Sects and the Committee
Patrick Archibold
The next general assembly of the Synod of Bishops, scheduled for Rome in October, will take on the issue of Catholics reading the Bible through a fundamentalist lens. I thought that most Catholics have avoided this by avoiding reading the Bible altogether, but apparently this is a growing problem.
The increasing Protestantization of Catholic thinking on the Bible is a real bummer for the Church. I took a Bible study offered by my parish earlier this year, presented by a parishoner through Scott Hahn's St. Paul Center in Steubenville, Ohio. For seven weeks, I was pretty sure that my Catholic Church had become Southern Baptist. (Please don't get me wrong, I'm no anti-Hahn firebrand. He does fine work and is a super writer. But he treads dangerously close to sola-Scriptura, which can quickly distort a Catholic sensability with centuries of study, writings and Tradition [capital T] that forms the other leg of Catholic doctrine).
But because Catholics have walked away from a Catholic identity, because they turn to the (pseudo-) History Channel for their religious education, and because Catholics don't go to church to hear the Word professed-- it's no surprise that Catholics don't have a a sense of a Catholic way to read the Bible.
When I was a freshman in college, the Resident Assistant in my dorm invited me to a Bible study he regularly conducted in his dorm room. I accepted his invitation and toted my NAB over to join the group. When it was my turn to read, I confidently read the Word to the study group. When I looked up from the page, they were all giving me these quizzaled looks, wanting to know what version I was reading from. I answered that it was my study copy of the New American Bible.
They were having a hard time following along. They used two translations for their group, either the New International Version or the classic King James Version. I've since developed a taste for the richly layered language of the Douay Rheims version and would like to pick up a Revised Standard Version for my primary study bible rather than the NAB (which I've learned is a little clumsy with its vocabulary), but I didn't know any of this at the time.
But my translation tipped off a fierce debate in the room. The NIV readers thought the KJV readers were arrogant elitists, the KJV readers thought the NIV readers were sellouts, no one said a word about my Catholic bible since they'd never heard of it anyway. I left the group when it all came to a head and one other guy stood up and blurted:
If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!
