3īut what, exactly, was supposed to have been so radically new about Divino afflante Spiritu? It is significant that this characterization of Pius XII’s encyclical seems not to have been expounded publicly before his death in 1958. After a period of sometimes tense debate within the Church regarding the validity of these new and even `revolutionary’ orientations, Pius XII’s `liberating’ vision, we are told, was vindicated triumphantly at Vatican Council II with the promulgation of the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum.
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Plus X in 1907, until Pius XII supposedly flung wide the gates of free enquiry and opened the door to `scientific’ biblical studies with his 1943 encyclical Divino af flante Spiritu. The vast heritage of biblical exegesis and commentaries produced by the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church over nineteen centuries tends to be regarded mainly as a collection of pious but “pre-critical” museum-pieces of little practical use to the modem student of Scripture and, although Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical Providentissimus Deus of 1893 is recognized as having begun a new chapter by prompting a more serious Catholic response to the challenges resulting from nineteenth-century scientific and historical research, scholarly progress is said to have been generally suffocated by the `anti-modernist reaction’ of Church authorities initiated by Pope St. The Revisionist Reading of Divino afflante SpirituĪmong exegetes and teachers of Scripture over the last three or four decades, it has become a commonplace observation that the year 1943 marked a watershed in the history of the Catholic Church’s approach to the Bible. We will therefore examine Pope Benedict’s encyclical, and the reasons why it has lately fallen into oblivion and even disrepute, in the wider context of the recent history of Catholic biblical studies-and, in particular, of the very one-sided version of that history which, although it has reigned practically unquestioned among Catholic Scripture scholars since the 1960s, stands in need of critical examination.Ī. In spite of this currently fashionable disqualifying of Spiritus Paraclitus-or perhaps because of it-its message has arguably never been more relevant than it is now. The impact of the encyclical of Pope Benedict XV was stifling. In its reaction to the Modernism of the early decades of the century, this encyclical developed a negative approach to Scripture, insisting on its inerrancy and, in effect, denying that one had to interpret the Bible according to its literary forms. If we are grateful today for the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII on biblical studies, we have to recall that between them there also appeared the encyclical of Pope Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus,… commemorating the fifteenth centenary of the death of St. He does not find Benedict XV’s encyclical worthy of mention in the main text of his historical account of the Catholic biblical movement, but writes in a footnote:
Fitzmyer, in a recently published commentary on the 1993 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, feels it appropriate to express quite the opposite of gratitude for Spiritus Paraclitus. Indeed, on the rare occasions when it is remembered at all by today’s most prominent Scripture scholars, the context usually appears to be one of disdain for its doctrine and regret for its allegedly negative effect on biblical scholarship. The Catholic press made little if any mention of the anniversary of Spiritus Paraclitus, which in truth is now an almost forgotten encyclical. 1The Pontiff took advantage of that landmark centenary for laying down in this encyclical further norms and guidelines for exegetes, a quarter-century after the promulgation of the great magna carta of modem Catholic biblical studies, Leo XIII’s Encyclical Providentissimus Deus (November 18, 1893).
September 1995 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of a highly significant document of the Catholic Church’s Magisterium: the Encyclical Letter Spiritus Paraclitus, issued by Pope Benedict XV on September 15, 1920, to mark the 1500th anniversary of the death of the greatest Scripture scholar of the ancient Church, St.
Was Spiritus Paraclitus Rendered Obsolete by Divino Afflante Spiritu?
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