BIBLICAL CRITICISM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11855, 6 January 1902, Page 5

BIBLICAL CRITICISM.

ROMAN CATHOLIC COMMISSION APPOINTED. By Telegraph.—Press Association.—Copyright, London, January 3. The Tablet, the well-known Roman Catholic newspaper, reports that the Pope has appointed a Pontifical Commission to consider all questions and difficulties submitted by Roman Catholic scholars in connection with their Biblical studies. Cardinal Parocchi, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, has been appointed president of the Commission.

The action of the Pope in setting up the above commission is apparently one of the outcomes of the liberal movement within* the Roman Catholic Church which has made itself felt both in England and America recently. In December, 1900, the English v;: Roman Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral condemning the movement, and pointing out the relation of pride to unbelief, the evils of indiscriminate reading, and the "paring down of the supernatural doctrines of faith." Replying to the patsoral in the Pilot a Roman Catholio cosrespondent stated that "it is in the domain of Scripture that the Esoteric Catholic most widely departs from the current teaching of the Church. Anyone at all acquainted with intelligent Catholics knows that they I arc deeply distressed, not merely at the outi come of recent Biblical research, but far i more at the attitude taken up towards it by ! their ecclesiastical rulers. These latter, with I-what motive I cannot understand, are ap- ! patently, resolved to allow no open confes- | sion of opinion which is in any degree in disaccord, with the current teaching of theologians, perhaps I should say, with the tra- . ditional teaching of the Church. It is con- ' oeivehle that thoy do not fully fathom the ; significance of the discovories resulting from improved scientific,. textual, and historical criticism ; it is also conceivable that they do fathom it, but find themselves unable to see in what direction they can open the barriers of their authoritative pronouncements to allow tho introduction into the Church of j. any of these widely-accepted results,"-