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The Papal Encyclicals: 1939–1958 is unavailable, but you can change that!

For nearly 2,000 years the bishops of Rome have addressed theological topics of especially timely concern through the circulation of papal letters. These letters became known as encyclicals, and since the later eighteenth century have become increasingly important in the popes’ exercise of their teaching office. In the mid-nineteenth century, the encyclical letter began to take on its...

the Holy Spirit, they rightly observe that, impelled by the divine motion, he so uses his faculties and powers, that from the book composed by him all may easily infer “the special character of each one and, as it were, his personal traits.”28 Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had
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