Leo XIII, 1878-1903

1951. The books, all and entire, which the Church accepts as sacred and canonical, with all their parts, have been written at the dictation of the Holy Spirit; so far is it from the possibility of any error being present to divine inspiration, that it itself of itself not only excludes all error, but excludes it and rejects it as necessarily as it is necessary that God, the highest Truth, be the author of no error whatsoever.

1952. This is the ancient and uniform faith of the Church, defined also by solemn opinion at the Councils of Florence [see n. 706] and of Trent [see n. 783 ff.], finally confirmed and more expressly declared at the Vatican Council, by which it was absolutely declared: "The books of the Old and New Testament . . . have God as their author" [see n. 1787]. Therefore, it matters not at all that the Holy Spirit took men as instruments for the writing, as if anything false might have slipped, not indeed from the first Author, but from the inspired writers. For, by supernatural power He so roused and moved them to write, He stood so near them, that they rightly grasped in mind all those things, and those only, which He Himself ordered, and willed faithfully to write them down, and expressed them properly with infallible truth; otherwise, He Himself would not be the author of all Sacred Scripture. . . . And so utterly convinced were all the Fathers and Doctors that the holy works, which were published by the hagiographers, are free of every error, that they were very eager, no less skillfully than reverently, to arrange and reconcile those not infrequent passages which seemed to offer something contrary and at variance (they are almost the very passages which are now thrown up to us under the name of the new science); and they professed unanimously that these books, both in whole and in part, were equally of divine inspiration, and that God Himself, speaking through the sacred authors, could have set down nothing at all at variance with the truth.

Let what the same Augustine wrote to Jerome sum this up: “. . . If I shall meet anything in these works which seems contrary to truth, I shall not hesitate to believe anything other than that the text is false, or that the translator did not understand what was said, or that I did not in the least understand.” ¹

1953. . . . For many objections from every kind of teaching have for long been persistently hurled against Scripture, which now, quite dead, have fallen into disuse; likewise, at times not a few interpretations have been placed on certain passages of Scripture (not properly pertinent to the rule of faith and morals) in which a more careful investigation has seen the meaning more accurately. For, surely, time destroys the falsities of opinions, but "truth remaineth and groweth stronger forever and ever." ²