Pius X, 1903-1914

not accept this with that strictness with which the theologians have accepted it, who have established the notion and the number of the sacraments.

2049. 49. As the Christian Supper gradually assumed the nature of a liturgical action, those who were accustomed to preside at the Supper acquired the sacerdotal character.

2050. 50. The elders who fulfilled the function of watching over gatherings of Christians were instituted by the apostles as presbyters or bishops to provide for the necessary arrangement of the increasing communities, not properly for perpetuating the apostolic mission and power.

2051. 51. Matrimony could not have emerged as a sacrament of the New Law in the Church, since in order that matrimony might be held to be a sacrament, it was necessary that a full theological development of the doctrine on grace and the sacraments take place first.

2052. 52. It was foreign to the mind of Christ to establish a Church as a society upon earth to endure for a long course of centuries; rather, in the mind of Christ the Kingdom of Heaven together with the end of the world was to come presently.

2053. 53. The organic constitution of the Church is not immutable; but Christian society, just as human society, is subject to perpetual evolution.

2054. 54. The dogmas, the sacraments, the hierarchy, as far as pertains both to the notion and to the reality, are nothing but interpretations and the evolution of the Christian intelligence, which have increased and perfected the little germ latent in the Gospel.

2055. 55. Simon Peter never even suspected that the primacy of the Church was entrusted to him by Christ.

2056. 56. The Roman Church became the head of all the churches not by the ordinances of divine Providence, but purely by political factors.

2057. 57. The Church shows herself to be hostile to the advances of the natural and theological sciences.

2058. 58. Truth is no more immutable than man himself, inasmuch as it is evolved with him, in him, and through him.

2059. 59. Christ did not teach a defined body of doctrine applicable to all times and to all men, but rather began a religious movement adapted, or to be adapted to different times and places.

2060. 60. Christian doctrine in its beginnings was Judaic, but through successive evolutions it became first Pauline, then Johannine, and finally Hellenic and universal.

2061. 61. It can be said without paradox that no chapter of Scripture, from the first of Genesis to the last of the Apocalypse, contains doctrine entirely identical with that which the Church hands down on the same subject, and so no chapter of Scripture has the same sense for the critic as for the theologian.