“What is Scripture, if not a letter from Almighty God?
The Lord of men and of angels, has sent you His letters for your life’s advantage–
and yet you neglect to read them eagerly!
Study them, I beg you, and meditate daily on the words of your creator.
Learn the heart of God in the words of God.”
(Pope St. Gregory the Great, c. 540-604)

“And such is the force and power of the Word of God that it can serve the Church as her support and vigor
and the children of the Church as strength for their faith, food for the soul,
and a pure and lasting font of spiritual life.”
Hence “access to Sacred Scripture ought to be open wide to the Christian faithful.”
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, 131; Dei Verbum, 21-22)

 

My journey toward the Catholic Church, as I noted in Part One, led me to the joyful discovery that love of Scripture and love of Catholic faith go hand in hand, that Catholics can be Bible Christians. I also came to realize, sadly, that not all Catholics seem to agree with that conclusion; and I’m pretty certain that most Protestants do not. Among both Catholics and non-Catholics, however, reservations about putting ‘Catholic’ and ‘Bible’ in the same sentence are based on faulty assumptions.

In the earlier piece, I identified some of the myths many non-Catholics believe about Catholics being Bible Christians and exposed a number of failures in those perceptions. This is not to imply that all Protestant doubts about Catholic devotion to the Bible derive from prejudice. In fact, Catholics themselves are sometimes guilty of fueling Protestant apprehensions, in ways that reveal some of their own false ideas about what it means to be Catholic. We will come to these in a moment, but the point is this: Non-Catholics are not to blame for opinions they form from the failure of many Catholics actually to be Bible Christians. This does not describe all Catholics of course, nor, as we shall see, do such failures reflect a systemic flaw in the Church’s actual position. But even among Catholics who understand and embrace the Church’s unwavering testimony to the supremacy and centrality of Scripture and who are not laggards in taking the Bible seriously, there exists a tendency to feel insecure about identifying themselves as Bible Christians. More often than not this stems from a certain faulty self-perception vis-à-vis non-Catholics, which amounts to believing a myth of a different kind. It is to this assortment of issues that we turn in Part Two.

Getting It Wrong

To begin, it is not uncommon for Catholics to think of the Bible as a Protestant book, and to regard its study as a Protestant activity. “Protestants have their Bible, and we have our Tradition,” as one lifelong Catholic expressed it to my daughter. Or again, “Protestants might be able to recite Bible verses by memory, but we Catholics know all the Mass prayers by heart.” Then there are those who wonder whether or not Catholics are really supposed to read and study the Bible, since, in their understanding, it’s the role of the Magisterium¹ simply to tell us everything we need to know. Some Catholics are of the mind that the Church actually cautions against personal Bible study, warning that it’s better for ordinary people not to touch the Bible lest they mishandle and misinterpret it. For still others, the Mass readings, the priest’s homilies, and the Scripture citations in the Catechism are sufficient; there’s no need for any more Bible than that (presumably, knowing just enough for our salvation relieves any need for loving God “with all [our] mind”). As well, there are Catholics who, like certain groups within Protestantism, regard intellectual engagement or studied understanding of the Faith as a threat to spirituality or a personal relationship with Jesus (as if real love of God is possible without genuine knowledge of God).² Many Catholics, like many Protestants, view the Bible as a reservoir of guidelines and guardrails—a source book for ensuring that our beliefs are the correct ones—rather than a wellspring flowing with the ever-fresh and sustaining water of life. Finally, some Catholics have the impression that one can be a good and faithful Catholic simply by “following the rules,” without actually occupying themselves with the “letter from Almighty God” (Pope St. Gregory the Great) as “strength for their faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting font of spiritual life” (CCC 131).

