Reading the Bible...

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joegrabowski

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I’ve heard from many pre-Gen X. Catholics that they were told growing up (either by parents, teachers in Catholic school, or by priests and nuns) that Catholics were not allowed to read the Bible.

I’m just curious about how common this trend was, and also in what age-groups and demographics it was most prevalent. I’m a 21 year-old Catholic male, and while my Catholic school studies were never very Bible-intensive, I was never actively discouraged from reading God’s Word. Scott Hahn’s advice for being “Bible-Christians” as Catholics is, I think, an important part of being a good apologist, so this is kind of a disturbing concept for me.
 
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joegrabowski:
I’ve heard from many pre-Gen X. Catholics that they were told growing up (either by parents, teachers in Catholic school, or by priests and nuns) that Catholics were not allowed to read the Bible.
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My wife was raised Catholic about 25 years ago and she was actively discouraged to read the bible for herself. About 10 years ago her family got a new parish priest who reversed this and advocated scriptural study for laypeople. This was in California.

ken
 
I’m a baby boomer and I never heard that Bible reading was discouraged. My parents gave me a Bible when I made my First Communion. Maybe in some dioceses that was the personal opinions of the clergy or religious. My husband grew up in a parish that was populated by primarily immigrants and he was told things by the sisters (like don’t chew the host or it will squirt blood - a frightening thing to ponder for a 7 year old) that I never heard as the parish I grew up in was primarily upper middle class.
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I grew up in the pre-Vatican II church, and we were never discouraged from reading the Bible.

JimG
 
I voted for :Go for it! We Catholics should read and meditate upon God’s written word as often as possible!
I’ve been reading the Bible since I learned how to read; as a former Baptist so this has not been a problem for me. My husband, on the other hand, does… We are both 60 and I guess that’s considered ‘Pre-Baby Boomer’?? Anyway, he doesn’t think it’s necessary…because he was brought up with the idea that he wasn’t supposed to…Sooo he reads the missalette on Sundays. Occasionally he’ll look at a passage if I ask him…:twocents:
 
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joegrabowski:
I’ve heard from many pre-Gen X. Catholics that they were told growing up (either by parents, teachers in Catholic school, or by priests and nuns) that Catholics were not allowed to read the Bible.

I’m just curious about how common this trend was, and also in what age-groups and demographics it was most prevalent. I’m a 21 year-old Catholic male, and while my Catholic school studies were never very Bible-intensive, I was never actively discouraged from reading God’s Word. Scott Hahn’s advice for being “Bible-Christians” as Catholics is, I think, an important part of being a good apologist, so this is kind of a disturbing concept for me.
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We had a bible in our home and were always encouraged to read the scripture.
 
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Annunciata:
I voted for :Go for it! We Catholics should read and meditate upon God’s written word as often as possible!
I’ve been reading the Bible since I learned how to read; as a former Baptist so this has not been a problem for me. My husband, on the other hand, does… We are both 60 and I guess that’s considered ‘Pre-Baby Boomer’?? Anyway, he doesn’t think it’s necessary…because he was brought up with the idea that he wasn’t supposed to…Sooo he reads the missalette on Sundays. Occasionally he’ll look at a passage if I ask him…:twocents:
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Aren’t the Psalms, Epistles and Gospel readings in the missal from the Bible?
 
I’m 26 and I don’t ever remember hearing that Catholics shouldn’t read the Bible. We always had Bibles available in my Catholic elem. school, at home, and I even had a children’s Bible when I was little.
 
I was born in 1949 and attended 12 years of Catholic schools. I was never required, encouraged, or asked to read anything directly from a bible - the first time I did this was when I opened one we received as a wedding present (some years after the wedding).

I think the Church’s local leaders don’t want to deal with the questions they will undoubtly receive when educated people start critically reading the bible - it is must easier to just give the disconnected little snippets at mass. Then most people don’t try to put the whole picture together or start doing comparisons and contrasts between the accounts.

Pat
 
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patg:
I was born in 1949 and attended 12 years of Catholic schools. I was never required, encouraged, or asked to read anything directly from a bible - the first time I did this was when I opened one we received as a wedding present (some years after the wedding).

I think the Church’s local leaders don’t want to deal with the questions they will undoubtly receive when educated people start critically reading the bible - it is must easier to just give the disconnected little snippets at mass. Then most people don’t try to put the whole picture together or start doing comparisons and contrasts between the accounts.

Pat
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The Church never discouraged folks from reading the bible. Before and after 1962 the church had pew potatos. The fact that few Catholics read the bible or truly learned their faith is an indictment of some of the clergy and many of the faithful themselves.

What gets my goat is that many before Vatican II blame the Church for the drama of the upbringing.
 
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Before and after 1962 the church had pew potatos. The fact that few Catholics read the bible or truly learned their faith is an indictment of some of the clergy and many of the faithful themselves.
QUOTE]

I agree - if you sat through mass, you were good to go!

Pat
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I think PatG hit the nail on the head with his/her(?) observation that catechists in the past may have discouraged Bible study to save themselves headaches. I come from an area populated by the descendants of poor Irish coal-miners who were rarely educated past gradeschool. I think many of the Catholic instructors of this region took the adage “a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing” as a central dictum of their teaching philosophy.

I do not think this was a Magisterial instruction or anything like that. I recognize that this was a grass-roots problem and occured at the parish level. Still, I wonder how many current issues of lackadaisicalness and mediocrity in the faith can be traced back to such practices as these.

