the 1870 definition was quite well known to them. In 1889, nineteen years after the Vatican Council's proclamation of the dogma, the great Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Soloviev published his book "Russia and the Universal Church." In it, pleading for the reunion of the Orthodox Churches with Rome, he wrote, on p. 34: "As a member of the Orthodox Church, I recognise as supreme judge in matters of religion him who has been recognised as such by St. Irenaeus, St. Dionysius the Great, St. Athanasius the Great, St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril, St. Flavian, the Blessed Theodoret, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Theodore of the Studium, St. Ignatius, etc. — namely, the Apostle Peter who lives on in his successors." On p. 143 he writes that at the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.) "the reading of the Pope's dogmatic letter was hailed by the Orthodox Bishops with cries of 'Peter has spoken by the mouth of Leo'." The reference was to Pope Leo the Great. Soloviev adds that "to reject the supremacy and doctrinal authority of the Roman See as usurped and false involves not merely a charge of usurpation and heresy against a man of the character of St. Leo the Great; it means accusing the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon of heresy, and with it the whole Orthodox Church of the fifth century." Few scholars have made themselves as familiar with the early Church Fathers as was Soloviev.

The Church, St. Paul tells us, was built "upon the foundation of the apostles." (Eph., 2:20); and all twelve were equally apostles, sent by Christ to preach the gospel in His name and with the promised assistance of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, our Lord gave more to St. Peter than to the other apostles, making him the shepherd of the whole flock (Jn., 21:15-17. See also Q.247 above). Each of the apostles was, of course, infallible as an exponent of the religion of Christ. But there is a difference between apostolic and episcopal power. The latter was included in, but less extensive than the former; and it was the episcopal power that the apostles conferred upon the bishops they appointed to rule the particular churches they established. These bishops were not infallible individually; but the continuing infallibility of the Church as such finds its expression through the bishops taken collectively and as united with the Pope as head of the Church. In 1870, the First Vatican Council defined that, besides the collective infallibility of all the bishops including the Pope as successor of St. Peter, the Pope individually and in his own right as head of the Church is infallible when, in virtue of his office, he defines a doctrine of Christian faith or morals for the benefit of the whole Church. The infallibility of the Church can, therefore, find its expression either through all the bishops taken collectively with the Pope, or, under special circumstances and conditions, through the Pope alone. This doctrine was reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council in its 1964 Decree on "The Constitution of the Church", n.25.

It would be a mistake to think that only those Catholic teachings are guaranteed as true for which strictly papal definitions can be produced. The Catholic Church as such is infallible in the safeguarding and teaching of all essential Christian doctrines. These, regarded as Articles of Faith are to be found in the Apostles', Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, in many definitions by various Councils, and in such teachings as the Fathers and Doctors of the Church have unanimously held to be an integral part of the Christian Faith. Particular doctrines infallibly guaranteed by individual papal definitions are relatively few, about fifteen or sixteen at most, ranging from a declaration concerning the Divinity of Christ by Pope Leo I in 449 A.D. to the most recent of them, namely, the definition of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1950 A.D. Normally, Catholics make the allinclusive act of faith: "I believe in the Catholic Church and in all that she believes and teaches," without worrying as to how this or that particular doctrine has been declared to be part of the Catholic Faith. One can have implicit faith in the Catholic religion without having an explicit knowledge of every specific aspect of it.

Catholic doctrine does not require that. When the Pope addresses an Encyclical Letter to the faithful everywhere on matters of faith or morals he is undoubtedly speaking as head of the Church, yet not necessarily infallibly. Pope Pius XII, in his Encyclical "Humani Generis" (1950), said that such documents are indeed authoritative, demanding respectful attention and obedience, but that in them the Popes do not necessarily exercise their teaching authority to the full nor claim to be speaking infallibly. Catholics have to believe that the Pope is infallible only when he makes it clear that he is exercising the fulness of his teaching-authority, defining some truth to be accepted by all Catholics throughout the world as part of or essentially connected with the divine revelation given to mankind by Christ and the Apostles.

If the Pope does express merely a personal opinion, speaking as a private theologian, then his views are neither infallible nor do they impose upon us acceptance of them in a spirit of religious obedience. But if the Pope, in virtue of his office, gives an authoritative decision on some religious matter, even though he does not intend it as an infallible declaration, we are obliged to regard his decision as binding. So the Second Vatican Council, in its "Constitution on the Church", n.25, said expressly that "loyal submission" of the will and intellect must be given in a special way to the authentic teaching-authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he does not speak ex cathedra, so that his supreme teaching authority is acknowledged with respect and sincere assent is given to decisions made by him, in accordance with his manifest mind and intention." It is not absolutely impossible for the Pope to be mistaken in such non-infallible decisions, but owing to the general guidance and protection of the Church by the Holy Spirit, it is not at all likely or probable that the Pope's decision would be erroneous. The ordinary day-to-day guidance of the Church would be practically impossible if we had no obligation to accept any but technically infallible papal definitions of doctrine. In such a case, the Pope would be called upon to make an endless number of infallible decrees in order to have any real teachingauthority at all - which it would be quite unreasonable to expect.

He used those words in his "Open Letter to the Duke of Norfolk," dated Dec. 27, 1874. He was replying to Gladstone's charge that, after the definition of Papal Infallibility in 1870, Catholics were reduced to mental and moral slavery under a foreign power, and could not be trusted as loyal subjects of the realm. Newman realised, of course, that Gladstone was making an unwarranted transition from the sphere of strictly religious matters to that of our civic duties and the obligation of allegiance to our country in its lawful requirements of us; and he stressed the Catholic doctrine of the supremacy of Conscience. Even where religion is concerned it can be said that a Catholic's conscientious conviction of the truth of the Catholic religion both precedes his acceptance of the Pope's authority as supreme head of the Church on earth and also dictates submission to it. But in order to show Gladstone that Catholics are not mental and moral slaves Cardinal Newman explained the limits of the Pope's authority and the areas in which the individual conscience still retains its independence. All the more significant is what he has to say about the duties of the Catholic conscience in regard to authoritative but non-infallible papal decisions in matters of faith and morals.

Cardinal Newman lays down pretty stringent conditions for that. First of all, he says, make sure that what you call your conscience is your conscience, and not the "miserable counterfeit" which so often assumes the name — merely attachment to one's own opinions and selfwill. That, he says, would be but the right of conscience to dispense with conscience. If true, conscience must be a genuine sense of duty to God and to the divine voice speaking within us. Many speak of the right of conscience, not as involving the rights of God and of duty to Him, but as the right of thinking, speaking and acting according to their own ideas with no thought of God at all. Secondly, the initial dispositions of a Catholic must be the desire rather than otherwise to think and speak as the Pope does, to want to take one's stand with him. One must guard against being predisposed to dispute what the Pope says, or his right to say it, and the desire to exempt oneself from the duty of obedience. Thirdly, granted proper dispositions, conscience is not to be taken as reflecting the Will of God until after serious thought, earnest prayer, consultation, and all other available means of arriving at what one honestly believes to be a right judgment — that is, should difficulties present themselves. Fourthly, it must ever be kept in mind that obedience to the Pope is "in possession;" that is, the burden of proof rests on the conscience of the one who is inclined not to obey. As Cardinal Newman puts it: Unless one can say before God "I must not, I dare not obey", it would be sinful to reject and to disobey the Pope's decision. Newman adds that if these rules were observed, conflicts between individual consciences and the Pope's authority would be rare indeed; which means that in most cases of insubordination and protest such rules have not been observed.

Once a Pope is elected, no matter of what nationality, as successor of St. Peter and head of the Catholic Church on earth he has to act in the name of Christ and according to the mind and will of Christ. He has to put aside all lesser considerations, intent above all else on the preservation and propagation of the Christian Faith, and the good of the whole Church everywhere. Many Popes, once elected, conscious of their office and its responsibilities, have falsified all human predictions and expectations of what they would be likely to do. A classic example of this is the case of Pope Pius II. Born in 1405 as Aeneas Sylvio de Piccolomini, he led a very loose life but was intellectually highly-gifted and as a lay-theologian opposed Pope Eugenius IV and published a book against Papal Supremacy. In 1445, however, converted from his dissolute ways, he became a priest and later a bishop, finally being elected as Pope in 1458. When his earlier writings were quoted against him, he issued a condemnation of such writings, insisting that no credit should be given to them, and concluding: "Reject Aeneas; accept Pius." Pope John XXIII, when opening the Second Vatican Council in 1962, called for a renewal within the Church; but he stressed that the Council must provide for "a formation of consciences in perfect harmony with authentic doctrine" which, he said, "still shines forth in the acts of the Council of Trent and of the First Vatican Council." An English, French, Belgian, German, American, Indian or African Pope would have exactly the same sense of duty in regard to what Pope John XXIII called that of "guarding the sacred inheritance of Christian doctrine." Catholics, convinced of the divine institution and protection of the Catholic Church, are equally convinced that the Holy Spirit would certainly see to that.

It is part of the Catholic Faith that the Bible from beginning to end, both the Old and the New Testaments, that is, from the Book of Genesis to that of the Apocalypse or Revelation, contains the inspired Word of God. But, as regards the meaning of any particular passage of Scripture, a Catholic has to hold that no interpretation which would conflict with any defined dogma or "Article of Faith" in the Catholic religion can be right. That, however, leaves a wide field open for possible interpretations which do not conflict with the authoritative teachings of the Church. Positively, of course, where the Church has infallibly defined the sense of certain passages, we are obliged to acknowledge that as their true meaning; but such cases are very few and are limited to the doctrinal content of such passages whether from the viewpoint of faith or of morals, leaving unaffected historical or literary questions concerning them. Scholars may discuss those to their heart's content, observing of course such practical rules of prudence as the Church may from time to time prescribe. Normally speaking any Catholic of intelligence and common sense with an average background knowledge of his religion, will find by far the greater part of Scripture sufficiently clear and helpful, if he reads it in a spirit of faith and piety. Occasionally, as 2 Pet., 3:16 puts it, he will come across "certain things hard to be understood"; but he will be preserved by his faith as a Catholic from joining the ranks of those who, "unlearned and unstable wrest the scriptures to their own destruction."

Catholics are bound to accept any definitions or decisions of the Church which involve her divinely-given teaching-authority. For example, the Catholic Church has defined the Canon of the Scriptures or the list of books which must be held to constitute the Bible as the inspired Word of God. Nowhere in the Bible itself it there any information given as to what the full list of its books should be. Again, the solemn Canonisation of a Saint involves an infallible decision by the Church. No Catholic could admit the possibility of the Church being mistaken in a final and solemn Decree of such a kind. For here the Church definitely commits herself to the declaration that the one canonised attained to a life perfectly conformed to the teachings and precepts of the Gospels. That proclaims the Saint to all the faithful as a practical rule of faith and morals; and the Church can be no more liable to error in this matter than in defining the principles themselves which sound faith and morals involve. It is to be noted that, apart from infallibility, the Church has an ordinary, non-infallible but authoritative teaching-authority in prescribing standards of belief and behaviour which normally Catholics are obliged in conscience to accept.

In the 16th century most of the Protestant reformers introduced the idea that the Bible, and the Bible only, was the one final court of appeal in all religious matters. "Show it to me in the Book" was the standard challenge, and an explicit text was wanted for everything. To avoid this extreme, some Anglican writers devised the formula: "The Church to teach and the Bible to prove." But this supposed a teachingauthority in their Church which few acknowledged and which, when pressed, could only lead to final decisions by the Privy Council, a secular tribunal, as in the famous Gorham case in 1847 when the Privy Council decided that an Anglican clergyman's views on the Sacrament of Baptism were sound, although the Bishop of Exeter had insisted that they were not. As for "the Bible to prove", the accepted right of private interpretation meant that individuals were free to make up their own minds about what could or could not be proved from its pages. In the "Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare, even in his day, put on the lips of Bassanio the famous words: "In religion, what damned error, but some sober brow will bless it and approve it with a text."

