offensive to pious ears
offensive to pious ears adjective: describing a doctrine or proposition that is not heretical, but formulated improperly or ambiguously and hence liable to cause scandal. A formal censure.
Adjective
offensive to pious ears
- Describing a doctrine or proposition that is not heretical, but formulated improperly or ambiguously and hence liable to cause scandal. A formal censure.
- And Bishop Ullathorne concluded by condemning the journal as “containing propositions which are respectively subversive of the faith, heretical, approaching to heresy, erroneous, derogatory to the teaching of the Church, and offensive to pious ears.”1910, William John Sparrow-Simpson, Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility, page 121
- It is therefore impossible from Exsurge Domine alone to determine whether proposition 36 is condemned as heretical or merely as “offensive to pious ears.”1969, Harry J. McSorley, Luther: Right or Wrong? An Ecumenical-Theological Study of Luther’s Major Work, The Bondage of the Will, page 252
Origin of offensive to pious ears
Calque of Ecclesiastical Latin piārum aurium offēnsīvus.
Questions about offensive to pious ears
- What does offensive to pious ears mean?
- Offensive to pious ears means describing a doctrine or proposition that is not heretical, but formulated improperly or ambiguously and hence liable to cause scandal. A formal censure.
- What part of speech is offensive to pious ears?
- Offensive to pious ears is an adjective.
Words near offensive to pious ears in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: offensive to pious ears (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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