SECT. 15.—GRADUAL PROGRESS IN THE TRANSMISSION OF REVELATION—APOSTOLIC DEPOSIT: ECCLESIASTICAL TRADITION: RULE OF FAITH
I. The office-holders in the Teaching Apostolate form one unbroken chain, derived from God, and consequently the doctrine announced by them at any given time is a continuation and a development of the doctrine originally revealed, and is invested with the same Divine character Jesus Christ, the immediate Envoy of His Father, announced what He had heard from the Father; the Apostles, the immediate envoys of Christ, preached what they had heard from Christ and the Holy Ghost; the successors of the Apostles, the inheritors of the apostolic mission, in their turn taught and still teach the doctrine received from the Apostles, and thus Revelation has been handed down from generation to generation without a single break.
The transmission and the teaching of Revelation are really one and the same act under two different aspects. Whenever the Word of God is announced, it is also transmitted, and it cannot be transmitted without being announced in some form or other. Thus transmission and publication are not two acts of a distinct nature, as they would be if Revelation was handed down only by means of a written document, or on merely historical evidence. The Council of Trent tells us that Traditions, “dictated by the Holy Ghost, have reached us from the Apostles, handed down as it were by hand,” and it speaks of “Traditions preserved by continual succession in the Catholic Church” (sess. iv). The transmission is the work of living, authorized officials, who hand down Revelation to the lawful heirs of their office. We must, however, distinguish between the authenticity and the authority of the act of transmission. When, for instance, a council makes the belief in some dogma obligatory, this act contains a twofold element: it bears authentic witness to the existence of the dogma in the Apostolic Deposit, and it authoritatively imposes Faith in that dogma. The authentic testimony belongs to the whole Church, which, either in teaching or in professing belief, witnesses to the existence of certain
