Follow the word

With past experience as a benchmark, it is likely that Bible Sunday on August 28 will go by unnoticed in many parishes in Southern Africa, as will Social Communications Sunday the following week.

This is a pity, since the combination of Scripture and social communication are at the heart of our mission to evangelise—the endeavour of bringing the faith to people so that they may attain salvation.

We do so in many different ways: through books, radio, newspapers, Internet and through preaching and other forms of verbal catechesis. The homilies at Mass are predicated on the readings from Scripture.

When we read the Bible, we are profiting from what may be the most successful tool of social communications. At the time when the media of the day was the spoken word and the library was shared memory, the evangelists and the communicators of the early Church set out in writing the life of Our Lord and its radical implications on humanity.

The Catholic Church’s teachings may draw from subsequently cultivated tradition, but these take as their foundation the precepts of the Scriptures. The Second Vatican Council explicitly rooted its most significant teachings in Scripture.

Catholics have a reputation of having a more casual relationship with the Bible than their Protestant counterparts. Where many Protestants come to church with well-worn Bibles under their arms, Catholics have to be reminded to prayerfully read the Bible. Pope Benedict once identified what he saw as a deficiency of scriptural formation as part of a wider crisis of catechetics in the Catholic Church.

It is true, of course, that in the past lay Catholics were not always encouraged to read the Bible, though the idea that Catholics were actively discouraged from doing so until Vatican II is not true.

It is true, however, that much of exegetical scholarship was inhibited for much of the first half of the 20th century until Pope Pius XII unshackled and encouraged it in his 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu.

Two decades later, Vatican II was most explicit in promoting Catholic use of the Bible, calling in its document Verbum Dei (The Word of God) for a biblical renewal in the liturgy, in the formation of priests and in almost all aspects of Church life. The document encouraged prayerful study of Scriptures, especially by priests, deacons and “catechists who are legitimately active in the ministry of the Word”.

Pope Benedict, who as Fr Joseph Ratzinger was an expert theological advisor at the council, has placed the Bible high in his pontifical agenda. In 2008 he called a Synod of Bishops to deliberate “the Word of God in the life and mission of the Church”.

The pope has encouraged Catholics to develop a deeper relationship with the Bible, which he sees as an interconnected whole that can provide the vehicle for a rich spiritual journey. Clearly he has no use for what the noted Scripture scholar and long-time Southern Cross columnist Fr Nicholas King SJ once called “Bible Bingo”, whereby arguments are supposedly settled by invoking isolated and often decontextualised scriptural verses.

In last year’s post-synodal exhortation, Verbum Domini, Pope Benedict advised the faithful: “It’s important to set aside a certain amount of time every day for a meditation on the Bible so that the word of God becomes a lamp that lights our daily journey.”

This will help sanctify our own lives, but also aid the Church in its mission: “Let us be silent in order to hear the Lord’s word and to meditate upon it, so that by the working of the Holy Spirit it may remain in our hearts and speak to us all the days of our lives. In this way the Church will always be renewed and rejuvenated.”

It is for this reason that Bible Sunday should matter to us. In the words of Pope Benedict, let the Bible “keep us company and guide us”.