For the newspapers, any strongly expressed differences of opinion among the Council Fathers became "violent dissensions." But in the Council discussions the Fathers were there to express their different viewpoints. At the risk of over-simplifying things, I will try to put the complex problem as clearly as possible. During the First Session of the Council in 1962 it was proposed that the ordinary Catholic doctrine of Scripture and Tradition as the basic sources of our knowledge of divinelyrevealed truths should be simply reaffirmed as it stood. But many Bishops present said that, while Catholics understood what was meant, others did not. On hearing the word tradition most non-Catholics thought at once of merely human traditions and quoted Christ's rebuke to the Pharisees: "You hold the traditions of men . . . making the Word of God of no effect." Mk., 7:8-13. These Bishops argued that the Council should make it clear that the Catholic Church intended no reference to merely human traditions, and that it would be better not to speak of two sources of divinely-revealed truth but of one source only, the revealed Word of God as manifested in the traditions contained in the written Scriptures and in recollections of the preachings of the apostles handed on faithfully in the teachings of the Church. In the ecumenical interests of unity, these Bishops declared, it should be made clear that there was no question of humanly-invented traditions distinct from and opposed to the teachings of Christ and the apostles. The discussion continued for six days, for the subject was much more complex than I have been able to indicate. As things seemed likely to go on endlessly, a vote was taken as to whether it would not be better to terminate the discussion and ask for another and revised document than the one originally prepared for the Council's consideration. The vote did not gain the necessary majority and the discussion would have continued had not Pope John XXIII intervened, ignoring the majority vote and saying that a new document must be prepared, this time not only by the Theological Commission, but by that Commission together with the Secretariat for Christian Unity. The revised statement followed the lines proposed by those Bishops who had suggested a document on "Divine Revelation" instead of one dealing with the "Two Sources of Revelation." Pope John's intervention came on Nov. 20th, 1962. He himself had said earlier, on Nov. 4th, during the celebration of the Anniversary of his Coronation as Pope, that the living substance of the Church's teaching must always conform perfectly to "the pure evangelical and apostolic truths." That excluded as a basis for our faith all merely human traditions which were over and above those contained in the teachings of the apostles, whether written or oral.

That I have explained. The Council finally declared, in its "Constitution on Divine Revelation," that "Sacred Tradition and Holy Writ are a single holy deposit of the Word of God entrusted to the Church." We can say, for example, that the four Gospels, written between 65 A.D. and 100 A.D., that is, between thirty and seventy years after the death of Christ, embody the early traditions preserved in the Church about His life and work. The apostolic preaching (some of it, not all of it, written in other New Testament books) contained, amplified and explained the message recorded in the Gospel accounts. Scripture and Tradition (in this sense) have preserved for us between them the divinelyrevealed Truth, although much is explicit in Tradition which is only implicitly contained in Scripture. Protestants themselves, who proclaimed the sufficiency of Scripture alone, are becoming more and more conscious of the need of the authoritative traditional teachings of the Church, inherited from the apostles, as a safeguard against the erratic interpretations resulting from unbridled religious individualism; and today among them there is developing a better understanding of the Catholic position.

Not in the sense of a whole body of unwritten apostolic teachings additional to Scripture being handed down in the Church by oral transmission from generation to generation. No one can point to such a stereotyped set of doctrines and rules. The position was well stated in a quotation from St. Augustine to which Pope Paul VI (who had succeeded the late Pope John XXIII) drew the attention of the Preparatory Commissions. As St. Augustine put it: "There are many things which the entire Church holds, and they are therefore correctly believed to have been taught by the apostles even though they are not to be found in written form." The principle there stated is that Scripture and Tradition between them provide us with the fulness of the faith entrusted to the keeping of the Church. Holy Scripture is indeed a permanent record in writing of divinely-revealed Truth. It has a unique place in the Church. But it must be read in the light of her traditional and official teachings which, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and as part of her apostolic inheritance, are never opposed to, but ever in harmony with the Written Word of God, giving a deeper insight into its meaning and application in our lives. To ignore the traditional teachings of the Church is to run the risk of lapsing into one or other of the almost limitless aberrations into which independent Bible-readers have fallen.

There is little difficulty in doing so. Christ Himself wrote no books. He founded His Church on the Apostles, trained them personally, and sent them to teach all nations whatsoever He had made known to them. From the very beginning, the "Apostolic Preaching" constituted the Tradition to be handed on in the Church. Twenty years elapsed before the first of the writings in the New Testament appeared, and those were not the Gospels, but the Epistles of St. Paul. In his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, written about 52 A.D., St. Paul wrote: "Stand fast and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word or by our epistle." 2 Thess., 2:14. To provide for the handing on of the traditions he wrote to Timothy: "The things which you have heard of me by many witnesses, the same commend to faithful men who shall be fit to teach others also." 2 Tim., 2:2. In an earlier letter to Timothy he had written: "Know how you ought to behave yourself in the house of God, which is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and mainstay of truth." I Tim., 3:15. The admonition of Jude, 3: "Contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," refers therefore to that traditional body of doctrine committed to the care of the Catholic Church by Christ and the Apostles. In its completed document on "Revelation", then, the Second Vatican Council declared, in n.9, "The Church does not derive through scripture alone her certitude about all that has been revealed;" and in n.10 added that "sacred tradition, sacred scripture and the teaching-authority of the Church are so linked that one cannot stand without the others. All, each in its own way, under the action of the Holy Spirit, contribute effectively to the salvation of souls."

Ultimately, it is based on our faith in Christ Himself who promised to be with His Church founded upon the Apostles "all days even till the end of the world." Matt., 28:20, and who pledged Himself to bestow upon the Apostles for their mission the Holy Spirit who, He said, "will teach you all things and bring to your mind whatsoever I shall have said to you." Jn., 14:26. It was the faith which made St. Paul describe the Church of the Living God as "the pillar and mainstay of truth," and which impells Catholics to look to their Church for their immediate guidance in all the essentials of the Christian religion, seeing in her the one of whom Christ still says: "He who hears you, hears me." Lk., 10:16.

Such a position is scarcely tenable. The Bible, as a written book, cannot speak. It cannot say to a given reader: "Just a minute. You have mistaken me there." Also we have the disconcerting fact that, were the Bible its own interpreter, it would be interpreting itself to different and equally sincere readers of it in different and conflicting ways. The truth is that, not the Bible, but the readers of it do the interpreting of it as best they can. They are not always able to grasp the real significance of the passages they read. So, in the New Testament, we find the Ethiopian, who was reading the scriptures, saying to Philip the deacon who had asked whether he understood what he was reading: "How can I, unless some man show me?" Acts, 8:31. Granted that the Bible contains divinely-revealed truth, it needs authentic interpretation. We must remember that the Word of God for the first Christians, before a line of the New Testament had been written, was the preaching of the Apostles. Thus St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians: "You received the Word of God by hearing it; and you received it not as the word of man but (as it is indeed) the Word of God." I Thess., 2:13.

Those words were an instruction addressed to Timothy himself, not to "every believer;" and they concern Timothy's personal character and the nature of his teaching. The sense is: "Aim at pleasing God only, fulfilling your office blamelessly before Him, rightly proclaiming the truth." In 2 Tim., 1:16 St. Paul told him: "Stir up the grace of God which is in you by the imposition of my hands." Thus ordained to the priesthood by St. Paul, his duty was, as in 2 Tim., 4:2, to "preach the word . . . rebuke, exhort with all patience and doctrine." In 2 Tim., 1:13 St. Paul bade him: "Hold the form of sound words which you have heard from me in faith." Obviously, even as the first converts "continued steadfastly in the doctrine of the Apostles" (Acts, 2:42), so Timothy was commissioned to preach faithfully the same doctrine of the Apostles. There is no reference here to everyone studying and interpreting Scripture for himself.

Church respond to this Word? If I say yes to that, I will mean one thing and you will understand quite another. For I am thinking of the Word of God as the revelation of God however it may be made known to us, while you are thinking of the Bible as a written book. Also, you are thinking of the Church solely in terms of the individuals comprising it, while I think also of the Church as a living organic body indwelt by the Holy Spirit and sent by Christ with a guaranteed perpetuity and infallibility, but with its teaching-authority vested in lawfully and validly constituted successors of the Apostles. It was to such successors, in Acts, 20:28, that St. Paul at Ephesus addressed his parting words: "Take heed to yourselves and to the whole flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you guardians, to feed the Church of God." It is the living voice of the Church, expressed through those endowed with teaching-authority within her, which makes clear what the Word of God demands of us; and it is the duty of all members of the Church without exception — teachers and taught alike — to respond to the Word of God thus proclaimed in the Church by fidelity to her doctrines and precepts. The Bible nowhere gives every independent reader of it the right to decide for himself what it means and to tell the Church what she ought to teach and the kind of conduct she ought to prescribe whether in the worship of God or in the living of our individual lives.

It would be strange if such were not the case. The Bible is a collection of different books written at different times by different authors in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, and dating, as we have it, from between 1000 B.C. to 100 A.D. In the words of the Anglican biblical scholar Dr. Lowther Clarke: "To understand the Bible thoroughly one needs an equipment of wide and varied knowledge compared with which that needed by, say, a Shakespearean scholar is modest." But that is from the viewpoint of scholastic attainments and quite apart from the insight of faith and the enligthening of the Holy Spirit which enable the Church to grasp clearly and to teach with certainty at least the essential message of salvation contained in the Bible's various books.

However applicable that might be to some biblical scholars - as it is - it cannot be applied to all. The vast majority of biblical scholars are not actuated by any unworthy motives of human expediency. They have no desire to do away with anything that ought to be maintained. They would never dream of using mental imagery or symbolism when they encounter it in the Bible as a smokescreen of any kind. These scholars, profoundly convinced of the truth of Sacred Scripture as the Word of God, realise that an excessively literal interpretation of all its statements taken at their face value does not make sufficient allowance for the fact that this Word of God is given us in the words of men who were conditioned by the ways of thinking, speaking and writing of the particular times in which they lived. These scholars, therefore, gather all the background information they can from archaeology, philology or the study of ancient languages, and from the study of literary forms employed in past ages - all of which help to throw light on the mind of each of the biblical writers. They seek to explain Scripture, not to explain it away; and we need the help of their scholarly findings if we are to avoid what has been called "the danger of thinking for oneself about things one has not been trained to think about." Only an unreasonable fundamentalism would reject their findings out of hand, preferring superficial views too easily taken for granted. A simple faith is good; but it need not be the faith of a simpleton - although even a simpleton may receive from God the grace of a very deep and sound spirit of faith. Not for a moment would I wish to suggest that heaven is for clever people just because they are clever, and that the less intellectually gifted ones are less able to qualify for it.

I have no hesitation in saying that he does not; nor is it essential that he should. He has, of course, a thorough grasp of the essentials of the Christian religion. He completed before ordination as a priest the normal studies in Scripture, History, Dogmatic and Moral Theology, Liturgy, Canon Law and Ascetical Theology or the Theory and Practice of the spiritual life. After he was ordained, he was engaged in duties of administration, became later Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, and later still was elected as Pope. His election as Pope, however, did not confer on him miraculously all forms of specialist knowledge which he had not previously acquired; and he had not specialised in biblical studies. Where particular and difficult biblical problems are concerned, he would turn for advice to biblical scholars. As Pope Pius XII said in his Encyclical "Divino Afflante Spiritu" (1943), guidance for Christians in matters of faith and morals is to be found in the teachings and laws of the Catholic Church; but the explanation of many important problems is not covered directly by the Church's official teachings, and this she leaves to the wisdom and insight of her biblical scholars.

There is no living human being in the world today who understands fully every individual statement or passage contained in the Bible. As the Word of God in the words of men who were the product of thenown times, the Bible must be full of difficulties. Some of the ideas the writers were inspired by God to set down expressed a mysterious revealed truth which they themselves, with their limited capacities, only partly understood. Other things were already naturally known to them; but even these can baffle us because of the difficulty we have in getting back into the mind of writers of thousands of years ago. Again, the Bible is a record of God's dealings with men, each inspired writer having a message for his own generation. As a result, while much of what he wrote might be applicable to men of all times, part of it could be applicable to men only of his own times — although, of course, we can always learn something from the lessons of past history. One should read the Bible by all means. If he does so in the spirit of faith, humility and prayer, he will find it a source of grace. Many passages will be clear enough and very moving. But some passages are difficult beyond the understanding of the most learned of modern biblical scholars, and it would be foolish to take literally and at its face value everything one reads.

