M
Mintaka
Guest
When I was a kid, I’d never even heard of Bible study. But we had various Bible storybooks when we were little, and my parents expected us to read them. When we got older, we got Bibles for religion class/CCD. Again, we didn’t formally study it much (although we did learn basic Bible facts the year we had to get them). But of course I read the whole thing, especially during the boring parts of religion class. It was my responsibility to do that. I mean, you’re over the age of reason at age 7 in most cases; a young Catholic has received most of the Sacraments of initiation by the time you’re 8 or so. At that point, your religious life is not something you can slough off on your parents.
Some people are never going to pay attention and digging into their faith unless somebody makes them, or unless they have an attitude change and decide to start paying attention. There’s no way in today’s world to put a gun to these people’s head and make them learn their faith. If you are Biblically illiterate in America today, it’s because you didn’t see it as important, not because you don’t have opportunity.
That said, it would be nice if people were encouraged more thoroughly to get excited about their faith, including reading their Bibles.
But by the same token, it’s very difficult to tell whether a community as a whole is “Biblically illiterate” from judging the content of the homilies/sermons at Mass! That’s one hour of one day a week. If the priest has determined that his congregation needs a good talking to in X area, he’s going to talk X topic more than the Bible. People aren’t going to show off how many verses they know, any more than they’re going to tell you how many Rosaries they’ve said in their lives. It’s not a quantitative thing or something they need to prove; it’s just life.
Also, a lot of Catholics have been taught not to quote the Bible casually in conversation, any more than they’d use the Lord’s Name casually. There’s something presumptuous about it, unless the matter is a serious one. So Biblical knowledge is something that’s not going to just come up, with them.
If an old Catholic lady starts quoting Biblical passages at you (and she probably has a big stock of them hidden away in her mind), she is desperate to save you from some horrible mistake. The Bible is the crushing argument of last resort. (This is yet another reason why Catholics tend to go all deer in the headlights when evangelicals start quoting away. The Catholic is thinking, “Did I murder somebody? What did I do wrong, that he’s quoting the Bible to me?” It’s like being held at gunpoint by somebody who thinks a gun is a hand decoration.)
If you’ve got a congregation in a Slavic area, they are usually extremely well-educated in every kind of literature and are eager readers. So it’s very likely that the congregation does already know the Bible very well. Poland used to have a tradition of having all sorts of religious newspapers and magazines with large circulations; I don’t know whether that’s something that carried into modern life. All I know is that when I accidentally hit a Polish search term, I find all kinds of religious info coming out of Poland.
Some people are never going to pay attention and digging into their faith unless somebody makes them, or unless they have an attitude change and decide to start paying attention. There’s no way in today’s world to put a gun to these people’s head and make them learn their faith. If you are Biblically illiterate in America today, it’s because you didn’t see it as important, not because you don’t have opportunity.
That said, it would be nice if people were encouraged more thoroughly to get excited about their faith, including reading their Bibles.
But by the same token, it’s very difficult to tell whether a community as a whole is “Biblically illiterate” from judging the content of the homilies/sermons at Mass! That’s one hour of one day a week. If the priest has determined that his congregation needs a good talking to in X area, he’s going to talk X topic more than the Bible. People aren’t going to show off how many verses they know, any more than they’re going to tell you how many Rosaries they’ve said in their lives. It’s not a quantitative thing or something they need to prove; it’s just life.
Also, a lot of Catholics have been taught not to quote the Bible casually in conversation, any more than they’d use the Lord’s Name casually. There’s something presumptuous about it, unless the matter is a serious one. So Biblical knowledge is something that’s not going to just come up, with them.
If an old Catholic lady starts quoting Biblical passages at you (and she probably has a big stock of them hidden away in her mind), she is desperate to save you from some horrible mistake. The Bible is the crushing argument of last resort. (This is yet another reason why Catholics tend to go all deer in the headlights when evangelicals start quoting away. The Catholic is thinking, “Did I murder somebody? What did I do wrong, that he’s quoting the Bible to me?” It’s like being held at gunpoint by somebody who thinks a gun is a hand decoration.)
If you’ve got a congregation in a Slavic area, they are usually extremely well-educated in every kind of literature and are eager readers. So it’s very likely that the congregation does already know the Bible very well. Poland used to have a tradition of having all sorts of religious newspapers and magazines with large circulations; I don’t know whether that’s something that carried into modern life. All I know is that when I accidentally hit a Polish search term, I find all kinds of religious info coming out of Poland.
I also to my own embarrassment neglected to inquire from the priest the meanings of scripture and verse for most of the class out of fear of being yelled at by the CCD educational advisor at my church…I should’ve grown a backbone at that point in the discovery of my faith, but the education advisor was so set against my being confirmed out of misplaced anger that it took my mind off of WHY I was there in the 1st place. To learn about God, Christ and the teachings of the CC.