The Pope And Climate Change, The Pontifical Academy Of The Sciences

The meeting of movers and shakers at the Vatican in Rome brings to mind aspects of the Roman Catholic Church's relationship with ideas in the past.

 

"In AD 340 St. Cyril of Jerusalem had reasoned that what all men believe must be true, and ever since then the purity of the faith had derived from its wholeness, from the conviction, as expressed by an early Jesuit, that all who worshiped were united in 'one sacramental system under the government of the Roman Pontiff'. Anyone not a member of the Church was to be cast out of this life, and more important, of the next. It was consignment to the worst fate imaginable, like being exiled from an ancient German tribe--'to be given forth,' in the pagan Teutonic phrase 'to be a wolf in holy places.' The faithless were doomed, the Fifth Lateran Council ((1512-1517) reaffirmed Saint Cyprian's third-century dictum 'Nulla salus extra ecclesiam'--'Outside the church there is no salvation.' Any other finding would have been inconceivable.

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'The Catholic Church holds it better' wrote a Roman theologian, 'that the entire population of the world should die of starvation in extreme agony . . . than that of one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin.' In the words of one pope, ' The Church is independent of any earthly power, not merely in regard to her lawful end and purpose, but also in regard to whatever means she may deem suitable and necessary to attain them.' Another pope, agreeing, declared that God had made the Vatican "a sharer in the divine magistracy, and granted her, by special privilege, immunity from error.' Even to 'appeal from the living voice of the Church was 'a treason', wrote a cardinal, 'because that living voice is supreme; and to appeal from that supreme voice is also a heresy   , because that voice, by divine assistance, is infallible.' A fellow cardinal put it even more clearly: 'The Church is not susceptible of being reformed in her doctrines. The Church is the work of an Incarnate God. Like alll God's works, it is perfect. It is , therefore, incapable of reform."

William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, Portrait of an Age, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1993.