This is meant as a nuance to Principle #8:
Given two documents of the Magisterium, the later document has more weight.
The reason for this is that, given earlier document A and later document B speaking about the same subject, it is impossible that A meant to interpret B but almost equally impossible that B did not mean to interpret A. But we have to be careful: this principle assumes the case of a document-to-document comparison and would obviously be nuanced in there were thirty earlier documents compared to one later text. And we’ll need an additional principle…but see the next post.
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Pingback: Principle #11 « Magisterial Interpretation
I think this principle needs to be understood in the sense of “other things being equally.” It doesn’t seem correct to say, for example, that a general audience of Pope John Paul II has greater weight than an encyclical from a previous pope, and given the different nature of the two documents, principle 11 may be more relevant than principle 10 to apparent discrepancies between the two–unless pope John Paul II explicitly took up not only the same theme, but the wording of the previous encyclical to interpret it.