Friday, April 26, 2024

Auctorem fidei (August 28, 1794) on the Adoration of the Humanity of Christ

 

Paul VI, Constitution Auctorem fidei to All the Faithful, August 28, 1794, re. the Errors of the Synod of Pistoia

 

 

 

Adoration of the Humanity of Christ

 

 

61. The proposition that affirms that “to adore directly the humanity of Christ and all the more any part of his humanity is always to render divine honor to a creature”, insofar as the use of the term “directly” is intended to bring condemnation on the cult of adoration that the faithful direct to the humanity of Christ, as if such an adoration—by which the humanity and the living flesh of Christ is adored, not indeed for its own sake and merely as flesh, but as united to the divinity—were a divine honor paid to a creature and not rather one and the same adoration by which the Word incarnate together with his own flesh is adored <is> false, and deceitful, and detracting from and injurious to the pious and fitting cult rendered and rightly rendered by the faithful to the humanity of Christ.

 

62. The doctrine that rejects devotion to the most Sacred Heart of Jesus among the devotions that it notes as new, erroneous, or at least, dangerous, if the understanding of this devotion is of such a sort as has been approved by the apostolic See, <is> false, rash, dangerous, offensive to pious ears, and injurious to the Apostolic See.

 

63. Likewise, inasmuch as <the Synod> also denounces those who adore the Heart of Jesus because they do not recognize that the most sacred flesh of Jesus or any of his parts or even the whole humanity cannot be adored with the cult of latria when there is a separation of breaking away of the divinity, as if the faithful would adore the Heart of Jesus separating of dividing it from the divinity, when what they adore is the Heart of Jesus, namely, the Heart of the Person of the Word to whom it is inseparably united, in the very manner in which the bloodless body of Christ, during the three days of death, without separation or division form the divinity was worthy of adoration in the tomb, <it is deceitful> and offensive to the faithful who adore the Heart of Christ. (DS 2661)