Read The Bible!

To all those who accuse the Catholic Church of keeping the Bible from the faithful, I invite them to read some quotes from John Paul II’s address Commemorating the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Dei Verbum:

“It proclaimed that ‘easy access to the Sacred Scriptures’ must be ‘available to the Christian faithful,’ for truly, ‘in the sacred Books the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children and speaks with them; so great is the force and power of God’s Word that it remains the sustaining life-force of the Church, the strength of faith for her children, the nourishment for the soul, and the pure and lasting source of spiritual life.’ Thus all Christians are urged to read, study, and meditate on the Sacred Scriptures so as to nourish their life of faith and charity.”

As well as:

“The prophetic message of peace, reconciliation, and friendship is destined for all peoples. That is why Sacred Scripture inspires a universal veneration. It also explains why there should be no obstacle to the outspread of Sacred Scripture throughout the entire world.”

What the people who make this accusation don’t realize is that the Catholic Church doesn’t need to keep Sacred Scripture from people! Encouraging everyone to read and properly interpret Scripture is what the Church wants, because there is nothing in the Catholic Church’s teachings that contradict Scripture and vice-versa. The Catholic Church does not fear the Truth! It is vindicated by it.

And even if one of the faithful couldn’t read Scripture for themselves, all they had to do was go to the Mass and they would be immersed in Scripture! In fact, if you read my previous post about Benedict XV’s encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus, you would see that St. Jerome encouraged everyone to read and learn Scripture and said that, “Ignorance of Scripture is Ignorance of Christ!”

If only our Protestant brethren would go back and explore the Fathers and the early history of the Church! For as John Henry Newman said, “to be a student of history is to cease to be a Protestant.”