Firstly, it is a matter of translating ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek documents into modern languages; and the task is not easy. In 1952 one of the best modern translations was published. Fifty Protestant biblical scholars with the highest qualifications had laboured for fifteen years in the making of that translation, known as the "Revised Standard Version." But they declared their translation to be only their inadequate best. They said that, owing to a lack of familiarity with customs and ways of thinking and speaking in olden times, they ran into many problems they could not solve, and that often they could give only approximately what they thought the meaning would have been. Some passages, they said, would probably forever remain unintelligible. Now if difficulties and obscurities remained for them, how much more for the vast majority of readers who have had no training at all as biblical scholars? Then, too, of what use would any written words be, however plain, for the more than 700 millions of illiterate people in the world who can neither read nor write? Yet the Christian religion is intended for all people. So Christ sent His Apostles and His Church to teach all nations the whole story of His work for our salvation and the essentials of revealed truth He had taught them. It is far more important to be taught Catholic doctrine and how to live one's religion, sharing in the worship of the Church and receiving the Sacraments — even the illiterate can be taught in such a way — than to devote oneself to Bible-reading, granted one's ability to read. Even then many passages of Scripture are liable to be misunderstood, however helpful others may be.

As regards interpreting the Bible the authority of the Church is exercised in different ways. In comparatively few cases have any official decrees been issued concerning the meaning of particular passages. But the mind of the Church certainly finds expression in the unanimous teachings of the early Fathers in regard to such sections of Scripture with which they do expressly deal. Where the Fathers are not at least morally unanimous, the question is left an open one within the limits, of course, of the Catholic Faith. We then turn to reputable Catholic scripture scholars and theologians who realise that no interpretation could be correct which would contradict any defined article of the Catholic Faith and who, with all the aids of modern scholarship try to discern the most likely of all the meanings that can be harmonised with such doctrines as have been authoritatively taught by the Church. For the most part, the Church is content that we should rely on their guidance.

That is true as regards direct and authoritative declarations by the Church about the meaning of particular texts. So Pope Pius XII, in his 1943 Encyclical on Scripture said that the meaning of very few individual texts have been expressly determined by infallible decisions of the Church. There are not more than about twenty such instances. But there are certain things here to be noted. Where the Church has authoritatively declared that a given sense must be attributed to a particular text, that does not mean that the prescribed interpretation exhausts the whole of its meaning. It may be far richer in content than the specified aspect suggests. What must be held is that it at least includes the sense determined by the Church whatever other meanings one may also find in it. Secondly, the mind of the Church in regard to Scripture passages is indirectly yet still authoritatively manifested by her official doctrines in other areas of the Faith. No text may be interpreted in such a way as to conflict with her defined teachings on any matters. This rule is known as that of the "analogy of faith," demanding that we interpret Scripture in the light of our faith and in harmony with it. Of course we must be sure that what we take to be a doctrine of the faith is indeed an essential article of it and not merely some current and more or less probable opinion held by only some Catholic theologians. Outside these two rules there is a very large field for biblical interpretation, the findings of which are worth no more than the arguments advanced for them; and here there is room for differences of opinion even among Catholic biblical scholars who may or may not find each other's viewpoints at all convincing.

I will do my best for you in the time at my disposal, listing them rather in an order of doctrines than of their occurrence in the Bible. They are as follows: (1) Romans 5:12 ("By one man sin entered into this world") refers to original sin. (2) I Corinthians 4:7 ("What hast thou that thou hast not received") proves divine grace to be a sheer gift of God. (3) Isaiah 7:14 ("Behold a virgin shall be with child, etc.") must be regarded as prophetic of a Redeemer to come. (4) Genesis 3:15 ("I will put enmity between thee and the woman"), and Luke 1:28 ("Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee") contain at least implicitly the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (5) Philippians 2:6 ("Christ Jesus, being in the form of God, did not prize being equal with God, etc.") refers to the existence of the Person of Christ as the Second Divine Person of the Holy Trinity before He became man in the Incarnation. (6) Matthew 16:16-19 ("Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church") and John 21:15-17 ("Feed my lambs . . . Feed my sheep") contain the doctrine of Papal Supremacy. (7) Luke 22:32 ("I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not and do thou . . . confirm thy brethren") must be interpreted as providing a basis for the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. (8) John 3:5 ("Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God") shows the necessity of the Sacrament of Baptism with water. (9) Luke 22:19 and I Corinthians 11:24, recording our Lord's words at the Last Supper: "Do this for a commemoration of THE BIBLICAL TRADITION 177 me", indicate the institution of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, the apostles being ordained as priests to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass or Holy Eucharist. (10) Matthew 26:26-28; Mark 14:22-24; Luke 22:19-20; I Corinthians 11:23-29, demand the literal and not merely a symbolical interpretation of our Lord's words at the Last Supper: "This is my body," "This is my blood," so that we must hold they teach the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist or Blessed Sacrament. (11) Malachi 1:11 ("From the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles; and in every place there is sacrifice") is a prediction of the Sacrifice of the Mass. (12) John 6:54-57 ("unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood") does not require Communion in both kinds instead of under the form of bread only. (13) Matthew 18:18 ("Whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven") and John 20:23 ("Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them") prove the Sacrament of Penance and the power of priests to forgive sins in confession. (14) James 5:14 ("Is any man sick . . . let him bring in the priests of the Church . . . anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord") teaches the existence of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. (15) Deuteronomy 6:5 and Matthew 22:37 ("Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and soul and mind and strength") do not require a love so spiritual and out of this world as to exclude all human emotional feelings and desires based on devotional sentiments. Those are, as it were, fifteen categories - some of them containing more than one text - covered by the infallible teaching-authority of the Catholic Church. And that bare outline is all I can offer in the timelimits of my session.

The Catholic Church does not ask anyone to accept that. What Catholics must hold is that no interpretation will be correct if it conflicts with any of her defined teachings on matters of faith or morals; and that, if any doubts arise concerning the meaning of any particular passage in the Bible, the final decision rests with her, should a definitive judgment be thought warranted. It must be remembered that Christ neither wrote nor ordered to be written any of the books contained in our New Testament. He called His Apostles, founded His Church upon them, and commissioned His Apostles and through them His Church, to teach all nations in His name. Years later, the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostles and others associated with them, as St. Mark and St. Luke, to set down in writing the basic traditions and convictions of the primitive Christian community. The New Testament should be regarded as containing "the family papers" of the Church, written by members of the family, which has inherited the traditional sense of them. Outsiders, without the intuitions or sense of the faith, and who take the writings at their face value, are to say the least less able to grasp their significance that members of the family to which they owe their origin and belong; and the right interpretation of them is to be sought within the Catholic Church, not from strangers to the family traditions. The words of Deut., 32:7 still apply: "Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask thy father and he will show thee; thy elders and they will tell thee."

That would be impossible. It does not allow for different human mentalities. Into almost any written sentences people can read meanings according to their own preconceived ideas. It is not to be denied, of course, that a Christian who reads his Bible in a spirit of faith and piety will gain a deeper understanding of much of the divinely-revealed truth it contains. But there will be difficult passages where even the sincerest, devout and scholarly men arrive at conflicting conclusions; and at least in really vital matters clarification

Only by the infallible teaching-authority of the Catholic Church. There are some who wish to by-pass that authority, saying that the Bible is self-authenticating. But innumerable readers of it do not find it so. Some have said: "I find the Word of God in the Bible because the Bible finds me." But again, there are innumerable readers who neither find the Word of God in the Bible, nor are found by it. Such a purely subjective standard won't do. An objective test is necessary. And that is found in the apostolic tradition manifesting God's witness to His inspiration of the writings contained in the Bible, a tradition handed down through the ages and guaranteed by the infallible teaching-authority of the Catholic Church declaring that the books contained in the Old and New Testaments — and no others — are to be accepted as the inspired Word of God. It must be kept in mind that the Church had existed for some twenty years at least before any of the New Testament books were written; and all its books were written within the Church and by members of the Church. It was when certain fictitious writings began to be circulated with the claim that they were also divinely inspired that the Church had to decide authoritatively which books were truly the Word of God and which were not; and her decisions were given as needed by different Synods of Bishops. A Council held at Rome under Pope Damasus in 382 A.D. gave the full list of the forty-six books in the Greek Septuagint Old Testament and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as being the officially accepted Bible for Christians.

If a non-Catholic who already believes in the Bible, no matter on what grounds, enters into a discussion of religion with a Catholic, the Catholic can logically start from that person's faith in the Bible, merely pointing out that without the authoritative decision of the Catholic Church in the fourth century one would not know precisely which books are rightly held to belong to the Bible as the inspired Word of God. It " is another matter, however, when dealing with a person who has no faith at all. Then it would be a vicious circle to ask the unbeliever to accept the Bible because the Church says it's true, and the Church because the Bible says it's true. One could go round and round forever in that circle, making no real progress at all. With an unbeliever, granted his interest in the subject, the thing to do is to ask him to consider the Gospels, not as the inspired Word of God, but just as documents stating the facts that Christ lived, made remarkable claims, did things making it at least not unreasonable to accept these claims, and founded a Church, promising His protection of it always as a reliable guide in His name. Only if the man admitted, not only that it would be reasonable to believe in these things, but, stepping up from the lower level of reason alone to the higher level of faith, professed his faith in Christ and in His Church, could one ask him to accept the verdict of the Church that the Gospels are not merely reliable as documents, but that they are indeed the inspired Word of God, and that her voice is the final court of appeal as to what their interpretation should be. Such a process does not begin from faith, but from a reasonable judgment. If the unbeliever cannot bring himself to step upstairs to the level of faith, further progress for the time being is not possible. But if he does, then one can go on to what faith requires us to believe. From a logical point of view, no vicious circle occurs there. It is a legitimate spiral process. One has not gone round and round, but round and up, as one who ascends by a spiral staircase from lower to higher levels.

Here we must be careful. Absolutely speaking, the Scriptures, having their own inherent authority as God's inspired Word, are above the Church. The Church, even though she decided between the claims of spurious books and those which really contained the inspired Word of God, did not give the really inspired ones their authority. God gave them that, and the Church has to conform her doctrines to the truth they contain. But while the Church is not above the Bible in that sense, her authority is definitely above private interpretations of it by individual readers of it - a very different thing. After all, it is the Church which Christ commissioned to "teach all nations" (Matt., 28:19) and to which He said: "If a man will not hear the Church, let him be as the heathen" (Matt., 18:19).

We accept both. The Catholic Church cannot contradict Scripture. But her teachings, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, tell us how the Christian community through the ages has understood Scripture. The early Church Fathers, some of whom knew the Apostles personally, reflect the faith of the first Christians. In the life and thought of the Church during succeeding ages, biblical teaching was further clarified, misinterpretations being rejected and right interpretations proclaimed. A so-called purely "biblical theology" which would ignore almost two thousand years of Christian teaching developed in accordance with Scripture would be quite inadequate. That is why, in its "Document of Revelation", n.10, the Second Vatican Council declared: "Sacred tradition, sacred Scripture, and the teaching-authority of the Church, in accord with God's most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others; and all together act each in its own way under the action of the Holy Spirit, and contribute effectively to the salvation of souls." The Bible, then, can be rightly understood only in the light of the official doctrines of the Church — doctrines we accept through faith in the Church as our divinely-appointed guide in religious matters. That others who lack the Catholic faith should develop ideas differing from the teachings of the Catholic Church is not disconcerting to Catholics, nor even a matter of surprise to them.

Better-informed Protestants no longer accept that over-simple formula. They realise that no complete New Testament as we know it was acknowledged by Christians until about four centuries after Christ - as long a time as between the 16th century Reformation and our own times! Initially, as we are told in Acts 2:42, Christians adhered "steadfastly to the teaching of the Apostles." Between the years 50 and 100 A.D. the different books of the New Testament were written, being circulated separately. Finally, in the 4th century, the Church gathered them into the one New Testament. The test of which books were indeed the inspired Word of God was the Church's judgment both of their apostolic origin and their conformity with her own teachings from the very beginning. For the first 400 years, therefore, the rule of faith was not the full New Testament as we have it, which did not then exist, but the teaching-authority of the Church which did exist. This question of the relationships between the Church and the Bible constitutes one of the problems confronting the ecumenical movement; but it is only one of the many problems, each to be solved in its own good time; and the very existence of these problems, far from being a reason for discontinuing the movement, are a reason for persevering with it. Its very purpose is to see clearly what hinders the reunion of all Christians in one and the same visible Church and how such hindrances can be overcome. Merely to point out the differences is not to prove them insuperable. We must allow for the Holy Spirit having something to say about that.

