Got a quote? Precise language matters in these things.
Riiiiight. Suuuure he does.
"16. St. Jerome's teaching on this point serves to confirm and illustrate what our predecessor of happy memory, Leo Xlll, declared to be the ancient and traditional belief of the Church touching the absolute immunity of Scripture from error:
"So far is it from being the case that error can be compatible with inspiration, that, on the contrary, it not only of its very nature precludes the presence of error, but as necessarily excludes it and forbids it as God, the Supreme Truth, necessarily cannot be the Author of error.
"17. Then, after giving the definitions of the Councils of Florence and Trent, confirmed by the Council of the Vatican, Pope Leo continues:
"'Consequently it is not to the point to suggest that the Holy Spirit used men as His instruments for writing, and that therefore, while no error is referable to the primary Author, it may well be due to the inspired authors themselves. For by supernatural power the Holy Spirit so stirred them and moved them to write, so assisted them as they wrote, that their minds could rightly conceive only those and all those things which He himself bade them conceive; only such things could they faithfully commit to writing and aptly express with unerring truth; else God would not be the Author of the entirety of Sacred Scripture.'[42]
"18. But although these words of our predecessor leave no room for doubt or dispute, it grieves us to find that not only men outside, but even children of the Catholic Church -- nay, what is a peculiar sorrow to us, even clerics and professors of sacred learning -- who in their own conceit either openly repudiate or at least attack in secret the Church's teaching on this point.
"We warmly commend, of course, those who, with the assistance of critical methods, seek to discover new ways of explaining the difficulties in Holy Scripture, whether for their own guidance or to help others. But we remind them that they will only come to miserable grief if they neglect our predecessor's injunctions and overstep the limits set by the Fathers.
"19. Yet no one can pretend that certain recent writers really adhere to these limitations. For while conceding that inspiration extends to every phrase -- and, indeed, to every single word of Scripture -- yet, by endeavoring to distinguish between what they style the primary or religious and the secondary or profane element in the Bible, they claim that the effect of inspiration -- namely, absolute truth and immunity from error -- are to be restricted to that primary or religious element. Their notion is that only what concerns religion is intended and taught by God in Scripture, and that all the rest -- things concerning "profane knowledge," the garments in which Divine truth is presented -- God merely permits, and even leaves to the individual author's greater or less knowledge. Small wonder, then, that in their view a considerable number of things occur in the Bible touching physical science, history and the like, which cannot be reconciled with modern progress in science!
"20. Some even maintain that these views do not conflict with what our predecessor laid down since -- so they claim -- he said that the sacred writers spoke in accordance with the external -- and thus deceptive -- appearance of things in nature. But the Pontiff's own words show that this is a rash and false deduction. For sound philosophy teaches that the senses can never be deceived as regards their own proper and immediate object. Therefore, from the merely external appearance of things -- of which, of course, we have always to take account as Leo Xlll, following in the footsteps of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, most wisely remarks -- we can never conclude that there is any error in Sacred Scripture.
"21. Moreover, our predecessor, sweeping aside all such distinctions between what these critics are pleased to call primary and secondary elements, says in no ambiguous fashion that "those who fancy that when it is a question of the truth of certain expressions we have not got to consider so much what God said as why He said it," are very far indeed from the truth. He also teaches that Divine inspiration extends to every part of the Bible without the slightest exception, and that no error can occur in the inspired text: 'It would be wholly impious to limit inspiration to certain portions only of Scripture or to concede that the sacred authors themselves could have erred.'[43]
"22. Those, too, who hold that the historical portions of Scripture do not rest on the absolute truth of the facts but merely upon what they are pleased to term their relative truth, namely, what people then commonly thought, are -- no less than are the aforementioned critics -- out of harmony with the Church's teaching, which is endorsed by the testimony of Jerome and other Fathers. Yet they are not afraid to deduce such views from the words of Leo Xlll on the ground that he allowed that the principles he had laid down touching the things of nature could be applied to historical things as well. Hence they maintain that precisely as the sacred writers spoke of physical things according to appearance, so, too, while ignorant of the facts, they narrated them in accordance with general opinion or even on baseless evidence; neither do they tell us the sources whence they derived their knowledge, nor do they make other peoples' narrative their own. Such views are clearly false, and constitute a calumny on our predecessor. After all, what analogy is there between physics and history? For whereas physics is concerned with "sensible appearances" and must consequently square with phenomena, history on the contrary, must square with the facts, since history is the written account of events as they actually occurred. If we were to accept such views, how could we maintain the truth insisted on throughout Leo Xlll's Encyclical -- viz. that the sacred narrative is absolutely free from error?