The irony consists in the fact that each of these perceptions, whatever its provenance or popularity, gets it wrong; each is contradicted by the Church’s actual teaching. Often these myths are accompanied by faulty assumptions of a comparative nature. For example, on one occasion, a year or so after my wife and I were received into the Church, I introduced myself to a cradle Catholic in our parish who, upon learning of my recent conversion as a lifelong Protestant, responded in almost hushed and reverent tones: “Oh, then you must really know the Bible.” I assured him that I must not fit the stereotype, since I still have a great deal to learn, especially now that I’m Catholic. He seemed puzzled by my response. Had our conversation continued, I would have explained to him how reading and studying the Bible through my new Catholic lenses had opened a world of fresh insights which had escaped my attention in the past. (Concerned Protestant friends need not worry that my conversion signals a departure from biblical fidelity. On the contrary, my love for Scripture has never been stronger, nor my devotion deeper. In this late season of life I am humbly blessed to be doing my best study and teaching.³)

Sometimes the sentiments are captured more humorously: The priest and seminary professor who stumbled over a Scripture reference in a predominantly Protestant setting and modestly shrugged in self-deprecation, “Hey, I’m a Catholic, what do you expect?” Or Dr. Scott Hahn’s charge to a largely Catholic audience, inviting them to turn to a certain Scripture passage if they’ve brought a Bible with them, or to look around for a Protestant who has. Even our jocularity might contain an element of truth, however.

Occasionally Catholics express their views on this matter in ways that are brutally honest and disconcerting, as in a concluding remark by Benedict Thomas Viviano, OP: “In practice a Roman Catholic who wants to remain faithful to the divine revelation as contained in the Scriptures must accept that he or she will be living with believers for whom scriptural fidelity is not a high priority and who indulge in unscriptural beliefs and practices. So patience and charity remain necessary also in this important area.”⁴ (It is not obvious to me that Protestants are a leg up on Catholics on this point.)

In Part One of this two-part discussion we focused on some of the faulty perceptions non-Catholics sometimes have of Catholics respecting their appreciation for the Bible. We turn now to some of the myths Catholics themselves may be guilty of believing and propagating with respect to the question, Can Catholics be Bible Christians? As in the case of mistaken Protestant assumptions and conclusions, there is much to be gained for Catholics in exposing our own ideas to critical scrutiny, in facing the truth with honesty and humility, and in ensuring that opinions and attitudes we find to be misguided and flawed are promptly discarded.

Getting It Right

As a likely starting point, it will be instructive for us to consider a few quotations from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (hereafter in citations, CCC), especially selections which highlight the Church’s official position on the centrality of Scripture and its place in the faith and life of Catholic Christians. At the very least, doing so will demonstrate that the point I am belaboring and the appeal I am making are not novel; they are in fact completely in sync with Catholic teaching. Most of these passages reflect the Catechism’s dependence on the Second Vatican Council’s landmark document Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, November 18, 1965; hereafter in citations, DV). Consider the following selections:

103 For this reason, the Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God’s Word and Christ’s Body. [DV 21]

104 In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word, “but as what it really is, the word of God” [1 Thess 2:13]. “In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them” [DV 21].

131 “And such is the force and power of the Word of God that it can serve the Church as her support and vigor and the children of the Church as strength for their faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting font of spiritual life” [DV 21]. Hence “access to Sacred Scripture ought to be open wide to the Christian faithful” [DV 22].

132 “Therefore, the ‘study of the sacred page’ should be the very soul of sacred theology. The ministry of the Word, too–pastoral preaching, catechetics, and all forms of Christian instruction, among which the liturgical homily should hold pride of place–is healthily nourished and thrives in holiness through the Word of Scripture” [DV 24].

133 The Church “forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful . . . to learn ‘the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ,’ by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures. ‘Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ’” [DV 25; cf. Phil 3:8 and St. Jerome, Commentariorum in Isaiam libri xviii prol.: PL 24, 17b].

