Posted on 04/07/2005 4:09:47 PM PDT by StoneColdGOP
It seems pretty clear that according to the literal sense of Gen. 2-3, Adam and Eve were created as adults. If anyone had come along at the moment after their creation, and tried to discern how old the world was from their age, he'd have gone 30 years too far back, maybe. Preserving the fact that evolutionary theory, modern geology, etc., are probably correct, is there any reason we couldn't speculate, at least as a possibility, that the earth was also created as an "adult", analogously to the formation of the first man and woman?
Cunning as serpents; innocent as doves.
Not throwing his lot in with the serpents seems to have been Cardinal Law’s failure.
In my time had have had some past dealings with Catholic bureaucracies, most notably an American-based, international catholic media apostolate. While one is given the impression that the good sister is in charge, she is only as informed of the day to day operations as her associates want her to be. The leader has the “vision”, sees the forest so to speak, but it’s the underlings who must tend to the trees. Sometimes we are only as good as those under us. Many, many priests who served under Cardinal Law betrayed him. And these priests had been raised and long participated in the entrenched corrupt bureaucracy of the Archdiocese of Boston. Note how New York, not Boston or even the mother-diocese of Baltimore has been the moral authority in America.
An aside: as a Nutmegger living below the Mason-Dixon, I’ve seen that the fervent faith of Catholics in the Bible Belt which is nothing like the inbred, Easter-Christmas Cultural Catholicism of the Northeast.
Incidentally, Law is not a native Irish son of Bean Town. Cardinal law was born in Mexico to the son of a US Army Colonel. Later he graduated from high school in the US Virgin Islands before attending Harvard. As a newly ordained priest he was assigned to the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson during the height of the Civil Rights era. In the 60’s he was appointed bishop of the still relatively new diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau.
All those who think Law’s banishment to Rome will change anything in the Archdiocese of Boston are mistaken. The one man who now thoroughly grasps what is “wrong”…who now see’s “face to face” the darkness that is in Archdiocese has been exiled to Rome. Those who want Cardinal Law excommunicated or retired are really saying they want to preserve the status quo in Boston. They want the homosexuality and pedophilia to continue.
Nothing will change Archbishop O’Malley because all of the players…all of the Chancellery officers, all the auxiliary bishops, and all of the high-ranking priests who have participated in or collaborated in the real cover-up are still in office. Perhaps more scary still, some of those Aux. Bishops formerly under Law have now been named bishops of other dioceses.
Remember, Boston has consistently voted the Kennedy’s and Kerry’s back into office every four years.
Again, I suggest massnews.com to get the whole story behind what is happening in Boston.
Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Humani Generis
On Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine
12 August, 1950
22. To return, however, to the new opinions mentioned above, a number of things are proposed or suggested by some even against the divine authorship of Sacred Scripture. For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the Vatican Council's definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a human sense of the Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they say is the only infallible meaning, lies hidden. In interpreting Scripture, they will take no account of the analogy of faith and the Tradition of the Church. Thus they judge the doctrine of the Fathers and of the Teaching Church by the norm of Holy Scripture, interpreted by the purely human reason of exegetes, instead of explaining Holy Scripture according to the mind of the Church which Christ Our Lord has appointed guardian and interpreter of the whole deposit of divinely revealed truth.
23. Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church's vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis of the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.
24. Everyone sees how foreign all this is to the principles and norms of interpretation rightly fixed by our predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII in his Encyclical "Providentissimus Deus," and Benedict XV in the Encyclical "Spiritus Paraclitus," as also by Ourselves in the Encyclical "Divino Afflante Spiritu."
38. Just as in the biological and anthropological sciences, so also in the historical sciences there are those who boldly transgress the limits and safeguards established by the Church. In a particular way must be deplored a certain too free interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament. Those who favor this system, in order to defend their cause, wrongly refer to the Letter which was sent not long ago to the Archbishop of Paris by the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Studies.[13] This letter, in fact, clearly points out that the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters, (the Letter points out), in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.
39. Therefore, whatever of the popular narrations have been inserted into the Sacred Scriptures must in no way be considered on a par with myths or other such things, which are more the product of an extravagant imagination than of that striving for truth and simplicity which in the Sacred Books, also of the Old Testament, is so apparent that our ancient sacred writers must be admitted to be clearly superior to the ancient profane writers.
God can pretty much do what He wants.
Agreed!
I notice that you posted this to me rather than to the Catholics who are defending evolution and the documentary hypothesis on this thread. How come Catholic inerrantists spend all their time trying to convince non-Catholics that the Catholic Church subscribes to Scriptural inerrancy instead of confronting the majority Catholic "errantists" who are causing this alleged "misperception" of the Church's position???
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