Pope Pius Xiii Quotes

Dermot found me; bad news inexorably does. Let me reiterate, bumping into Pope Pius XIII would have surprised me less. In fact, His Infallibility would have blended in better

How could it be that Theophilus, one of the earliest Christian apologists, wrote nearly 30,000 words about Christianity without once mentioning Jesus Christ? How come the name "Jesus Christ," in fact, doesn't appear in any Greek or Latin author until after the Council of Nicaea? Why was it that the only near-contemporary account that mentioned Christ, a suspiciously precise paragraph known as the Testimonium Flavianum, in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, had been proved to be a patent insertion into that historical narrative? How could Jesus have been born in 1 A.D. when the Gospels say he was born before Herod the Great died — and King Herod's death could be pinpointed to 4 B.C.? Even Philip Cardinal Vasta, now known to the world as Pope Pius XIII, had lamented that the greatest obstacle for spreading the Catholic faith today was that the historical existence of Jesus could no longer be made credible.

In 1879, the English theologian John Henry Newman addressed “liberalism in religion” in his so-called “Biglietto Speech,” given in Rome on the occasion of his being named a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. His analysis of the subject—the “one great mischief” that he had resisted for fifty years—remains unsurpassed.4 The directness of Newman’s assault on liberal religion surprised many people. He had been seen as ill at ease with the Catholic Church’s direction during the pontificate of Leo’s predecessor, Pius IX, and his misgivings about the opportuneness of the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) were well known. But those who had followed Newman’s thought over the course of his career would have recognized the opposition to liberalism that had been there from the beginning. In his Biglietto Speech, Newman identified a number of doctrines of liberal religion: (1) “that there is no positive truth in religion,” (2) “that one creed is as good as another,” (3) that no religion can be recognized as true for “all are matters of opinion,” (4) that “revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective faith, not miraculous,” and (5) that “it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.

Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Divinum Illud Munus, spoke beautifully of the invocation of the Divine Paraclete,