Popular apologist Jimmy Akin (appropriately distinguished by the fact that he sports a cowboy hat) has been propagating a serious error concerning the authority of the Fathers of the Church. He has been claiming that because Trent’s Decree Concerning The Edition And Use Of The Sacred Books was issued on the same day as the Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (8th April 1546) it should be taken as a disciplinary decree and therefore its requirement that the Scriptures never be interpreted ‘contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers’ should be taken as purely disciplinary. Furthermore, he opines, because the 1983 Code of Canon Law makes no reference to this ‘rule’ it is lapsed and no longer binds the faithful. The motive for this preposterous claim appears to be the desire to unburden himself of unfashionable teachings of the Fathers and to clear the ground for ultramontane magisterial positivism (especially in regard to the interpretation of Genesis).

The problem for Mr Akin is that, even granting his claims about the disciplinary character of the Decree Concerning The Edition And Use Of The Sacred Books, the requirement that the Scriptures never be interpreted ‘contrary to the unanimous teaching of the Fathers’ is not confined to this decree. Exactly the same requirement in included in the Creed of Pius IV or Professio Fidei Tridentina the Church’s rule of faith for four centuries proclaimed at the end of Trent by Pius IV and solemnly affirmed not once but twice by Vatican I. This dogmatic and irreformable statement of the ‘true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved’ resoundingly affirms that:

“I also accept the Holy Scripture according to that sense which holy mother the Church hath held, and doth hold, and to whom it belongeth to judge the true sense and interpretations of the Scriptures. Neither will I ever take and interpret them otherwise than according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.”

The authority of the Fathers, which reaches its highest point in their unanimous interpretation of scripture, is the guarantee of the unchanging sense of the Church’s teaching delivered once and for all to the Apostles and preserved inviolate until the Lord’s return. As Vatican I put it,

“For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated. Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy mother Church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.”