I do not doubt your sincerely religious dispositions. It was to one of similar dispositions that our Lord said: "You are not far from the kingdom of God." Mk., 12:34. But that statement implies that the good man had not yet attained to the kingdom of God as Jesus had come to establish it. Meantime, your principle surely cannot be a sound one. Firstly, nowhere does the Bible itself say that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is got only by daily Bible-reading. Secondly, Christ did not order a line of the New Testament to be written, which would be a strange neglect were daily Bible-reading the only way to gain the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Thirdly, millions of Christians had the indwelling of the Holy Spirit during the many centuries before the invention of the printing-press by Gutenberg in 1448 A.D. made the possession of Bibles for daily reading generally available; and to this day the Christian religion is still being preached in many mission areas to illiterate people who attain a deep faith in it and to lives in accordance with its requirements which would put to shame many professing Christians in our sophisticated and secularised so-called civilisation. For the rest, it is the divine plan, as St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, that "through the Church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known." Eph., 3:10. Those are words deserving of much more attention and thought than many are prepared to devote to them.

What I have had to say has necessarily been dependent on the nature of the questions put to me. The Second Vatican Council, in its Decree on Ecumenism, n.21, said that Christians separated from us, while believing with us in the divine authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God, think differently from us about the relationship between the Scriptures and the Church, the teachings of which play an important part in helping us to understand God's written Word. They are those differences which have prompted most of the inquiries sent to me and with which I have had to deal. But the Council, in its "Constitution on Divine Revelation," n.25, urged all the faithful to learn by their frequent reading of Scripture "the knowledge of Christ Jesus which surpasses in value all other knowledge (Phil., 3:8). It is my duty, therefore — and not only my duty but my desire also — far from discouraging, to encourage all able to do so to devote time, daily if possible, to the prayerful reading of the Bible, and especially of the Gospels in which we meet our Lord and find in His teaching and example an inspiration to love God and our neighbour, and grow personally in virtue and holiness of life. Nor, as regards good Christians separated from us, would I for a moment deny that from the viewpoint of their spiritual lives the reading of the Holy Scripture has made a great impact upon them, enkindling in them an ever greater desire to love and serve God, to trust in Christ as their Saviour, providing them with comfort and courage to live as committed Christians in the midst of the largely secularised and often hostile environment of the world of today. But a subjective and personal religious contentment is not all that Christianity in its fulness is meant to provide. It has a body of revealed truth to be explicitly believed; a community and public worship to be offered to God, we "not forsaking our assembly", as Heb., 10:25 puts it; and sacramental means of grace to be used throughout our lives. To by-pass these elements of the Christian religion is to be content with much less than our Lord requires of us as a duty and intends for our own greater spiritual welfare.

He added that the Council could not rightly be expected to avoid a declaration on a subject so intimately bound up with the Catholic religion. We could add that it was one of equal importance to the Eastern Orthodox Churches. As a matter of fact, while insisting that devotion to Mary should be highly esteemed, the Council warned Catholics against exaggerations which could give non-Catholics mistaken ideas concerning it; so much so that some Catholics accused the Council of watering down Catholic devotion in the interests of reunion - misgivings which were quite unjustified. The Council did not depart from the principle that the interests of reunion are best served, not by ignoring differences of outlook, but by stating them clearly and studying more deeply the reasons for them in the hope of reaching agreement on the problems to which they give rise.

We must go back much earlier than that. The Holy Spirit descended upon a Church already founded by Christ, of which He is the Head, the members of the Church becoming by the very fact members of Christ. St. Paul speaks of his filling up what is wanting to the sufferings of Christ "for His body, which is the Church" (Coloss., 1:24). A mother brings forth not only the head but the head and members of her child. By becoming Mother of Christ, Mary became Mother also of all who would become members of His body, the Church. In actual fact that occurred at the moment of the Incarnation; but in the plan of God her destiny to be that goes right back to the beginnings of the human race when, after the sin of our first mother Eve, God promised to put enmity between Satan and the woman and her posterity. Mary was the Second Eve, destined to undo the work of the first. As the first Eve listened to an evil spirit and disobeyed God to our ruin, so Mary listened to a good spirit, obeyed God, and brought forth Christ for our salvation, Christ making us His members within His body, which is the Church. Mary is, of course, herself a member of the Church and subject to Christ as the Head of the Church just as any others of its members. She herself owes her redemption to Christ. But within the Church, and on a different level, she has a role of such importance that all other members will find that, through her motherhood of Christ, she is their mother also.

If the Catholic Church has defined any doctrine as a dogma or necessary article of faith, you can take it for granted that such a doctrine was at least implicitly contained in the apostolic deposit of the Faith handed down in the Church by means of Scripture and Tradition. As a matter of erudition, if one wishes, one may go to the further trouble of studying to find out how the Marian dogmas are contained in the apostolic deposit of the Faith. But that is not necessary, for the Church by her teaching-authority has made the truth clear to us independently of our own researches.

The author of the book did not understand the Catholic doctrine. He was thinking in terms of biology. But the Immaculate Conception of Mary had nothing whatever to do with biology. She was as much the child of an ordinary and natural conception biologically as any other normal child, her father and mother being traditionally known as Joachim and Anne. What Catholic doctrine holds is that, at the moment she was naturally conceived, God preserved her soul when He created it from contracting the original or inherited sin by which all other ordinary descendants of Adam and Eve are affected. In other words, her soul was constituted from the very beginning in a state of grace, and was therefore immaculate from the moment of her bodily conception. The doctrine, then, concerns her soul, not her body. It declares that her soul, in the spiritual and supernatural order, was by the grace of God preserved free from any taint even of original sin. Incidentally, if a person did not believe in the existence of inherited original sin at all, he would believe in the immaculate conception of everybody!

They certainly confirm that dogma although of themselves they could not be regarded as an adequate and explicitly biblical proof of it. More telling would be God's promise in Genesis 3:15, declaring that He would put enmity between Satan and the woman. The early Christian Fathers interpreted the promised woman as a new Eve, as sinless as Eve herself was before the first sin; and the Church has defined the doctrine that, through the anticipated merits of Christ's redemptive work, Mary's soul was preserved from the contagion of original sin. As grace is the opposite of sin, the angel's salutation of Mary as "full of grace" brought out the radical opposition - the "enmity" - between the promised woman and Satan. Never for a moment was Mary, the Mother of Christ, under the actual dominion of Satan, as she would have been had she at any time been subject to sin. The Anglican Dr. E. L. Mascall, at a London conference with Eastern Orthodox theologians in 1948 - the discussions being published later in a book entitled "The Mother of God" - declared his own firm belief in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, saying that if Mary was to be a worthy dwelling-place for the Divine Word she would have to be pure in every respect, which includes freedom from original sin by a special intervention of the grace of God. And he drew from the Orthodox Professor G. Florovsky the admission that before Pope Pius IX defined the doctrine in 1854 a number of prominent Eastern Orthodox theologians had upheld the doctrine.

The Catholic Douay version gives the English rendering of St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate translation of the original Greek words "Chaire Kecharitomene." These words St. Jerome translated as "Ave, gratia plena." The same sense, "Hail, full of grace", is found also in ancient Syriac and Arabic translations of the New Testament. There are no reasons for doubting the accuracy of such a rendering of the Greek text.

Literally, the Greek words may rightly be given that alternative translation, but it does not adequately convey the sense of the angel's salutation. Protestant commentators themselves recognise this, and explain the text as meaning "full of grace." Dummelow's Commentary (1950 edition) says of Lk., 1:28, "The angel recognised in Mary a holiness of a very special kind which God had given her to fit her to be the mother of the Holy One." The Anglican Bishop Gore, in "A New Commentary on Holy Scripture" (1928) explains the verse as meaning "highly favoured or endued with grace ('gratia plena'); that is, a preeminent example of divine favour." Dr. Lowther Clarke's "Concise Bible Commentary" (1952) says that the meaning is "full of grace." Mr. E. V. Rieu, in his Penguin edition of "The Four Gospels" (1952), translates Lk., 1:28 as "Greetings, lady of grace." Peake's "Revised New Commentary" (1962) says: "Mary is a recipient of God's grace in a supreme degree." The Catholic translation of the text as "Hail, full of grace" undoubtedly gives the true meaning of it.

That is an historically impossible supposition. St. Jerome wrote in 390 A.D. No one at that time had so much as thought of formulating the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception. It is not contained explicitly in Scripture, nor is it mentioned in the writings of any-of the early Fathers. About the 6th century A.D. the liturgical Feast of Mary's Conception (without any reference to its having been an immaculate conception) was introduced, and from then onwards its observance gradually extended throughout both Eastern and Western Christendom. Between the 12th and the 15th centuries the question was raised and debated by theologians as to whether Mary had been preserved immaculate by a special grace when her own mother, St. Anne, had conceived her. From the 16th century onwards it had become the common belief throughout the whole of Catholic Christendom and certainly the majority opinion among members of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. In 1854 Pope Pius IX defined the doctrine as a dogma or Article of Faith, to be held by all Catholics as an integral part of divine revelation. It would, therefore, be an anachronism to suggest that St. Jerome in the 4th century adjusted his translation to support a developed doctrine of which he had never heard. He simply gave the actual sense of the Greek text by describing Mary as "gratia plena", or "full of grace."

In allowing that change the General Editor, Father Alexander Jones, permitted a departure from the magnificent French version, "La Sainte Bible", published by the "Ecole Biblique" in Jerusalem, a translation of which he claims to be making available to English readers. The French version has "comblee de grace"; that is, "crowned, laden, or filled with grace." Also, in 1965, a Catholic edition of the Protestant "Revised Standard Version" was published, with permission to make a few changes in it. One of these changes, for which the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain obtained authorisation, consisted of substituting "Hail, full of grace" for the Revised Standard Version's "O favoured one."

That is a quite inadequate explanation. It suggests that the favour granted to Mary was limited to the function she was to fulfil in the future, apart from any extraordinary grace already affecting her own soul even as the angel addressed her. But the Greek word "kecharitomene" denotes something which had already happened to her in the past and was still effective. So "La Sainte Bible", the French Jerusalem Bible, says in its footnote that the literal sense of the Greek is: "You who have been and have continued to be filled with grace." Undoubtedly the reason why she had been so sanctified was that she might become the Mother of the Messiah. But the angel saluted her as having been sanctified for the purpose he had come to announce to her. "Hail, full of grace" is an accurate and appropriate translation of the way in which the angel addressed her.

The Catholic Church has never regarded the expression "full of grace" as explicit biblical proof of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. It proves only that Mary had a holiness of an entirely special kind conferred upon her by God to fit her to be the Mother of the Messiah, without saying when it had been bestowed upon her. The Church, therefore, holds that the words can be regarded as no more than a suggestion, not as proof, that she had such grace from the very moment of her conception. To arrive at the doctrine that her soul was preserved immaculate in and from the very moment when she was conceived one needs the assistance of other passages of Scripture, the developed later beliefs of the faithful, and the authoritative declarations of the Church. Still, one must agree that at least the suggestion of the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception is much better brought out in the "full of grace" translation - originally adopted on quite other grounds - than in the "so highly favoured" which is offered us as an alternative rendering. "Hail, Mary, full of grace" will certainly retain its place among the prayers of Catholics.

The Eastern Orthodox Churches have never made any official pronouncement on the subject. Their members are quite free to accept it if they wish. Timothy Ware, in his book "The Orthodox Church" (1963) points out, on pp. 263-4, that the Orthodox Churches hold Mary to be "All-Holy" and "Immaculate" at least in the sense of her never having personally committed a sin of any kind. On the question as to whether she was also free from original or inherited sin, as the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception maintains, he says that many orthodox theologians supported the doctrine before Pope Pius IX defined it in 1854, but not since then. To find some reason for rejecting it other than anti-papal prejudice, these theologians argue that the doctrine "seems to separate Mary from the rest of the descendants of Adam." But the Protestant theologian Max Thurian, in his recent book "Mary, Mother of the Lord and Figure of the Church" (1963), points out that Christ, as both truly God and truly man, was undoubtedly immaculate, and that if this did not separate Him as regards His human nature from the rest of the descendants of our first parents, neither could Mary's immaculate conception which belonged to the purely supernatural order separate her from the rest of the descendants of Adam. This Calvinist theologian has rightly solved the difficulty advanced by some of the Orthodox theologians to justify their rejection of the doctrine defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854.