In addition to these compelling statements, it is noteworthy that the Catechism is itself anchored to Scripture throughout, with over 3,000 biblical passages cited, many of them multiple times. And then there is the entirety of Dei Verbum as well as many other magisterial documents.⁵ And this does not begin to include the countless other writings both ancient and modern calling Catholics to the serious study of Scripture and modeling for all to see what that entails.⁶

In this light, it is inconceivable that any Catholic would take lightly the Sacred Scriptures or be willing to settle for mediocrity when it comes to learning the Bible. It is understandable, of course, that in the aftermath of the upheavals which ripped Christendom asunder half a millennium ago and the postulated biblical basis for doing so, Scripture reading should become suspect, that whatever Protestants promoted Catholics avoided. Few people were on their best behavior in those days, and there is plenty of blame to be shared on all sides. But this is no longer the sixteenth century. The Church has spoken, again and again–consistent with what she has always taught, even if some of her members denied those teachings in their practice. Five hundred years later, it is just as tragic for Catholics to retain a posture of reaction and to retreat in one direction, whether from fear or indifference or ambivalence or identity disassociation, as it is for Protestants to do so in the other, whether in self-adulation or as justification for evangelistic exploitation (proselytism) or as grounds for remaining in schism.

Returning to the first quotation from the Catechism above, the fuller statement from Dei Verbum reads as follows:

The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since, especially in the sacred liturgy, she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life from the table both of God’s word and of Christ’s body. She has always maintained them, and continues to do so, together with sacred tradition, as the supreme rule of faith, since, as inspired by God and committed once and for all to writing, they impart the word of God Himself without change, and make the voice of the Holy Spirit resound in the words of the prophets and Apostles. Therefore, like the Christian religion itself, all the preaching of the Church must be nourished and regulated by Sacred Scripture. For in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life. Consequently these words are perfectly applicable to Sacred Scripture: “For the word of God is living and active” (Heb. 4:12) and “it has power to build you up and give you your heritage among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32; see 1 Thess. 2:13).

This is a breathtaking summary of what the Catholic Church actually believes and teaches about Sacred Scripture, including the reverence in which God’s Word has consistently been held, the supremacy and centrality it occupies in the life and faith of the Church, and the indispensable value it is accorded as the precious and powerful gift of the Father’s love to his children. Whether or not every Catholic actually regards Scripture in this light, this is the Church’s position. To be truly and faithfully Catholic is to embrace these same convictions. To refrain from doing so is to exchange the truth for a myth, the reality of what it means to be Catholic for a “form of religion” which “denies the power of it” (2 Tim 3:5).

We must pause here a few more moments. The implications of the Catechism’s claims are jolting. Among other things, it means that “just as [we] venerate the body of the Lord,” treasuring every morsel of the Eucharistic Bread, so we will treat every inspired word with comparable reverence and devotion and meticulous attention. If Scripture and Sacrament are bound definitively and inseparably together, it will not do for us to adore the one and to abandon the other, to ingest the one and to ignore the other, to venerate the one on the Altar and to neglect the other on the library shelf. And just as the liturgy (most especially the Eucharist) illuminates the Scriptures by providing the proper context in which they are to be read and heard,⁷ so “the sacred books, [wherein] the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them,” illuminate the wonder of the holy sacrifice in the Real Presence there. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI summarizes this relationship in the following way:

Thus the revelation of God’s will is the revelation of what our own being truly wishes–it is a gift. So we should learn anew to be grateful that in the word of God the will of God and the meaning of our own existence have been communicated to us. God’s presence in the word and his presence in the Eucharist belong together, inseparably. The eucharistic Lord is himself the living Word. Only if we are living in the sphere of God’s Word can we properly comprehend and properly receive the gift of the Eucharist.⁸

Matthew Levering expresses this conviction in his reflections on King Josiah’s liturgical reforms in ancient Israel (2 Kgs 23:1-27): “Liturgical forgetfulness means scriptural ignorance and vice versa.” Again, “the orientation of the liturgy and the orientation of Scripture are one and the same. Both turn us away from our own sufficiency and lead us into the sufficiency of God. . . . [T]he eucharistic liturgy is a God-centered ordering because, like the Scripture it proclaims, it draws us into the new eschatological life in Christ and the Spirit.”⁹

As a new Catholic, I sometimes worry that, just as Protestants tend to accentuate one side of this full-gospel vision, so Catholics tend to accentuate the other and to console themselves in doing so. As a variation on an earlier theme, “Protestants have the written word in their Bible, but we Catholics have the living Word, the Real Presence, in the Blessed Sacrament.” The Church consistently, explicitly, and forcefully warns against this sort of false dichotomy as we should see in the quotations above.

