Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus II (Pars Altera): Demonstratio Catholica

For brighter than light are the words by which Christ promises to the teaching office of the Church His perennial assistance, that it may teach the whole world all days everything whatsoever He Himself commanded,¹ and likewise the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church into all truth,² namely revealed truth. Whatever therefore has been formally revealed is the object of infallibility, whether those things are contained in the deposit explicitly or implicitly.

1. Explicitly revealed are those things which are set forth in the deposit not only as to concept, but as to their proper term, e.g.: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth;"³ "And the Word was made flesh."⁴ These, since they were revealed with such clarity, could never be unknown in the Church, and hence from the very first centuries they had to be proposed to the faithful by an explicit, constant and universal preaching. Concerning these indeed that well-known canon of Vincent of Lérins holds most of all: "In the catholic Church itself great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all."⁵

2. Implicitly revealed are those things which are set forth in the deposit not indeed under their proper term, but nevertheless as to concept or sense, e.g., that in Christ there are two wills; that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. These, since they conduce to a fuller and deeper understanding of revelation, were not immediately understood and preached in the primitive Church, but were believed only by implicit faith. In the course of the centuries, however, as theological science advanced, controversies arose, and the Holy Spirit guided the Church, the implicitly revealed and believed truths could and can be gradually unfolded by the infallible magisterium and at length definitively proposed.⁶

Hence it is clear that the deposit of faith, although it admits of no increase in itself, nevertheless admits of progress with respect to us. On this matter Vincent of Lérins discourses excellently: "But perhaps someone will say: Shall there then be no progress of religion in the Church? Let there certainly be, and the greatest. For who is that man so envious of men, so hateful to God, as to try to forbid it? But yet in such a way that it be a true progress of faith, not a change. For it pertains to progress that each thing be amplified in itself; but to change, that something be turned from one thing into another. Let the understanding, knowledge and wisdom both of individuals and of all, both of one man and of the whole Church, grow therefore and advance much and vehemently through the stages of ages and centuries, but only in its own kind, namely in the same dogma ... Let the religion of souls imitate the manner of bodies, which, although in the process of years they unfold and develop their numbers, yet remain the same as they were."⁷ Therefore the revealed truths entrusted to the infallible magisterium of the Church are not like stones, but like seeds, whose innate powers and virtues must day by day be unfolded and whose fruits set forth. However they are unfolded and set forth, the same apostolic deposit remains, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared by the Church.

Corollary. From what has been said it follows that in the Christian economy there is no place for a history of revelation. The history of revelation obtained until the end of the apostolic age, since throughout the whole Old Testament, from the first beginning of revelation up to Christ and the apostles, new revelations continually accrued to the old; from then on, however, it no longer obtains, since the deposit of revelation remains objectively closed by the death of the last apostle. Since nevertheless the apostolic deposit can and must be more and more unfolded and proposed in the course of time, in the Christian economy there is also a history of dogmas, i.e., a history of the unfolding and proposing of the revealed truths. The dogmas themselves, however, i.e., the truths once definitively proposed by the Church, exclude historical progress or the so-called "evolution" just as revelation itself does. Hence the Vatican Council: "For the doctrine of the faith which God revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention, to human minds to be perfected, but has been handed to the spouse of Christ as a divine deposit, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly declared. Hence, too, that sense of the sacred dogmas is perpetually to be retained which holy Mother Church once declared, nor is it ever to be departed from that sense under the appearance and name of a higher understanding ... If anyone shall say that it is possible that, according to the progress of science, a sense is sometimes to be attributed to the dogmas proposed by the Church other than that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema."⁸ Likewise Pius X rejected the modernists' "fiction of the evolution of dogmas, passing from one sense into another sense, different from that which the Church formerly had".⁹