"23. And if Leo XIII does say that we can apply to history and cognate subjects the same principles which hold good for science, he yet does not lay this down as a universal law, but simply says that we can apply a like line of argument when refuting the fallacies of adversaries and defending the historical truth of Scripture from their assaults.
"24. Nor do modern innovators stop here: they even try to claim St. Jerome as a patron of their views on the ground that he maintained that historic truth and sequence were not observed in the Bible, "precisely as things actually took place, but in accordance with what men thought at that time," and that he even held that this was the true norm for history.[44] A strange distortion of St. Jerome's words! He does not say that when giving us an account of events the writer was ignorant of the truth and simply adopted the false views then current; he merely says that in giving names to persons or things he followed general custom. Thus the Evangelist calls St. Joseph the father of Jesus, but what he meant by the title "father" here is abundantly clear from the whole context. For St. Jerome "the true norm of history" is this: when it is question of such appellatives (as "father," etc), and when there is no danger or error, then a writer must adopt the ordinary forms of speech simply because such forms of speech are in ordinary use. More than this: Jerome maintains that belief in the Biblical narrative is as necessary to salvation as is belief in the doctrines of the faith; thus in his Commentary on the Epistle to Philemon he says:
"'What I mean is this: Does any man believe in God the Creator? He cannot do so unless he first believe that the things written of God's Saints are true.' He then gives examples from the Old Testament, and adds: 'Now unless a man believes all these and other things too which are written of the Saints he cannot believe in the God of the Saints.'[45]
"25. Thus St. Jerome is in complete agreement with St. Augustine, who sums up the general belief of Christian antiquity when he says:
"'Holy Scripture is invested with supreme authority by reason of its sure and momentous teachings regarding the faith. Whatever, then, it tells us of Enoch, Elias and Moses -- that we believe. We do not, for instance, believe that God's Son was born of the Virgin Mary simply because He could not otherwise have appeared in the flesh and 'walked amongst men' -- as Faustus would have it -- but we believe it simply because it is written in Scripture; and unless we believe in Scripture we can neither be Christians nor be saved.'[46]
"26. Then there are other assailants of Holy Scripture who misuse principles -- which are only sound, if kept within due bounds -- in order to overturn the fundamental truth of the Bible and thus destroy Catholic teaching handed down by the Fathers. If Jerome were living now he would sharpen his keenest controversial weapons against people who set aside what is the mind and judgment of the Church, and take too ready a refuge in such notions as "implicit quotations" or "pseudo-historical narratives," or in "kinds of literature" in the Bible such as cannot be reconciled with the entire and perfect truth of God's word, or who suggest such origins of the Bible as must inevitably weaken -- if not destroy -- its authority."
--Spiritus Paraclitus, Pope Benedict XV, 9/15/1920
"When, subsequently, some Catholic writers, in spite of this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine, by which such divine authority is claimed for the 'entire books with all their parts' as to secure freedom from any error whatsoever, ventured to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals, and to regard other matters, whether in the domain of physical science or history, as 'obiter dicta' and - as they contended - in no wise connected with faith, Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, published on November 18 in the year 1893, justly and rightly condemned these errors and safe-guarded the studies of the Divine Books by most wise precepts and rules."
--Pope Pius XII, Divine Afflante Spiritu, 1943
Then of course there are the decrees of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in the early years of the twentieth century (when the PBC was a magisterial body), which so many Catholics are embarrassed by today (the condemnation of the errancy of obiter dicta, affirmation of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch).
I'm sorry I got into this again on this thread. I've learned long ago that there's no need trying to reason with the vast majority of Catholics on this subject, since "Biblical literalism" is considered by them a mark of Protestantism and therefore "un-Catholic." But as these encyclicals make clear, you are at least consistent enough to reject the literal interpretation of them as well.
The stubbornness with which most of you defend evolution and higher criticism is such that one can only conclude that they have achieved a quasi dogmatic status in contemporary Catholicism.