She continues in verse 48: "From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed," showing our attitude towards her; and in verse 49: "For He that is mighty has done great things to me," giving the reason both for her attitude and our own. In her was fulfilled God's promise (Gen., 3:15), made when the first sin was committed: "I will put enmity between thee (Satan) and the woman." Mary was the promised second Eve with whom Satan is in radical opposition, so that she was never subject to him by the slavery of sin. The New Testament opens with the same assurance, the angel saluting Mary as "full of grace." We ourselves are purified from sin after our birth by our baptism. It was different with Jeremiah the prophet to whom God said: "Before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee." Jer., 1:5. The soul of Mary, however, at the moment of her conception, not between her conception and birth, was filled with the redeeming grace of Christ, so that she was never subject to the dominion of sin.

It does; but as the Anglican theologian Dr. H. S. Box says in "The Blessed Virgin Mary" (1963) p. 78: "A person may be redeemed in either of two ways: by being cleansed from sin after being stained by it; or by being kept free from it altogether." There is of course only one Redeemer. Acts 4:12 tells us "there is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved" than that of Jesus Christ. Every grace given to men from the moment of Adam's sin, therefore, was derived from Christ, operating retroactively in previous ages. Abraham, Moses, and all others in Old Testament times owed such graces as they received to Him; and but for the grace of Christ Mary would have been subject to the dominion of sin. She owed to Him her more perfect form of redemption by prevention rather than by subsequent cleansing from sin. No wonder she rejoiced in God her Saviour who had done such great things for her, to render her a worthy dwelling place for the Word of God Incarnate.

Catholic doctrine holds that those words apply to Mary in the sense that she, with all other human beings naturally descended from Adam and Eve, is the child of a guilty human race, and therefore was in need of redemption. That excludes any conflict of Catholic teaching with St. Paul's words. Mary knew, of course, that she owed her privilege (which theology describes as "redemption by prevention") to God, and in her "Magnificat" acknowledged the fact, saying: "My spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour." Lk., 1:47. The Anglican writer G. D. Carleton puts things well in his book "Mother of Jesus" (1957) pp. 8-9 by saying that, while Mary was not exempted from the need of redemption, "she was saved through the foreseen merits of Christ's death. She is the most wonderful of all fruits of the redemptive grace of Christ. She, who is entirely immune from the power of sin, is she who most singularly is saved."

The evidence is found both in Sacred Scripture and in the authentic Christian tradition embodied in the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Briefly, from the biblical point of view, the Church finds the doctrine of the virginity of Mary, despite her motherhood, in the old Testament prophecy of Isaiah: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel" (Is., 7:14); in Mary's own words to the angel Gabriel: "How shall this be done, for I know not man," the angel replying that the power of the Holy Spirit would be responsible for the conception of the child to be born of her (Lk., 1:34-35); and in the words of the angel, reassuring St. Joseph: "That which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit" (Matt., 1:18).

When Mary was told by the angel that she was to become the mother of a child to be called Jesus, she expressed her astonishment precisely because she had neither had nor contemplated having procreative relations with any man; whereupon the angel reassured her that "the power of the Most High" would alone be responsible for the origin of the child she was to bear, adding that nothing is "impossible" that God wills to do. God simply willed that she should be with child and that is all there was to it; just as, in the beginning of time, His creative "fiat" was enough, He having but to will "Let there be light," and "there was light." Gen., 1:3. One of God's attributes is that He is omnipotent, capable of doing things beyond the scope of ordinary natural laws and causing events we describe as miraculous occurrences.

That is true; and some have accordingly proposed the theory that it might be possible some day to cause a woman by artificial means to have a child independently of fertilisation by any male agency. But there is an immense gap between theory and practical likelihood. Dr. E. C. Messenger, in his book "The Mystery of Sex and Marriage", after a close study of this subject, writes: "As yet, apart from the Incarnation (i.e., the conception and birth of Christ) no human being has ever come into existence without a human father. And in spite of modern researches, it seems unlikely that any such event will ever take place."

Isaiah, writing in Hebrew, used the word "almah", meaning just a "young woman" who might or might not be a virgin, instead of the Hebrew word "bethulah" which meant a virgin in the strict sense. Since Isaiah went on to say that the "almah" would have a child to be called "Emmanuel" (or "God-with-us"), the word "bethulah", which excludes the idea of child-bearing, he would have thought inappropriate.

They accepted that translation, but did not invent it. They were unanimous in holding that the prediction of "Emmanuel" or "God-with-us" referred to Christ. Knowing as a fact of Christian revelation that He was born of a virgin mother, they interpreted the prophecy of Isaiah accordingly, saying that the "almah" of whom he spoke must have been intended in the sense of "virgin" - a sense the word could have in the Hebrew language. By itself, the word "almah" does not settle the question; but if one knew from other sources that the girl referred to was a virgin, "almah" would rightly be translated as "virgin." The New Testament context justifies that translation. Quite recently an outstanding Hebrew scholar, a Protestant, Dr. E. J. Young, published a book called "Studies in Isaiah" (1954). In it he insists that "virgin" is the best possible translation of "almah"; and the Protestant "British Weekly", March 17, 1955, when reviewing the book, said "no one can afford to neglect Dr. Young's discussion of the subject and the conclusion at which he has arrived."

Our present translations are those of St. Matthew's Greek gospel. His quotation is from the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew made by the Jews at Alexandria over a century before the Christian era. These Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew word "almah", not by the Greek word "neanis" meaning a young woman in general, but by the Greek word "parthenos" meaning "virgin." St. Matthew's use of the Greek word "parthenos" or virgin was due, therefore, to his quoting, not the Hebrew original of Isaiah, but the Greek translations made by the Jews of Alexandria.

Papias said that Matthew originally wrote in Hebrew a collection of the "logia" or sayings of Jesus. Most scholars hold that he wrote in Hebrew only a collection of Our Lord's sayings, not a complete gospel recording His life and activities. In that case, the first chapters of the Greek Matthew would not have been in it. This is a question which can never be settled, for the Hebrew manuscript of St. Matthew has long since perished and there is no copy of it in existence. Anyone who claims to know what words St. Matthew used in his Hebrew gospel is saying what he does not and cannot know to be true. In any case, it would not matter, granted that he wrote earlier in Hebrew the first chapter we have in the later Greek Matthew, whether he used the Hebrew word "bethulah" meaning virgin in the strict sense, or "almah" meaning a young woman who could have well been a virgin as not.

St. Jerome, the great biblical scholar of the fourth century, dealt even then with that problem. He pointed out that St. Matthew intended only to show that Joseph had nothing whatever to do with the conception of Jesus, not so much as thinking of anything beyond that. He quoted Hebrew instances where the expression "till" had no necessary reference to the future at all, as when we read in Genesis 8:7 that "the dove went forth from the ark and did not return till the waters dried up." That did not mean that the dove returned after the waters dried up. The dove did not return at all, having found resting places. Protestant biblical scholars give the same explanation as St. Jerome. Thus the Protestant Clarendon Bible Commentary says: "Matthew is entirely concerned with the virgin character of Mary at the time of the birth of Jesus. These words cannot be taken to imply that it (her virginity) was not afterwards preserved." The Protestant "New Commentary on Holy Scripture" says that Matt., 1:25 "is simply intended to make it clear that our Lord was not Joseph's son, and not to give any further information." Lowther Clarke's "Concise Bible Commentary," also Protestant, says that "he knew her not till" can mean "and afterwards too" he knew her not. Nor does the expression: "She brought forth her first-born son" imply that there were other children afterwards. Thus Exodus says: "Every first-born child shall be sanctified unto God." Parents had not to wait to see if other children were born before they could call their first their first-born. Any child of a woman who had not previously had a child would be her "first-born" whether any later ones were born or not.

There is one tell-tale phrase there which is really enough to settle the question. It was quite against Jewish custom to refer to a man according to the name of his mother rather than according to the name of his father. Thus, in Matthew 16:17 Jesus addressed Peter as "Simon, son of Jona." Even Renan, the French rationalist, who first argued that Mary had other children besides Jesus, abandoned that opinion later owing to this reference in Mark 6:3 to Jesus as "the son of Mary." "Such appellations," he wrote, "are employed only when the father is no longer alive and the widow has no other son." Moreover, Mk., 6:3 speaks of Jesus as "the son of Mary," then adding "and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon," not including these as also sons of Mary but obviously regarding them as brethren in a broader and more general sense than a literal one. Elsewhere these so-called brethren are depicted as older kindred critical of one younger than themselves, not as a first-born who would be older. Again, Lk., 2:41-52 speaks of Mary and Joseph going to Jerusalem with the child Jesus, giving not the slightest hint of any other children. But apart from all this there is an insuperable difficulty against taking references to the brethren of Jesus in the literal sense. When Jesus was dying on the cross He confided His mother to the care of John, the son of Zebedee (Jn., 19:26). If Mary had several other children to care for her, they would have had the duty of providing for her. Jesus, who had been so insistent on the obligation of children to their parents (Matt., 15:4), would never have dreamed of dispensing them from that commandment; and to break up a family would have been the last thing He would have thought of doing. Finally, the tradition of Mary's perpetual virginity could not have become current in the Church, as it did almost within the lifetime of her contemporaries, if it were known to all that she had other children, living, some of whom were prominent among the leaders of the Church, such as "James, the brother of the Lord" (Gal., 1:19). Scripture and the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church alike require our insistence that Mary had but one child, Jesus, and no others.

Among the Jews the term had a very wide meaning. It could stand for relatives in general, in any degrees of kindred. In Hebrew there was no word for cousins, who were simply called brethren. Acquaintances and fellow-villagers would know when the word was or was not intended in the strictly literal sense that we are inclined at first sight to read into it. In 1963, the Rev. Max Thurian, a French Calvinist writing for Protestants, published a book called "Mary, Mother of the Lord." In it, pp. 38-39, he says that no argument can be drawn from New Testament references to James and Joseph, Simon and Jude as "brethren" of Jesus since, according to Jewish ways of speaking, they could simply have been cousins; and he points out that St. Matthew, 27:56, indicates James and Joseph as sons, not of Mary, the mother of Jesus, but of a different mother. He says that Protestant ideas on this subject are due to loyalty to entrenched positions of the Churches of their birth, not to sound biblical interpretation. He adds that if they hold the first Reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, were faithful to the Bible, they will find it difficult to explain why they do not still follow Luther and Calvin. On. p. 29 he quotes Luther's words: "Mary was a virgin before the birth of Christ and remained a virgin after it." Calvin he quotes as saying: "According to the custom of the Hebrews all relatives were called 'brethren'. There are certain strange people who want to suggest that the Virgin Mary had other children. What folly this is!"

The Second General Council of Constantinople in 553 A.D. defined as an Article of Faith that Mary remained ever a virgin. That excluded her having, after the virgin birth of Christ Himself, any other children. That definition was accepted throughout the whole of Christendom, both East and West. The Eastern Orthodox Churches today - although separated from the Catholic Church now as they were not then - adhere as firmly to this doctrine as do all Catholics. In 1779 A.D. Pope Pius VI issued a special condemnation of the opinion expressed by some that Isaiah 7:14, as quoted in Matt. 1:23, contained no real reference of any kind to the virgin birth of Christ. All scripture scholars, however, agree that if one ignores New Testament teaching, no conclusive argument for the virgin birth of Christ can be based on Isaiah 7:14. This has great importance. It used to be suggested that Isaiah 7:14 gave rise to the doctrine of Mary's virginity. But the opposite is the case. There is no evidence that the text in Isaiah had ever been understood by the Jews as predicting a virgin-born Messiah. Only the fact of the virgin birth of Christ as recorded in the New Testament carries the evangelist's mind back to the text in Isaiah, enabling him to realise its prophetic significance. Here we have a case exemplifying St. Augustine's saying that the New Testament is latent in the Old Testament; the Old Testament becomes patent in the New.