The clarification we are making is not merely academic. In his Foreword to Jean Daniélou’s The Bible and the Liturgy, editor Michael A. Mathis refers to this “most unfortunate, not to say deplorable, situation” in which the instructional function of the Church’s liturgical rites and feasts seems largely to be lost, with the result that “the faithful have too seldom taken proper advantage of this primal source of Christian initiation and growth.” The reason, he goes on to explain, lies in their unfamiliarity with the Scriptures and the Fathers, in consequence of which the Church’s “rites and feasts have come to be treated like sacred but mysterious heirlooms having no vital meaning for ordinary Christians today, since they do their work anyway, whether they are fully understood or not.”¹⁰ In other words, while it is possible for Catholics to go on receiving the graces conveyed by the Sacraments, which clearly is one of their purposes, ignorance of the Scriptures and the Fathers can deprive them of growing in the life-giving and transforming significance of those Sacraments. It is one thing for Pope Benedict XVI to stress that:

Every liturgical action is by its very nature steeped in sacred Scripture. In the words of the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, sacred Scripture is of the greatest importance in the celebration of the liturgy. From it are taken the readings, which are explained in the homily and the psalms that are sung. From Scripture the petitions, prayers and liturgical hymns receive their inspiration and substance. From Scripture the liturgical actions and signs draw their meaning.¹¹

Yet it is another thing for parishioners to know this in their bones. Not to do so invites a stern caution about the failure to anchor our understanding of the liturgy in Scripture, lest our worship, like Israel’s dance around the golden calf (cf. Exod 32), become “a self-generated cult . . . a festival of self-affirmation . . . a kind of banal self-gratification . . . no longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one’s own resources.” It is then, Benedict XVI goes on to say, that “liturgy really does become pointless, just fooling around. Or still worse it becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise.”¹² As I frequently tell my students, this point deserves a long pause.

Facing the Hard Reality

Part of what I am driving at was brought home to me in the winter of 2017, during an RCIA¹³ session in a local parish in which I had been invited to present a scriptural study on the Eucharist. After class I asked an obviously attentive young woman, a cradle Catholic attending with her soon-to-be-husband, if what I had taught that evening was anything more than a review of the familiar. I assumed it wasn’t. Her response was enlightening: “On the contrary,” she said, “I learned about the Eucharist as a child, but I had never studied it as an adult; and so my understanding has remained elementary–until tonight.”

Her perspective represents what appears to be a widespread and I think unfortunate reality–unfortunate because the wonders of our Catholic faith are simply too rich and deep and full and life-giving to be contained in elementary buckets, where I fear many Catholics store them, with many unfavorable effects. For example, some are mystified at the enthusiasm they observe in converts over what we have discovered here, often amazed that anyone should make such a journey, and pay such a price for doing so. (How often I have thought, “If only they realized what they have!”) Many are insecure when it comes to articulating and defending the Faith in the face of challenges from a darkened culture, or the objections of fallen-away Catholics or non-Catholics. Some even abandon the Faith later in life because the roots of their understanding never grew deep and strong in theological soil that was nutritious enough to sustain adult doubts and intellectual assaults.

