MD,
What is bac???
You are looking at the Scriptures as a book without a church, without a gathering. Have you ever been to a Catholic Mass? Because you are playing words against words…I have attended Protestant services and shared with Protestant brethren. There aspects of our faith that we can share and pray together.
Have you ever attended a fellowship with Catholics?
If you have not gone to any Mass, or a prayer group, or parish event that draws on the historical traditions of our faith, what we are doing here is a play on words.
We don’t relate to Scripture looking at each word, pulling out an English dictionary, trying to find more spiritual depth with the word or phrase. We relate to our faith as an event with the gathering of believers. We through the Holy Spirit and prayer incarnate the Word of God into Church, into communion.
We don’t do this: ‘Well, today we are going to take about Matthew 13, verse 10 to 20.’ We wouldn’t know what the passage is about by identifying it as such. There are Protestants out there who know what the passage is just by hearing the numbers.
We identify the story once we hear it. If I were to go to daily Mass, in a 3 year period, I would hear all of the Bible. For us the Word of God is living. When we go to Mass and hear the Old Testament readings, we are at an event and are witnesses to what happened to the Jewish people on their faith journey…we hear about the people, their trials, their successes…we see ourselves living out the same path in our daily lives.
Just as the Jews have had their personages, the Holy Spirit moves through the Christian church to have our personages, epics, witnesses of great individuals in difficult times, and they begin with the Apostles. But the Church continues to bring forth great people in the lives of our saints. Witness to Christ did not end at Revelation. Christ said He would leave us His Holy Spirit and teach us many things.
We have feast days during the week with the readings of the Old and New Testaments with the Gospel, and then hear what the saint did and how the Scripture and the testimony of a saint connect and reveal life and example for us, as well as know this saint and countless others are in heaven praying for our behalf…as it says, ‘heaven watches us with a thousand eyes’. Christ continues to teach us through the saints more indepth about life in Him through various charisms, but always with the key factor of unity…all bearing the same fruit of Jesus Christ.
The Bible has God as its author. God works through human beings - sinful, fallen creatures, but nevertheless, those who aspire to God. ‘Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must through the Holy Spirit, "open our minds to understand Scripture.’
I have studied the bible my entire life, mainly at Mass which is followed the reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus. It is a most sacred moment.
But we want to understand the Scripture in truth, and so we must always take into account the intent of the author and the times they lived in.
What is important because Scripture is inspired, is that the truth of Scripture is ‘differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.’…Council…
We as Catholics are 'attentive to the content and unity of the whole Scripture…God’s plan of unity with Christ at the heart and center, open since his passover–CC112.
We Catholics read the Scripture within the living Tradition of the whole Church…Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart, CC113–the living memorial of God’s Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives spiritual interpretation of Scripture granted to the Church.
And finally, we Catholics are attentive to the analogy of faith—the coherence or unity of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation–CC114.
Thus we approach Scripture indeed as God’s inspired word, that it is Jesus Himself the Word Made Flesh Who is at the heart of Scripture, and His Holy Spirit interpreting His word, not just for an individual as would be in forms of Sola Scriptura, but rather in context for the whole church – the communion of believers.
With this spiritual and reflective approach, and contemplating on the salvation history of peoples, it is only natural for us in drawing on the Word Made Flesh, that we also acknowledge the source of Christ’s Flesh – His Blessed Mother, and to honor and respect her in her relation to Christ and sharing in His mission by cooperating with God in bringing forth the Messiah – and the first to proclaim Him while He was still in her womb to her cousin Elizabeth, and in her relation to us.
Mary prays continually for us to grow closer to her Son, and we as church know her countless work as a refuge for sinners and our greatest advocate before God the Father in heaven.
It is so sad to come to Scripture in such a way and not know all the graces that are given to us as Church. You only come to the end of Revelations but you do not go to the next step of all the great Christians who came to life and who also venerated Our Mother.
There is so much we have universally come to know about Mary, how she herself has helped many be delivered from the hands of the evil one or saved others from injury by her prayers, how she restores confidence in a soul as a mother, so a person can have courage to face God again.
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