Mary certainly cannot be the Mother of God in the sense that she, a mere creature made by Him, gave His very existence to Him as her Creator! Clearly, there must be another aspect of this problem than the one you have in mind. It is this. When Mary conceived under the influence of the Holy Spirit, she provided a human nature which the eternal and pre-existing Son of God, who is equally God with the Father and the Holy Spirit made His own. As a result, the Child born of Mary was both God and man. That is what we mean by the doctrine of the Incarnation. Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, was therefore both truly God and truly man, one Divine Person existing in two natures, the Uncreated Divine Nature and a created human nature. In the early centuries of the Church, however, there arose some opponents of this doctrine who declared that Christ was only a man and not at the same time God, thus denying the Divinity of Christ. The Church, to safeguard the truth about Christ, defined at the Council of Ephesus, 431 A.D., something about His Mother, namely, that Mary is the "Mother of God." In other words, the Child born of her was not merely an ordinary child, but was God Incarnate, dwelling among the mankind He had come to redeem. St. Thomas the apostle rightly, therefore, addressed Christ as "my Lord and my God" (Jn., 20:28) and we rightly declare Mary, the Mother of Christ, to be the "Mother of God;" meaning, of course, the Mother of "God-as-incarnate" or "as made man." The definition of the doctrine made clear to those who had genuine faith in Christ what that faith implied. Christians generally have not found this doctrine a problem but have quite well understood the sense intended.

Christ, as simultaneously God and man, was the only one unable to sin by the very nature of things, owing to His Divinity. Mary, not being God in human form, could not in that way be incapable of sin. But this would not exclude a sinlessness dependent upon an extraordinary privilege due to altogether special graces conferred upon her by God. The Anglican Rev. George D. Carleton, in his book "The Mother of Jesus" (1957), p. 7, rightly says: "The Church everywhere has believed and asserted the actual sinlessness of Mary in deed, word, thought and desire, and the complete fulfilment by her of the divine will throughout her whole life."

Not according to the ordinary laws of divine providence for one is still in a state of probation in this world and not yet confirmed in grace by the Beatific Vision of God in heaven. In Mary's case, it was an altogether special and exceptional providence of God, in keeping with her unique office as the Mother through whom, to use St. John's words, "God so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son." Jn., 3:15. An overwhelming influence of divine grace made it impossible for Mary, in exercising her free will, to choose evil of any kind rather than what was good and pleasing to God. We must keep in mind also what the motherhood of Jesus meant to her. His long and intimate association with her from the moment of her having conceived Him and throughout the years after His birth must have had a sanctifying influence upon her beyond estimate.

Strictly speaking, Mary's reference to humility concerned, not the virtue of humility, but her insignificance and lowliness as a mere creature in the presence of her Creator, as when we speak metaphorically of a humble home or dwelling. All the same, she went on to speak of the mighty and the proud who would be brought low and "sent empty away" (Lk., 1:53). She was certainly aware that she was not among those proud ones and that she did possess the virtue of humility. Even that virtue, however, as all her other virtues, she regarded as God's gift for which she took no credit and in which she found no reason for self-complacency. She was not "proud" of her "humility", which would indeed be a contradiction in terms. All that God had done for her remained ever in her eyes an undeserved generosity towards her on His part.

Basically, the reason for that is found in her relationship to Christ and to His Church. The Presbyterian Pastor Max Thurian says in his book "Mary, Mother of the Lord, Figure of the Church" (1963) p. 24, that Mary's sanctity is that of the Church which we proclaim holy as the mystical body of Christ. Our Lord's purpose, St. Paul tells us, Eph., 5:27, is "that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish." That applies to Mary, for she, Mother of Christ, is Mother of both Head and members of His Mystical Body the Church. "Mary, full of grace, is holy," writes Pastor Thurian, "because in her the Gospel sees the living sign of a unique and predestined choice of the Lord, the response of faith from a perfectly human creature but one who was also totally obedient." That tribute has additional significance as coming from a Protestant biblical scholar.

That does not follow. For over a thousand years before the dogmatic definition the ordinary teaching-authority of the Church had proclaimed the truth of the doctrine. In 1054 A.D., when the Eastern Orthodox Churches became separated from Rome, they retained the doctrine which was even then universally held throughout Christendom. Timothy Ware, in his book "The Orthodox Church", p. 264, says: "Orthodoxy firmly believes in Mary's bodily assumption, though without proclaiming it a dogma." That was the position in the whole of the Western Church also, until Pope Pius XII defined it as an Article of Faith in 1950. It had long been the unanimous teaching of all Catholic bishops. It was part of the Church's Liturgy, and the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, had long been a Holy Day of obligation. No instructed Catholic would have felt free in conscience to doubt the truth of the Assumption, thus repudiating the ordinary teaching-authority of the Church. This ordinary teaching-authority was confirmed by the extraordinary authority attaching to an infallible Papal Definition when, in 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the doctrine as a dogma of the Faith. Although not expressly mentioned in Scripture, the doctrine is certainly involved in the revealed facts of Mary's intimate association with Christ, our Lord and Saviour, from His birth into this world through to His ascension from it into the Heaven from which He came.

The importance of a doctrine does not of itself make it important that it should be defined at an earlier rather than at a later period. All Catholics at all times have had exactly the same faith in the sense of professing the general formula: "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church and in all that she believes and teaches." Later generations who attain to a more developed knowledge of the contents of the Faith simply believe explicitly what earlier generations believed implicitly. Earlier generations would say to us: "You know more clearly what the Catholic Faith requires of all who press it than we did; and, of course, that being the Catholic Faith, it is the Faith we ourselves professed although we were not so well-informed about it as you have the good fortune to be." However, as a matter of fact, the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary had already been known as quite certain Catholic teaching for over a thousand years before Pope Pius XII confirmed it infallibly by his solemn dogmatic definition in 1950.

The proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption had many important aspects, not precisely for the particular year 1950, but for our own times. Following upon two world wars, in which men forgot they were the children of the same heavenly Father, it directed our thoughts to our eternal destiny with Him, and to the supremacy of spiritual values. It reaffirmed the claims of faith upon us, as contrasted with an unbelieving rationalism and secularism. It exemplified the power given by our Lord to St. Peter who still speaks to us through his successors. And it strengthens our belief in the resurrection of the body, assuring us with the infallibility of divine revelation that Mary, both body and soul, is already glorified in Heaven. That what we hope to be true some day for ourselves is even now true of her is a pledge of grace and peace amid all the problems and anxieties confronting us in this world.

Isaiah himself completes the verse in a typical Hebrew parallelism: "Neither my praise to graven images." It should be obvious that God is forbidding the worship of pagan idols. But elsewhere God declares that He does give His glory to those who, in, with and through Christ, give themselves to Him. Thus Christ, in His prayer to His Father said of His disciples: "The glory you have given to me, I have given to them." Jn., 17:22. And St. Paul wrote to the

That was in 1964, during the Third Session of the Council. The Archbishop quoted from Martin Luther's treatise on the "Magnificat," written in 1521. In it, Luther wrote: "We are able to learn there the true honour with which we venerate and serve Mary. How are we to address her? Consider her words and she will teach you what to say: 'O Blessed Virgin and Mother of God, how have you been able to be considered as nothing and disdained as of little consequence, seeing that God has none the less regarded you with all His grace and all His riches, and accomplished in you such mighty things! . . . What can please Mary more than that you should come to God through her, and from her learn to believe and hope in God?" The Calvinist Pastor Max Thurian, who was an observer at the Council, published during it in 1963 his book on "Mary, the Mother of the Lord." In it, p. 7, he wrote: "Through fear and contrariness, Protestants have not dared to meditate freely on what the Gospel tells us about the Mother of the Lord. Because she played a distinguished part in the Incarnation of the Son of God, it is theologically essential and spiritually profitable to consider the vocation of Mary . . . giving to her her rightful place in our devotions." He went on to quote Luther's sermon on Christmas Day, 1529: "Mary is the Mother of Jesus, and the Mother of us all. If Christ is ours, all that He has must be ours also; and His Mother, therefore, is also our Mother." Pastor Thurian maintains that it would be a big step forward towards reunion if only modern Protestants would go back to the teachings of Martin Luther on devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

None at all. The Waldensian Professor John Miegge, a Protestant with no liking at all for devotion to Mary, says, on p. 179 of his book "The Virgin Mary" (1955) that in Roman Catholic teaching "Mary is not a divine person but continues exclusively and completely human. The Catholic theologians from Epiphanius to Thomas Aquinas and our contemporary Mariologists are quite unanimous on this point." He points out that Thomas Aquinas (who lived three centuries before the Reformation) taught clearly in his "Summa Theologica," Part 3, Q. 25, Art. 5, that since Mary is "purely a creature" and not God, adoration cannot be given to her. In a preface to Miegge's book, the Congregationalist Dr. Nathanael Micklem says: "It will not do to brush the whole movement aside with the contemptuous word 'idolatry'." London's Anglican "Church Times," reviewing the book, regarded it as a good antidote to a "barren Protestantism which so often regards Our Lady as simply 'a dead Roman Catholic'." And it is not without significance that the Lund 1950 Conference of Protestant Churches on "Faith and Order" included discussions on "Mariology" (the theology of Mary), not on "Mariolatry" (the adoration of Mary) - the latter reflecting a polemical bias of bygone ages.

Our filial attitude towards Mary is more than justified by the words of Christ when dying on the cross, directing the attention of St. John the disciple as representative of all of us to Mary, saying: "Behold thy mother." Jn. 19:27. She associates her intercession with the redemptive work of Christ in which she shared, and in heaven she is interested in all whom He died to redeem. We rightly, therefore, ask a place in her prayers. She is part of God's provision for our needs and to neglect her is to deprive ourselves of very great helps towards that most important of all things in the end, the saving of our souls.

Christ is indeed the one principal Mediator. But the doctrine that there are many secondary mediators as well as the principal Mediator is quite biblical. And this applies not only to those in this life. Our Lord told the Jews not to think of Abraham as dead, but as living. God "is not the God of the dead," He said, "but of the living" (Matt., 22:32); and He declared: "Abraham rejoiced to see my day" (Jn., 8:56). In 2 Machabees. 15:14 we find Onias the High Priest saying to the people that Jeremiah the prophet "is a lover of his brethren and of the people of Israel: this is he that prayeth much for the people and for all the holy city." Onias lived in the second century B.C.: Jeremiah four centuries earlier! As for Mary, our Lord wrought His first miracle by changing water into wine during the wedding feast at Cana, in Galilee, through her intercession (Jn., 2:3); and she has not less interest in us, less charity towards us, and less power of intercession for us, because she is now in heaven.

The Catholic Church, as does the Eastern Orthodox Church, bases her teaching in this matter on Holy Scripture, apostolic tradition, and Christian common sense. Mary's intercession for us is, of course, included in the doctrine of the intercession of saints in general. The basic principle governing this is the New Testament teaching that the Church is the Body of Christ and that we, members of that Body, are members of one another. We can, therefore, pray for one another and ask one another's prayers. If we cannot ask the saints in heaven (including Mary, the Mother of Christ) to pray for us, then we cannot ask anybody to pray for us. Yet St. Paul regularly asked others to pray for him; e.g., "Brethren, I beseech . . . your prayers to God for me" (Rom., 15:30); "Brethren, pray for us" (I Thess., 5:25). Heb., 12:1 tells us, for our encouragement, that we are "compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses" - a heavenly throng of angels and saints aware of our difficulties, interested in us, and (surely) to whom we can pray. The Congregationalist biblical scholar, Dr. C. H. Dodd, in his "New Testament Studies", has a chapter on "The Communion of Saints." Quoting Hebrews 12:22-23, he explains that we are not only members of the household of the faith on earth but also of the heavenly Jerusalem, of innumerable hosts of angels and saints, and of the spirits of just men made perfect. So we live within the family of God which is not of this world only but exists as militant on earth and triumphant in heaven. We can, therefore, ask the prayers of other members of the family, the saints in heaven (including Mary, the Mother of Christ) on our behalf.

