Father Raymond Brown, writing in
the Jerome Biblical Commentary (the
best single guide available for Scripture study), categorically asserts that
“the Church has the power to determine infallibly the meaning of Scripture in
matters of faith and morals”; however, he immediately goes on to note that this
never involves technicalities like authorship or dating of a book. In point of
fact, the Church exercises great restraint in offering authoritative
interpretations of individual pericopes (texts); fewer than a dozen such
instances can be pointed to in her two-thousand-year history, most of them
at the Council of Trent. (Peter M. J. Stravinskas, The Catholic Church and the Bible [rev
ed.; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996], 15, emphasis in bold added)
