In light of Pope Leo XIV publishing the first encyclical of his pontificate, “Magnifica Humanitas,” Father Dave welcomes church historian Mike Aquilina to unpack the importance of papal encyclicals through the years.
They first discuss the earliest days of encyclicals in the Church. “Saint Peter wrote two books of the New Testament. We can look at those as early papal encyclicals, because they were written to the whole Church,” Mike begins, and notes the nuance between divine Scripture and other kinds of encyclicals. “Encyclical comes from the Latin word ‘encyclius,’ so it’s a circular letter, circulated among the bishops…Any bishop could write one. It was traditional, for example, for the bishop of Alexandria to announce the date of Easter in the coming year, because Alexandria had the best astronomers, so they knew where the stars were [to determine the date]. The bishop of Alexandria traditionally did that in his festal letter, which was an encyclical letter, and he did it every year.”
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Mike expands on how these writings fall into the three primary sources of what’s called the “deposit of faith” in the Catholic Church: Scripture, tradition, and magisterium. “We get these categories from Saint Irenaeus of Leon, who was writing in the 100s; this is very early in. He talks about what’s been passed down, and how we know these things are traditional within the Church,” Mike says, “[Saint Irenaeus] said the difference between us and the heretics is that the heretics have secret teachings and writings that they don’t show to everybody. Everything we do is out in the open, and it’s public, and it’s solid.”
“You can hold bishops accountable to everything that’s gone before by everyone who’s held their office,” Mike continues. “You can hold them accountable to what you find in the Scriptures, and at the same time, they have the authority to speak and teach about those Scriptures and about the tradition of the Church, which they are charged with passing on. We have these categories appearing already in the 100s, and it’s still what we teach today.”
Father Dave says, “I noticed that certainly in modern-day papal encyclicals, popes will go out of their way to footnote and refer to previous sources. Is that an effort to kind of situate the words that I’m speaking right now in the entire course of the tradition?”
Mike responds, “Any bishop living in, say, the fourth century could, would, and should be held accountable to the bishops who lived in the centuries before that. The popes who are living today have an awful lot to be accountable to. They have to show that they’ve done their homework and that what they’re saying today jibes with all the teachings of their predecessors.”
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He notes that while there are no additions to Scripture, the Church still develops its teachings. “In the fourth century, Saint Basil talked about the development of doctrine. Already, he’s trying to explain this phenomenon that revelation’s over and it ceased with the death of the last Apostles,” Mike says.
“We’re not going to hear new [Scripture], but we need to grow deeper in our understanding of it, in our application of the principles of revelation, and the truths of revelation to our current situation; that’s a never-ending process. We’re always going to be learning and going deeper into the mysteries of what God’s revealed to us in Jesus Christ.”