That always remains true; for we are the "Body of Christ" (I Cor., 12:27), of which He is the Head and we the members (Eph., 5: 23, 30). Every spiritual activity of the members for one another, whether in heaven or on earth, has its efficacy only through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is the way, the truth and the life, and through whom alone as principal Mediator and Advocate, we have access to the Father, the mutual prayers of the members of Christ for one another being blended secondarily and subordinate^ with His intercession for us as the one principal Mediator. Difficulties in this matter arise from inadequate ideas of the New Testament doctrines of Christ living in His members and that of communion of saints which contributes towards "the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Eph., 4:13) who, Head and Body, is, as St. Augustine put it, "the whole Christ."

Those words have not the significance they may at first sight seem to have. Mary had said to Jesus: "They have no wine." She was moved by the host's embarrassment over insufficient provision for guests. Our Lord's reply to her was most mysterious. The text in Greak means literally: "Woman, what to me and to you?" The term "woman", as the Anglican Archbishop Temple points out in his "Readings in St. John's Gospel," implies no disrespect, which would be opposed to the commandment: "Honour thy father and thy mother." It was with immense love that Christ, dying on the cross, used the same expression when confiding His mother to the care of St. John, saying: "Woman, behold your son." Jn., 19:26. In English, the Archbishop notes, the term "woman" sounds repellent; but not so in Greek. Also, our Lord's words were not a refusal. Mary knew they were not, and at once said to the servants: "Do whatever He tells you." What, then, did our Lord mean? I have said His reply was mysterious. It was; profoundly so. Take His words: "What have I to do with you?" They could be rendered: "What are the relationships between us?" The key to the meaning is to be found in the very purpose of St. John's gospel, and the key to that purpose is found in its opening verse: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The overriding purpose of St. John's gospel was to stress the Divinity of Christ, and Mary did not give Him that Divinity. She indeed brought forth Christ as a Person who was both God and man; but it was the created human nature only that Mary, in the strict sense of the word, had provided. In the present case, Mary was asking for a miracle, a manifestation of Divine Power, in the granting of which He would be acting in virtue of His Divine Nature as the Son of God, not in virtue of the created human nature by which He was her son. It was because He would be acting in the former and not in the latter capacity that He added that His "hour had not yet come" - at least for the full revelation of His salvific mission which would involve His passion, death and resurrection. However, as Dr. C. H. Dodd explains in "The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel," p. 365, any moment in which Christ gave a sign of His divine functions could at least in some sense be called His destined "hour;" and His Father willed that He should grant a preliminary and partial manifestation of His divinity and glory by performing the first miracle of His public life in response to Mary's request. By it, Jesus manifested the glory of His divinity, not only confirming the faith of His disciples, but also the belief of both the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches in Mary's intercessory power.

That doctrine has not yet been defined by the Church as a dogma; but it is not just an optional pious opinion. As Mother of the Redeemer, Mary certainly had a special part in the mystery of redemption. Our Lord alone, of course, paid the price of our redemption on Calvary; but that the redeeming graces due to that are mediated to us through Mary so reflects the belief of Catholics everywhere, the considered verdict of Catholic theologians and the declarations of Popes and Bishops on the subject that, even though not yet technically defined as a dogma, i t must be regarded as the accepted Catholic doctrine and the safe and common teaching of the Church. This does not mean that we have to ask for every grace expressly through Mary's intervention or intercession. Whether we do so or not, every grace will in fact come to us from Christ through her as a secondary and subordinate channel of His redemptive influence in our lives. What we are really acknowledging is the place God gave her in His plan of salvation. As both sexes co-operated in our downfall, Adam and Eve, both sexes co-operate in our restoration by grace, Jesus and Mary; and we go to God as He came to us, through Mary. The doctrine of itself in no way gives rise to excesses in the practice of a multitude of devotions to Mary, but rather to a general awareness of our own indebtedness to her subordinately to, but in, with and through our one Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

The Council regarded it as its duty to set out clearly Mary's place in the Christian religion. Its document on Mary is entitled: "The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the Mystery of Christ and the Church." It concerned itself with what divine revelation has to say about Mary's role in God's plan of salvation as indicated in both the Old and New Testaments, and as involving her relationships with Christ and His mystical body, the Church. This approach provided the theological foundation for the esteem in which Mary is held by Catholics. As regards devotions to her, the Council contented itself with saying: "The various forms of piety towards the Mother of God which the Church has approved within the limits of sound and orthodox doctrine" should be "generously fostered" and "highly esteemed." Undoubtedly, one such form of piety is to be found in the recitation of the rosary. Pope John XXIII, in his "Journal of a Soul", notes that never on any day did he omit saying the full fifteen decades of his rosary. The most remarkable tribute I have found to the beauty and value of the rosary was, strangely enough, written by the Anglican theologian, Dr. Austin Farrer. In his book "Lord, I Believe," (1955) p. 68, he says "If I had been asked two dozen years ago for an example of what Christ forbade when He said 'Use not vain repetitions', I should very likely have referred to the fingering of beads. But now if I wished to name a special sort of private devotion most likely to be of general profit, prayer on the beads is what I should name. Since my previous opinion was based on ignorance and my present opinion is based on experience I am not ashamed of changing my mind." He adds that "the use of the rosary" should be taught to children. On p. 69 he writes: "A rosary comes into our hands. Whenever we are doing nothing else, we can use it. We do not have to find a subject on which to fix our meditation, for the devotion of the rosary supplies us with a chain of scenes impossible to forget . . . scenes so well chosen that everything in heaven or on earth crowds into them. If I follow the fifteen scenes or mysteries of the rosary I shall stick to the beaten track; and I am unlikely to quarrel with the beatenness of it, when I consider whose feet have trodden it." No Catholic could put things better than in those final words of Dr. Austin Farrer.

Not by any act of faith in the same way as they are obliged to believe in the truths revealed by Christ and the Apostles, and which the Church is divinely-commissioned to safeguard and preach to all mankind. So the Church speaks of the "apostolic deposit" of the Faith and of the truths it contained as constituting "public revelation", which concluded with the death of St. John, the last of the Apostles. But the Church does not deny that God may grant or permit special heavenly manifestations and revelations to individuals or groups of individuals during succeeding ages. Recipients of such favours may themselves be inspired with a divinely-given personal faith in them. But others who only hear or read of them are free, as Pope Benedict XIV declared, to form an opinion of them according to their own prudent judgment of the value of the evidence that can be produced on behalf of their reality. As regards Lourdes, official commissions appointed by the Church fully investigated the facts at the time and gave the verdict that the manifestations there can safely be accepted as supernatural interventions and that the devotions they have inspired promote the spiritual welfare of those who adopt them. Although they are not essential elements of the Catholic Faith as such, there is nothing in them contrary to that Faith, and they cannot be simply dismissed as unimportant, even though some Catholics may not feel personally attracted to or impressed by them.

Here we must be careful. Science examines the observable facts. At Lourdes there is a Medical Bureau, open to all scientists of any religion or of none, for the checking of all cures there which are claimed to be miraculous. But, as scientists, the investigators can do no more than say that no known natural factors can account for some given cure. If they say they are speaking according to their present degree of knowledge and that future scientific discoveries may show that such cures can be due to merely natural causes, they are indulging in speculation, not offering a scientifically verifiable opinion. From a philosophical point of view it could be argued that there was, in a given case, such a lack of proportion between a sudden cure and any possible natural causes that science will never find a natural cause capable of it. All philosophers would admit such a lack of proportion were we to suggest that, not men, but a particularly gifted swarm of mosquitoes built the Sydney Harbour Bridge! From a religious point of view, a man of faith could reasonably believe the cure to be supernaturally caused by God and therefore to be truly a miracle. But philosophical and religious judgments go beyond the scope of science as such.

Most of those who do so have not studied the facts. The famous Father Teilhard de Chardin, writing in the French periodical "Etudes", January, 1909, on "The Miracles of Lourdes and Canonical Investigations," listed twenty-five cases where he said that God had directly intervened, by-passing the laws of nature, and said: "Official science is silent on the matter; it feigns ignorance, or retreats before the explanation, dodging phenomena which it finds embarrassing; and so it is disloyal to its reputation for impartiality and absolute respect for facts." Some scientists have taken his reproach to heart. Thus, in 1958, Dr. Michel Agnellet published a book entitled "I Accept the Facts." Describing himself as a materialist and unbeliever, he said he approached the subject "with all the scepticism I owe to an atheist education followed by a medical training;" and concluded only with the honest admission that the facts of Lourdes remain "a giant question-mark in the scientific mind." On the other hand, Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine, and later Medical Director of the Rockefeller Institute in New York, wrote in his world-famous book "Man, the Unknown" that "the most important cases of miraculous healing have been recorded by the medical Bureau of Lourdes." Earlier, Dr. Carrel had described in his book "Journey to Lourdes" how he himself had witnessed one such case occur. He said that he was an agnostic at the time but that, unable to deny the miracle which took place before his very eyes, he there and then recovered his belief in God.

Dr. West is a medical man and an authority of physical and parapsychological research. He says he visited the Lourdes Medical Bureau, making a scientific study of the evidence recorded there for his eleven chosen cases claimed as miraculous. He concluded that in no case was it proven that the alleged miracle was beyond purely natural and psychological causes, even though those causes might not be fully explicable yet. But that was not a scientific judgment, for science cannot say definitely what is or is not beyond causes not yet scientifically known. A more reasonable attitude was adopted by Dr. Kenneth Walker, a London surgeon who was also an agnostic. In 1952, after a thorough study of the facts of Lourdes, he wrote that he found "little to support the view of some of my medical colleagues" that some unknown psychological forces can account or could account for those facts. He said that those who believe in God have their answer to the problem. They say miracle. But Dr. Kenneth Walker said that he himself, as an agnostic, could not accept that explanation. Where believers said miracle, he had to say insoluble mystery and leave it at that. Dr. Donald West, if on other than scientific grounds he was bent on remaining an agnostic, could well have left it at that also.

"Time's" article was devoted to Pope Paul VI's visit to Fatima in 1967, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the apparitions there. Undoubtedly many Catholics, although well aware of the reported apparitions, have not personally examined the facts relating to them; and many more, without actually doubting their reality, have taken little or no interest in them. Such indifference cannot be written off-hand as being perverse, for belief in such apparitions and the adoption of devotions associated with them do not rank among the essentials of the Catholic religion. The Catholic Faith as such imposes upon us belief in the divinelyrevealed truths given to the world directly by Christ and the Aposles, and taught as such by the Catholic Church. It is noteworthy that the Vatican Council, in its document on the Blessed Virgin Mary, made no reference to any apparitions ascribed to her in post-apostolic times, whether at Lourdes, Fatima or anywhere else. The omission of any mention of these did not, of course, imply any denial of them; it at most indicated that they were regarded as being of secondary importance in comparison with the basic and essential articles of faith. Nowhere is acceptance of them included in any profession of the Catholic Faith required of converts asking to be received into the Catholic Church.

It can be admitted that were there no evidence for the Fatima apparitions in 1917 beyond the word of the three young children, it would be rash to place any reliance upon them. They could be not unreasonably dismissed as the fantasies of excited and imaginative children. But there were external events which occurred precisely as the children said the Blessed Virgin had predicted. She said World War I would soon end (it did in the following year, 1918) but that before long another would break out (World War II began in 1939). During the apparitions in 1917 the children were told that the two youngest of them would not live much longer. Two years later, in 1919, the two of them, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, died during the influenza epidemic which followed upon World War I. All three children lived to see the fulfilment of the Blessed Virgin's promise to them on July 13, 1917, that on the following October 13 she would give a miraculous sign visible to all present at the scene of the apparitions, confirming the reality of them. The sign was duly granted on the date specified.

News of the July 13 promise spread widely and three months later, on October 13, some 70,000 people, believers and sceptics alike, assembled at the scene of the reported apparitions. The sky was overcast with dark clouds and it was raining heavily. Suddenly, before all present at the time, a remarkable phenomenon occurred. An apparent displacement of the sun took place, which seemed to come down through the clouds, radiating changing colours on all sides. Reports of this and of all other events at Fatima were subjected to a thorough investigation by a special Commission appointed by the Bishop of Leiria. Only after eight years did the Commission finalise its report. After a further six months of personal deliberation the Bishop declared the fact of the apparitions to be reasonably credible and permitted, without imposing, public devotions to the Blessed Virgin under the title "Our Lady of Fatima." Of course, people may admit a thing to be "reasonably credible", yet dismiss further thoughts about it and, not feeling particularly drawn towards devotion to "Our Lady of Fatima," remain content with their own forms of piety. But that is a personal matter and it does not entitle them to say that others who think and feel differently have not reasonable grounds for doing so.

