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William Grimm, a native of New York City, is a missioner and presbyter who since 1973 has served in Japan, Hong Kong and Cambodia.
Bible-reading was something Protestants did
Published: July 27, 2017 04:27 AM
Bible-reading was something Protestants did

When I was a lad, we had a family Bible. There were pages in the back where Mom entered dates of births, baptisms, and confirmations. There were pictures. Though it was obviously a book — in fact that’s what the word "bible" means — I have no recollection that I or anyone else in the family ever read it. We were good Catholics, and Bible-reading was something Protestants did.

It’s not that we had absolutely no idea of what was in the book. I learned Bible stories in our parish school. Noah’s ark. Exodus (though I may have actually gotten that from the Charlton Heston movie). Creation, with its two stories homogenized into one. Likewise, the nativity with the two versions merged in our school Christmas plays. On Sundays, after it was read in Latin, the Gospel passage for the day was reread in English, though preaching often had nothing to do with the Word. There were no weekday homilies or sermons.

Catholic life focused on devotions like novenas, scapulars, medals and First Fridays. Rather than the Word of God, piety was motivated by dedication to Mary in her various guises, or saints. Devotion to Christ was often, as in the case of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, an adjunct to Marian devotion.

There was Eucharistic devotion, but it was divorced from its Biblical and historic roots. Of course, people went to Mass, but except for the altar boys (no girls) who had a role, the main communal aspect was the collection.

That was the Catholicism of the laity. For the clergy, it was apparently not too different. Their basic spirituality was the same devotionalism with an overlay of medieval philosophy and a heavy veneer of moralism. Scripture, more often than not, was mined for "proof texts" to bolster positions derived from philosophy.

In other words, we had a Christianity that tried to do without the Word of God. After my eight years of Catholic school education, it was an atheist Jew who first got me to actually read scripture.

But, even then things were changing. Steps were being taken that would eventually restore the Word of God to its central place in Catholic life and thought, a transition that is still in its early stages.

On Sept. 30, 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu ("inspired by the Holy Spirit"), encouraging modern Biblical scholarship. Of course, that did not mean that on Oct. 1, 1943, the Catholic Church suddenly embraced and was embraced by the insights of the previous two centuries of biblical scholarship. It takes decades to train biblical scholars, and more time for their insights to filter down to seminary professors, pastors and, eventually, the majority of the people of God. In many ways, we are only now reaching those last two groups.

Possibly the first fruits of the encyclical came with Vatican II. Besides the council’s constitutions on revelation and liturgy that restored the centrality of the Word of God to Catholic life and worship, its other teachings were shaped by scripture. For Catholics who, like me, had only known a non-scriptural Catholicism, it was a radical shift to be embraced, rejected or pondered in confusion.

We are still in the midst of that process of embracing, rejecting or considering. For some people, even some young ones and clergy who are nostalgic for what they never knew, "Catholic identity" remains linked to a style of being Christian that has little or no basis in or consonance with scripture.

Might those people be afraid of what an encounter with the Word of God might demand of them? In fact, we all should be, but we should also be confident that the Word, Jesus Christ, will be with us in the encounter. He promised that. He had less to say positively about following "the traditions of the ancestors."

A key way to bring people to a deeper encounter with the Word of God is through preaching that is biblically based and intelligently informed by the insights of scholars who have devoted their lives to that encounter.

And here is a problem. Too many preachers have not "done their homework." They talk about issues that have nothing to do with the Word that has been proclaimed in the community. They demonstrate, sometimes even proudly, a reluctance to consider anything beyond the most fundamentalist or tangential interpretation of that Word.

In other realms, professionalism is expected, and lack of it is censured. A doctor who refused to use antibiotics because he didn’t bother to learn about them or because they weren’t used when he was a kid would lose his license to practice medicine. Perhaps the time is here for bishops to look at the preachers for whom they are responsible and demand either professionalism or silence.

Father William Grimm, MM, is the publisher of ucanews.com and is based in Tokyo.

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