How Does the Catholic Church Read the Bible?

Both God and human beings, fully, at the same time — and the Church resists collapsing that into either half.

God is called the author, so Scripture is held to teach without error the truth God intended to put in it for the sake of salvation. But the human writers are called true authors, not stenographers. They used their own languages, their own memories, their own literary conventions, and the historical assumptions of their own centuries. Inspiration, on this account, does not override a writer's personality or bypass ordinary human composition.

The practical consequence is that Catholic reading has to ask what a given writer was actually doing. The Church expects the reader to attend to genre — Genesis 1 and the Acts of the Apostles are not making the same kind of claim — as well as to the circumstances of composition and the conventions of the period. Vatican II's constitution Dei Verbum (1965) states this directly and made critical biblical scholarship a normal part of Catholic study rather than a suspect one.

Because the two traditions accepted different Old Testaments, and the split is later than most people assume.

Seven books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees — plus sections of Esther and Daniel appear in Catholic Bibles and not in most Protestant ones. Catholics call them deuterocanonical, meaning "second canon" in the order of their acceptance, not in authority. Protestants generally call them the Apocrypha.

They were in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures used across the Mediterranean world in the first century and quoted by the New Testament writers. They appear in the canon lists of the councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397, and in Christian Bibles for the next thousand years. The Reformers set them aside in the sixteenth century, following the shorter rabbinic canon; the Council of Trent defined the longer list in 1546 in response.

The New Testament is identical in both: the same 27 books, undisputed.

An interpretive framework inherited from the Church Fathers and the medieval schools, still used in the Catechism.

The literal sense is what the words actually say — the meaning conveyed by the text according to the intention of the author and the rules of the language. Everything else is built on it, and the Catechism follows Aquinas in insisting that any argument must rest on the literal sense. "Literal" here means "what the text literally says," which for a parable is a parable and for a poem is a poem; it is not the same as literalism.

The three spiritual senses read the text in the light of Christ. The allegorical sense sees how events point beyond themselves — the crossing of the Red Sea read as an anticipation of baptism. The moral sense asks what the passage requires of the reader now. The anagogical sense reads it as pointing towards the final destiny of humanity.

The order is a safeguard. Spiritual readings that have detached from the literal sense have historically been used to make Scripture say whatever the reader arrived wanting.

The Catechism gives three criteria, and they function as constraints on a reader rather than as a decoding key.

Read the whole of Scripture as one book. Individual verses are not free-standing propositions; the unity of the canon means a passage has to be read against everything else, not lifted out of it.

Read within the living Tradition of the Church. Christianity existed for decades before any New Testament book was written and for centuries before the canon was settled, so on the Catholic account the community is prior to the text and is the context in which it is properly understood.

Attend to the analogy of faith — the coherence of the truths of faith with one another. An interpretation that contradicts something the Church holds firmly is, on those grounds, a misinterpretation.

Behind all three sits the Magisterium, the teaching office of the bishops in communion with the Pope. Its role is more modest than it is often taken to be: it has defined the meaning of very few verses, and functions mainly as a boundary rather than a commentary.

The historical picture is more mixed than either side of the argument usually admits. Monasteries copied and preserved Scripture for a millennium, the medieval liturgy was saturated with it, and lectio divina — slow, prayerful reading of a short passage — is a Catholic invention. But restrictions on vernacular translation, particularly after the Reformation, produced real generations of Catholics who did not own a Bible.

That changed decisively in the twentieth century. Dei Verbum urged access to Scripture for all the faithful, and vernacular translations, study Bibles and parish Bible study are now ordinary.

The largest single fact is liturgical. A Catholic attending Mass every Sunday hears three readings and a psalm on a three-year cycle — Matthew, Mark and Luke in successive years, with John distributed through all three — and daily Mass adds a two-year weekday cycle. Over three years that covers a very large proportion of the Bible, in a fixed order, without the reader choosing the passages.

Several are approved, and the choice is mostly about purpose.

The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE) is the basis of the lectionary used in the United States, so it matches what is read at Mass there. Its footnotes are extensive and scholarly.

The Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition and its second edition (RSV-2CE) are the usual choice for study and are the version most often quoted in English-language Catholic theology — formal, close to the original phrasing, and useful when the exact wording matters.

The Jerusalem and New Jerusalem Bibles read more fluidly and are used in the lectionary across much of the English-speaking world outside the United States.

The Douay-Rheims predates the King James Version and is translated from the Latin Vulgate; it is valued for its history and its use in older devotional texts rather than for current scholarship.

A practical test: a Catholic edition contains all 73 books, and the approved ones carry an imprimatur on the copyright page.