It also occurs to me, after having opened this poll, that the folks who were raised with such bad advice regarding personal intellectual growth in faith may be the very same people who are least likely to read fora such as this one. :rolleyes: Oh, well. It’s an interesting topic to me, nonetheless.
 
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RBushlow:
Aren’t the Psalms, Epistles and Gospel readings in the missal from the Bible?
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Yes! My point is that is his excuse for not picking up the Bible and just plain reading it! Meditating prayerfully, etc. We need to do that…especially if we are going to defend the Faith…we need to know who, what, and where we are speaking of…Don’t you think? Annunciata:)
 
I was born in 1949 and attended 10 years of Catholic School. I was never told that we should not read the Bible. It was defintley read every Sunday at Mass (in english) and any other time we felt like it. Yes, the mass was said in Latin when I was younger but the Bible readings were in english. Yes, we knew what the Latin meant before and after the Bible readings during mass because we were taught what it meant.
I have had Protestants tell me we were not suppose to read the bible and EVERYTHING was in Latin so we could not understand. I told them I didn’t know where they got their information from but it was wrong. I was THERE enjoying our wonderful services.
I would like to thank all the nuns, priest and teachers for all the hard work they did at our schools. I know I greatly appreciate it!!
 
I was born in 1958 and went through 12 years of Catholic education in Southern California. I don’t specifically remember being asked to read the Bible in grammar school but I know that we learned Bible History and had a general understanding of the various books of the Old and New Testaments. I think the schools tended to have those Children’s Bibles with excerpts from the various books.

I think my Catholic School educated father had a New Testament. I don’t remember my mother having a Bible. We did have several Missals with the (pre-1969) Sunday and weekday readings.

I still have the RSV student Bible I used in my high school religion class. Also, when I was in high school, my parish held a weekly Bible Study for high schoolers which was taught by a team that included knowledgeable adults from the parish and seminarians from the nearby seminary.
 
One time I was discussing scripture with my fellow Catholics at a young adult function. The leader had a fit. He started telling us how we would all become confused heretics and suffer Church automatic excommunication which would condemn us to hell (cannon 1364). He insisted that we read and discuss only Church Doctrine to protect ourselves from such a disaster. He also said that anyone who leaves the Church for a Protestant church, say because their groom was Protestant, suffers Church automatic excommunication and goes to hell (canon 1364). Unless they repent of course.

Pope John Paul II changed the Church law so that American Bishops could not, on their own, defrock a convicted pedophile priest. It seems he wanted to be more forgiving and less punishing toward pedophile priests. Defrocking is like a mosquito bite compared to the spiritually deadly Church punishment of automatic excommunication.

If it truly is this tremendous eternal death punishment for discussing the bible and possibly not always being on the same track as the Church, then the Pope has an obligation to make sure one billion Catholics absolutely know this. Some of the massive amounts of papal worldwide media used for physical death war and capital punishment issues, could be transfered and used to warn us of Spiritual deadly Church punishments. Even one person suffering Church automatic excommunication eternal death for reading the bible will suffer far more death than the combine years of life lost from all the wars and capital punishments in human history.

If Church leaders have, officially or unofficially, abandon such harsh punishments from centuries back, then please Holy Father, make a statement to get these “to the letter of the Church law” guys off our backs. We want to read, study and discuss the Word of our Lord Jesus Christ with our fellow Catholics.

Peace in Christ,
Steven Merten
www.ILOVEYOUGOD.com
 
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JimG:
I grew up in the pre-Vatican II church, and we were never discouraged from reading the Bible.

JimG
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It was never discouraged just seemed to be a bit overwhelming. We heard the readings and gospel every Sunday.
 
I was born in 1956 and educated in Philadelphia catholic schools for 10 years (we moved when I was a sophomore in H.S.).

In addition to our Family Bible–Douay Rheims, we had a great series of Bible magazines (sadly lost, I’d love to know more about them); we all had missalettes (German, French, Latin and English), the Imitation of Christ, St. Augustine’s Confessions, the Lives of the Saints (great for “improving tales”), booklets on the rosary, holy cards galore. We learned Bible history, we read from the Bible in class, and our choir especially learned (Latin and English) psalmody, Gregorian chant, ITS history, etc. My grandmothers both loved the Bible; one was blind and had a Braille Bible, the other nearly wore out her German Bible.

While we didn’t quite match our Protestant relatives (distant-) in being able to quote “chapter and verse” we (I believe) knew much more of the Bible IN CONTEXT than they did. (And hey, we almost always got the chapter if not the verse. It’s not difficult to recognize Jeremiah, Isaiah, Paul, Genesis, etc.)

The nuns NEVER discouraged Bible reading–they encouraged it if anything. I only had the Baltimore catechism for the first two years of school but I was always peeking at my sister’s copy (she’s 5 years older).

It is hard for me, with my background/ experience, to picture Catholics of the mid and late 20th century being “discouraged” from reading the Bible. If it DID take place, I’ve often wondered lately if they could have been from the same dioceses that NOW are–shall we say–a little more “creative” (i.e., Mahony’s California)? I certainly would love to be able to access diocesean records. Here’s a neat project for a budding seminarian or theologian–check the correlation between “bad doctrine of the 50s on” with “bad doctrine/ bad practices of the 90s on”. Makes me curious. . .
 
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patg:
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Before and after 1962 the church had pew potatos. The fact that few Catholics read the bible or truly learned their faith is an indictment of some of the clergy and many of the faithful themselves.
QUOTE]

I agree - if you sat through mass, you were good to go!

Pat
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My point is that those who blame the pre VII Church should not blame the Church, but blame themselves.
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