Editors note: Other than being a good (but not by any means perfect) teaching document, it also addresses a great many of the controversial and confusing things Pope Francis has said, and so far, adamantly refused to clarify.
“The Church of the living God – the pillar and the bulwark
of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15)
Declaration of the truths
relating to some of the most common errors
in the life of the Church of our time
The Fundamentals of Faith
1. The right meaning of the expressions ‘living tradition,’
‘living Magisterium,’ ‘hermeneutic of continuity,’ and
‘development of doctrine’ includes the truth that
whatever new insights may be expressed regarding
the deposit of faith, nevertheless they cannot be
contrary to what the Church has always proposed
in the same dogma, in the same sense, and in
the same meaning (see First Vatican Council,
Dei Filius, sess. 3, c. 4: “in eodem dogmate,
eodem sensu, eademque sententia”).
2. “The meaning of dogmatic formulas remains
ever true and constant in the Church,
even when it is expressed with greater clarity
or more developed. The faithful therefore
must shun the opinion, first, that dogmatic
formulas (or some category of them)
cannot signify truth in a determinate way,
but can only offer changeable approximations
to it, which to a certain extent distort
or alter it; secondly, that these formulas
signify the truth only in an indeterminate way,
this truth being like a goal that is
constantly being sought by means
of such approximations. Those who hold
such an opinion do not avoid dogmatic relativism
and they corrupt the concept of the Church’s
infallibility relative to the truth to be taught
or held in a determinate way.
” (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Declaration “Mysterium Ecclesiae” in defense
of the Catholic doctrine on the Church
against certain errors of the present day, 5).
Doug Lawrence's Catholic Site 