I have read of only one such case. There could have been others. But it must be remembered that Portugal is a Catholic country, and also that the presence of non-Catholics was not to be expected under the existing conditions. The event occurred on October 13, 1917. The First World War, which did not end till November, 1918, had brought to an end the tourism which usually brings with it a flow of foreign visitors to Portugal. However, there was one Protestant school teacher there, a Miss Mabel Norton, acting as an English governess for the children of a Portuguese family. On October 13 the family, not confident that anything would happen but thinking it might, invited her to go to Fatima with them in their car, a journey of some miles. She went out of curiosity and saw for herself the inexplicable phenomenon of the displaced and rotating sun. Later thoughts about the extraordinary event led to her eventually becoming a Catholic.

In 1941 the eldest of the three children, Lucy dos Santos, then a nun aged 34, was asked by the Bishop of Leiria, the diocese which includes Fatima, to write an account as far as she could remember of what the Blessed Virgin had said during the apparitions. Lucy's document contained what has come to be known as the "Threefold Message." The first two parts called for repentance of sin and a renewed practice of prayer, especially by the recitation of the rosary and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The third part of the message was given to the Bishop in a sealed envelope with instructions, said by Lucy to be her understanding of God's Will, that it was not to be opened and read until 1960. There was no instruction that this third part of the secret was then to be made public. That rested with the ecclesiastical authorities. Wide publicity led to an equally widespread curiosity which was destined to remain unsatisfied. A Vatican pressrelease in February, 1967, said that the sealed envelope had been sent in 1960 to Pope John XXIII, who opened it and read its contents. But knowledge of those contents died with him, for he ordered the document to be placed in the Vatican Archives without publication of what it contained.

Sister Lucy, now a Carmelite nun, during a press-interview concerning the non-publication of the contents of the envelope in 1960, said that in what she had written she had found it difficult to express herself properly, and that what she had written may have seemed too obscure and confused to warrant publication. She added that apparently God had wanted to use her only to remind the world of the need to avoid sin, making reparation for it by prayer and penance, Catholics particularly renewing their devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and to the regular and fervent recitation of the rosary. She declared herself quite content to accept as God's Will whatever the appropriate ecclesiastical authorities might decide. On her own implicit admission, the essential part of the Fatima message was contained in the first two sections, and the third can evidently be dismissed as being of no practical importance.

The English word liturgy comes from the Greek word leitourgia, which originally meant any civic work or service on behalf of the State. Christians adopted the word, giving it a religious significance, to denote the service and official worship offered to God by the Church. In early times, to be present at the liturgy meant to participate in the Eucharistic assembly of the faithful. The Eastern Orthodox Churches still speak of the Liturgy where we Catholics speak of the Mass; for we extend the term liturgy to other liturgical rites such as the administration of any of the sacraments and to the prescribed recitation of the Breviary or Divine Office in the name of the Church. Other religious practices in common, such as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the Stations of the Cross, or services including scripture readings, the recitation of the rosary or of other prayers, and the singing of hymns, although sanctioned but not prescribed by the Church officially, are regarded as para-liturgical or extra-liturgical rites.

The Preparatory Commission had suggested many topics for discussion without indicating any particular order in which they should be taken. In the published Documents of the Council, those on the Church and on Divine Revelation rank first and second respectively, that on the Liturgy being third. But the preparatory material on the Liturgy was so complete while that on other subjects seemed to require more time that it seemed better to deal with the Liturgy first. Pope Paul VI later declared this to be providential since the Church exists primarily to promote the worship of God and the Liturgy is of first importance in her life, bringing out the meaning of total dedication to Him, not only among the faithful when present at it, but in all their everyday activities. The document was, therefore, an excellent preparation for later conciliar deliberations on renewal of the Church in all phases of her nature and of her impact upon the world today in which she has to exercise her mission.

It would be surprising were it otherwise. A lifetime's mentality is not changed in a moment, above all in matters of worship and prayer which touched us so deeply. We older ones would have echoed Cardinal Newman's moving words: "Nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, said as it is among us." But now stillness and silent reverence seem to have given way to bodily activities and vocal disturbances, and the Mass to have lost something of its dignity and awe-inspiring mysticism. I say that it seems like that; for the Mass is still essentially what it was; as Newman put it: "the greatest action that can be on earth . . . of consecration and of sacrifice." We must remember that in the liturgical rites of the Church there are unchangeable elements, but also others which are alterable according to their suitability or unsuitability in different ages. In the past lengthy additions had been made at different times to the ceremonies surrounding the Eucharist, while there remained vestiges of features which were given prominence in former periods but had since been pruned away almost out of recognition. The changes now made in no way imply that up till now all was wrong. They seek only to clarify and make more intelligible to our own generation what the Church's liturgical worship really means. Again, as regards the Mass, many who were present unthinkingly and passively before are now more aware of what is happening and more active participants in the great event; and we older ones must remember that the newer generation will not have our difficulties. What is new to us will not be new to them, but what they have always known. That thought, not to speak of accepting God's present will for ourselves, should help us to forego our own preferences in this matter and adapt ourselves as best we can to the new ways put before us.

Since I commenced my sessions in 1928, that meant for a period covering thirty-four years. During those years I undertook to answer questions on religion in general, whether from biblical, historical, scientific or psychological points of view: and the Catholic religion in particular, clearing up misunderstandings concerning it, explaining its teachings, practices and disciplinary laws current at the time of speaking, giving the reasons for them and solving the difficulties of inquirers in regard to them. Naturally, during the past six years since the Council began, the wide publicity given to its proceedings has resulted in many problems being put to me, especially in relation to positions I had formerly maintained.

Unreservedly I uphold the obligation, binding upon myself as well as upon all other Catholics, of accepting the constitutional authority of the Vatican Council in any changes it has prescribed. That has nothing to do with one's personal likes and dislikes in regard to any particular change. It would be impossible, in fact, to devise any set form of public worship for all which will at once fit in with the tastes and moods of each and every individual participating in it. Likes and dislikes vary with different individuals. One thing, however, must be noted here. Changes officially authorised by the bishops of given areas in accordance with principles laid down by the Council and with the approbation of the Holy See constitute an authentic liturgical reform. It would be tendentious to speak of those as "put forward under the guise of liturgical reform." Only unauthorised changes could deserve that description. But no Catholics are obliged to reconcile themselves to those. All have the right to protest against them to their respective bishops, should they occur.

Awareness of God

The Faith of Israel

The Importance of Man

Origin of the Gospels

The Divine Redeemer

The Catholic Church

The Papacy

The Biblical Tradition

The Blessed Virgin Mary

Liturgy and Sacraments

Moral Problems

Final Realities

The Ecumenical Movement

Catholic Apologetics in Question & Answer Form

Awareness of God

The Faith of Israel

The Importance of Man

Origin of the Gospels

The Divine Redeemer

The Catholic Church

The Papacy

The Biblical Tradition

The Blessed Virgin Mary

Liturgy and Sacraments

Moral Problems

Final Realities

The Ecumenical Movement

QUESTIONS IN VOLUME 5

301. If Popes are indeed infallible, the Holy Spirit should have inspired all to vote yes.

302. Granted Papal Infallibility, why does not the Pope exercise this faculty whenever decisions have to be made?

303. You are practically saying that the Pope is not personally infallible.

304. Why all the sifting of evidence and consulting of other bishops, historians, canonists and theologians, who should be listening to his decisions?

305. There must be thousands of tortured minds among Roman Catholics, not believing in the Pope's infallibility but compelled to do so.

306. I have read that the early Christian Fathers knew nothing of Papal Infallibility.

307. If the Catholic Church as such is infallible, why single out the Bishop of Rome as infallible rather than the other Catholic Bishops?

308. How much of Roman Catholic teaching is guaranteed as true by specifically papal definitions of themselves infallible?

309. Have Catholics to believe that the Pope is always infallible when speaking as head of the Church on matters of faith and morals?

310. Surely the Pope is not infallible when expressing merely his personal opinion on religious matters.

311. Did not Cardinal Newman say: "If I had to bring religion into an after-dinner speech, I would drink to the Pope, if you wish - but I would drink to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards?"

312. When has a Catholic the right in conscience to dissent from an authoritative but non-infallible ruling of the Pope on matters of belief or moral conduct?

313. Another Pope, especially one of a different nationality, might think differently from our recent Popes.

314. Do Catholics regard the Bible as the inspired Word of God?

315. Are not Catholics bound to believe the teachings of their Church even where these are not to be found in the Bible?

316. In explaining Christian doctrine, you quote the Bible at times but repeatedly appeal to what tradition teaches and the Church authoritatively declares.

317. At the Second Vatican Council violent dissension on "the Bible and Tradition" was avoided only by the intervention of Pope John XXIII.

318. What exactly was the problem?

319. In what way does the Church retain the unwritten apostolic traditions?

320. Can you provide grounds for believing in the handing on of such apostolic traditions?

321. On what do you base your confidence in such an explanation?

322. I am afraid the Catholic way is not my way of thinking. For me, the Bible interprets itself.

323. To my mind, every believer is able to interpret scripture for himself. It tells us in 2 Tim., 2:15, "Study to show yourself as one approved of God . . . rightly proclaiming the word of truth."

324. Is not the Word of God an empowering, judging and healing Word, telling us we have been unfaithful? And must not the Church respond to this Word?

325. Why is there so much in the Bible that is obscure and difficult to understand?

326. Biblical scholars seem to use expediency and raise the smokescreen of symbolism to do away with the truth as it really is and should still be acknowledged.

327. Does Pope Paul VI himself understand everything in the Bible?

328. If the Pope does not understand everything in the Bible, who does?

329. Why does not the Pope have the Bible written in plain words so that we can all understand everything in it?

330. How are the Church's authoritative interpretations of difficult biblical passages known?

331. My "Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture" says: "There is no official view on any but a minute handful of biblical texts."

332. What are all the biblical texts infallibly interpreted by the Catholic Church?

333. I cannot accept that the Catholic Church is the only one capable of interpreting the Bible.

334. Why did not God make everything in the Bible so clear that no one could mistake its meaning?

335. How do we know the Bible writings, but not others, to be the inspired Word of God?

336. Is it not a vicious circle to accept the Bible on the word of the Church, and then prove the Church from the Bible?

337. Are the Scriptures above the Church, or is the Church above the Scriptures?

338. It is commonly said that Roman Catholics accept, not the teachings of the Bible, but those of their Church.

339. How is reunion possible from the Catholic point of view, since Protestants claim to base their religion on the Bible only?

340. Personally, I believe we get the indwelling of the Holy Spirit only by reading the Bible daily for oneself, and that is good enough for me.

341. Your explanations would seem to discourage rather than to encourage Bible-reading at all.

342. The Lutheran Dr. Oscar Cullmann, an observer at the Vatican Council, expressed disappointment later that the Council had emphasised the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary beyond actual references to her in the Bible - to the detriment of the interests of reunion.

343. Mary was declared "Mother of the Church." Did she become that by her presence with the Apostles on Pentecost Sunday (Acts, 1:14)?

344. What I want is proof that the Marian dogmas defined by the Catholic Church were not new inventions.

345. I have read a book saying that Roman Catholics believe "Mary was the child of an immaculate conception."

346. Do the angel's words to Mary: "Hail, full of grace" (Lk., 1:28) prove the dogma of the Immaculate Conception?

347. Is the Catholic translation of the Angel's salutation to Mary: "Hail, full of grace" accurate?

348. The Protestant Authorised Version has: "Hail, thou that art highly favoured."

349. Was not the Catholic translation an exaggeration to provide New Testament proof of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary?

350. The new English "Jerusalem Bible" translates Lk., 1:28 as "Rejoice, so highly favoured" instead of "Hail, full of grace."

351. The English "Jerusalem Bible" explains in a footnote: '"So highly favoured', that is, as to become the Mother of the Messiah."

352. Does the new English "Jerusalem Bible's" translation, instead of "full of grace", remove a New Testament proof of Mary's Immaculate Conception?