Many Catholics attend Mass routinely, with minimal ostensive interest or meaningful participation (as reflected on impassive faces, inactive voices, and inexcusable early exits¹⁴). Worship, for them, has become formalistic–an adherence to sacramental routines which lack the vibrancy of the living and active voice of God infusing those Sacraments with generative and regenerative power (the ability to be culturally “Catholic” without being devotedly Christian, to be formally catechized but not spiritually converted). A contributing factor might be the way the so-called “five precepts of the Church” (regarding Mass, Confession, the Eucharist, fasting and abstinence, and financial giving; CCC, 2041-2043) are sometimes taught, as sufficient “rules” for being “good and faithful Catholics.” Context is essential. It is instructive that the precepts are positioned two-thirds of the way into the Catechism, as a component section on “Life in Christ” (1691-2557), after lengthy discussions on “The Profession of Faith” (26-1065) and “The Celebration of the Christian Mystery” (1066-1690). Indeed, the precepts are explicitly focused on “growth in love of God and neighbor” (2041); they are not a formulaic or formalistic substitute for having a deep personal connection to Jesus Christ and a consistent life-giving encounter with the living and breathing words of Sacred Scripture.

Then there are leading politicians who, as professing Catholics, find ways to accommodate the values and morals of the prevailing culture in their “establishment cultural Catholicism.”¹⁵ Their compromise of and departure from the Church’s teachings are, I suspect, made easier by the fact that they do not comprehend how deeply anchored those teachings are in the eternal, unchanging, and life-giving verities of Sacred Scripture. It’s far easier and more tolerable to say, “I’m Catholic, but I disagree with the Church on this point or that,” than it is to say, “I’m Catholic, but I think God is mistaken on this point or that.” That these are logically equivalent statements escapes those who remain unaware of what God actually says in Sacred Scripture, from which divine revelation the Church derives her teaching.

Some lifelong Catholics bemoan their biblical illiteracy, especially in conversations with Protestant friends or new converts who seem more versed than they, yet they remain at a loss as to what they might do about their deficit and doubtful about any prospect for changing the situation. Some in this last category are among those who react defensively: “Well, Protestants can have their Bible, but at least we Catholics have our Tradition and our Magisterium,” thus misunderstanding the Church’s unequivocal teaching on this topic.¹⁶ Others in this category may need to be reminded that our capacity to speak the word of God with clarity and conviction grows in proportion to our actual knowledge of that word.¹⁷

Again, many are ignorant of Scripture’s power to draw us to the heart of God and to inform all of our beliefs and practices, including our daily Christian experience, with the authority and guidance and fresh breath of divine revelation. And some who consider themselves faithful Catholics give little serious thought to their role as the lay faithful in the day-to-day life of the Church because they lack an informed and vibrant understanding of scriptural teaching on this important matter.

There’s more. Almost all Catholics are able to name Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as two of the most influential figures since the apostles in shaping the Church’s faith, yet few show any awareness of the extent to which both of these theologians were steeped in and shaped by Sacred Scripture. Indeed, to be truly Augustinian or Thomist is to be a lover of Scripture.¹⁸ The same can be said of being a true disciple of Blessed (soon-to-be-Saint) John Henry Newman, who knew the entire New Testament by memory, or of being a true admirer of virtually every saint, most of whom lived deeply in the Scriptures which made them saints. This includes Mary, the blessed mother of our Lord and fully deserving of all the veneration she receives in Catholic dogma and devotion. What fails to register in many Catholics’ minds, however, is the fact that Mary’s Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55), where we hear her speak most fully from her own heart, is arguably more densely saturated with scriptural (Old Testament) echoes and allusions than almost any other New Testament passage–“a virtual collage of biblical texts.”¹⁹ The Gospel depictions of Mary are unmistakable: She was full of God’s words before she was full of God’s Word, which explains in part why she was prepared to respond to Gabriel’s announcement in the manner that she did. To express this sharply, it is not possible to honor the blessed mother of our Lord and of the Church in the way that she deserves without crediting the Scriptures which made her who she was. In this light, Marian devotion without biblical devotion is misguided devotion.

And on it goes, all, or at least in large part, because of that “most unfortunate, not to say deplorable, situation” (recalling Mathis above) in which we have not properly united the Sacraments with the study of the Sacred Word, Faith with Scripture. If Protestants betray a “preference for prophet over priest, for the word over the sacrament, and for the spirit over institutional structures,”²⁰ it is not difficult to detect the opposite tendency in each case among Catholics. This includes some Catholic theologians, past and present,²¹ despite the fact that according to Vatican II, “the study of the sacred page is . . . the soul of sacred theology” (DV 24). It is understandable that Bishop Barron should regard “neglect of the Bible as one of the cardinal sins, so to speak, in currents in Catholic theology,” and insist that “there can be no authentic presentation of Christianity that doesn’t begin with immersion in the ‘density’ of the Biblical universe.”²²

A Hope and a Prayer

What I hope to have achieved in this discussion is to grant that non-Catholics do have a legitimate concern about apparent Catholic (dis)interest in Scripture, even if their observations do not lead straightforwardly to the conclusions at which they arrive. More importantly, I hope to have underscored that a serious devotion to Sacred Scripture is fundamental to what it means to be truly Catholic. It will not do for Catholics to continue to rehearse the familiar litany, “I was not catechized well,” or “My pastor administered the Sacraments but failed to teach the Scriptures,” and then leave it at that. However true it might be, it does not excuse; or to put this differently, it might not be our fault that we do not know the Scriptures well, but it is our responsibility to do something about it. Excuses fail, especially given the clarifying emphasis and clarion call of Vatican II, repeated exhortations by recent popes urging the faithful to read and study the Bible, and the plethora of opportunities for Catholics to do so. As one of my seminary professors was fond of saying, “Ignorance might be bliss, but it is not a virtue.” Those who are ignorant of Scripture have no justification for blissfully remaining that way, especially given the many available resources and opportunities through radio, television, print, courses, conferences, seminars, and other educational vehicles.

My prayer is that this discussion will contribute in some way to fulfilling the desires of our Lord and of our Holy Fathers in helping my Catholic brothers and sisters become more fully and faithfully Catholic, that is to say, Christian. This is a far nobler motivation than trying to play catchup with our Protestant brothers and sisters, although I do hope to have relieved any unnecessary sense of insecurity and inferiority in this regard. My prayer further is that this discussion and the Institute on whose website it appears will encourage a certain renaissance of the kind of love and study of Sacred Scripture that characterized our Fathers in the Faith and the Doctors of the Church, who truly believed that in reading Scripture they were hearing and encountering the ever-living voice of God.

In my more audacious moments, I even dare to dream of the day when, consistent with the urging of the Church, which “forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful . . . to learn ‘the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ,’ by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures” (CCC 133; cf. DV 25), all Catholics will be known as much by their love of Sacred Scripture as they are by their love of the Holy Eucharist, and Christians the world over will think first of the Catholic Church when they think of either. The renaissance of which I speak is not farfetched, but is in line with the vision of Dei Verbum as expressed in its closing paragraph:

In this way, therefore, through the reading and study of the sacred books “the word of God may spread rapidly and be glorified” (2 Thess. 3:1) and the treasure of revelation, entrusted to the Church, may more and more fill the hearts of men. Just as the life of the Church is strengthened through more frequent celebration of the Eucharistic mystery, similarly we may hope for a new stimulus for the life of the Spirit from a growing reverence for the word of God, which “lasts forever” (Is. 40:8; see 1 Peter 1:23-25). (DV 26)

In his later reflections on Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI offered his own sentiment: “With the Synod Fathers I express my heartfelt hope for the flowering of ‘a new season of greater love for sacred Scripture on the part of every member of the People of God, so that their prayerful and faith-filled reading of the Bible will, with time, deepen their personal relationship with Jesus’.”²³ More recently, Pope Francis has called for the “Word of God to become the heart of every ecclesial activity; the beating heart, which vitalizes the limbs of the Body.”²⁴

To understand and to embrace these calls is to acknowledge that Catholics can and must be Bible Christians.