Do Catholics Even Read the Bible?

Back when I was a Protestant, one of the many things I believed about Catholics was that they didn’t read the Bible. I believed that the Catholic Church didn’t even want Catholics to read it. I heard that Catholics chained Bibles down in their “Dark Age” churches. I’d heard that the Bible just wasn’t that important to Catholics. Turns out, I was wrong. Not only that, I was extremely prideful, because as a Protestant, I rarely, if ever, read my Bible. 

Recently, I was listening to Ben Shapiro interview John MacArthur. John MacArthur is a Five-Point Calvinist pastor. Ben was asking him about Christianity and Mr. MacArthur started in with a diatribe about the Catholic Faith and the history of the Church. At one point, he commented on the Bible and said this in reference to the “Dark Ages”: “The faith was dead, cold and the Gospel was lost and truth was lost. But, it had massive power over people, but what kept that power [away] was [the Church’s practice of] don’t put the Bible in their language, don’t let them read it. The [Catholic} Church is the only interpreter of the Bible. They [the people] can’t interpret Scripture.” Brackets are my add-ins so that the sentence is given context for those who didn’t listen to the whole show. 

My husband shared this with our two teens and they easily refuted Mr. MacArthur’s arguments. It’s not that hard to do when you have a basic understanding of history. Because there are so many untruths circulating about Catholics and the Bible, I’d like to take this time to clear up some issues. I’ll state a common untruth that non-Catholics believe or that I used to believe and then I’ll refute it. 

“Catholic leaders chained down their Bibles in their churches and wouldn’t make them accessible to the people.”

It’s true that Bibles were chained down in many churches during the early years of the church. But why? Was it to keep it from the everyday layperson? Well, I think a little historical context is needed here. First off, once we got the completed Bible, which by the way, was given to us by the Catholic Church, there weren’t Bibles just lying around everywhere. There were no bookstores with loads of Bibles on hand. You didn’t stay at the local inn and find a Bible near your cot. Bibles were extremely rare. Why? Because there was no printing press before the 1500s. Every Bible was a labor of love by some monk. He had to hand write the entire thing which often times took a whole year. Because it was his life’s work, the monk would usually ornately decorate parts of the pages. The Bible was usually bound in beautiful gold covers decorated with gems and stones. This was the Word of God and so it was treated as a rare, precious item. If you lost a Bible or it was destroyed, you couldn’t just get a new one within a day or even a week. During these early years, there were tons of church pillages by many barbarians: Danes, Normans, Saracens, Viking raiders, etc. It was very common for the looters to steal the Bibles for the worth of the gold and gems that were gilded on the front. So, churches chained them down hoping this would save them from losing such a sacred item. Not only did they have to worry about barbarians taking the Bibles, but they also had to worry about just regular people living in the village, yes, even professing Catholics. A desperate person could easily see the Bible as a way to get money. We, also, know that Catholic Churches had to protect their Bibles from looting Protestants, such as Henry VIII, who raided the Catholic Churches in England, burning Bibles and stealing the precious stones and metals to help him with his debt. So, as we can see, the chaining of the Bible was not done to keep it from the people, it was done to protect it from those who would take it from the people.  

A few other things to keep in mind about the accessibility of Bibles. 1. Fires were a huge problem during the early years of Christianity. Many historical documents are lost to fire. 2. What they wrote on did not keep well. We take great care today to make sure things are cataloged and protected from the elements. They didn’t have this luxury. 

“Only the Church was allowed to read the Bible. It wouldn’t let the regular people read it.” 

It’s important that we not extrapolate our way of life back onto the past. Very few of us, in the US, know people that can’t read, unless they are very small children–most everyone can read. This was not the case in ancient times or even in the early and middle parts of the ADs. There weren’t public schools where all good kids went to learn their 123s and ABCs. Most people were just trying to survive life. Not to mention, books were exceedingly rare. People just didn’t have them, because they weren’t around to be had. Books that did exist were very expensive, because of the enormous amounts of time it took to make one and so common people couldn’t afford them. Even if they could have, they wouldn’t have been able to read them. So, when Catholics went to church, the priest would read to them from the Bible. It’s no different than the priests reading to the Jews in the Temple.

Reading the Bible has always been very important to Catholics. St. Jerome, Doctor and Father of the Church, was born in 342. He is the man that translated the Bible into the Latin Vulgate thus making it readable in the common vernacular throughout the Roman Empire. He said:

“Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and if the man who does not know Scripture does not know the power and wisdom of God, then ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”

Those are strong words coming from a man who lived at a time when supposedly the Church wanted to keep people ignorant of Scripture. Seems unlikely that they would have made such a man a Doctor of the Church if he was teaching things that cut against their policy of ignorance. 

“The Catholic Church kept the Bible in the Latin language long after it was a dead language. They did it to keep people from reading it.”

Actually, if the Catholic Church wanted to keep most people in the dark they would have kept it in the original Hebrew and Greek. However, because of the Roman Empire, Latin became a popular language. We do find other people providing translations of the Bible–sometimes not a full Bible–for different areas with different languages. A few I know off the top of my head are Saints Cyril and Methodius who translated the Gospels and other parts of the Bible into Slavonic. They lived in the 800s. We also have some German translations, too, around the time of Charlemagne in the 800s. What we need to keep in mind is that people couldn’t translate the Bible and not have it approved. Otherwise, any learned Joe could translate it and claim that it was good. We know what that would lead to–errors. The Catholic Church needed to look things over and make sure that it was a good, correct translation. This seems reasonable. Today, the Catholic Bible is translated into many, many languages. It’s much easier to do today now that we have printing presses and ways to fix errors easily.

Before I close this blog, I’d like to point out just a few more facts.

1. Jesus did not have a fully compiled Bible. He didn’t go around handing out Bibles to people. Neither did the Apostles. The fully compiled Bible didn’t come around until hundreds of years after they were gone from the earth. Christ must have intended his “Good News” to be spread in other ways outside of just the Bible. St. Paul tells us “Therefore, brothers, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.”  2 Thess. 2:15. Catholics do not hold to Sola Scriptura (the Bible Alone) as the only way to know and learn about God. 
2. The only reason anybody has a Bible is because of the Catholic Church. The Canon of Scripture was given to us by the Catholic Church at the end of the 4th century. It wasn’t until the 1500s that a Protestant Bible arrives on the scene. The Protestant Bible has seven books removed. They were removed by Martin Luther by his own authority.
3. The invention of the Gutenburg Printing Press happened at nearly the exact same time as the Protestant Reformation. In the same country, interestingly enough. After the printing press, we see a surge in Bibles being read and circulated around. Protestants are quick to believe that they were just the first ones actually encouraging it, but you can’t ignore that the printing press made them much more readily available than had been the case.   

I became Catholic in 2009 and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why this myth still exists. To be sure, there are numerous Catholics that don’t read their Bibles. Just like there are numerous Protestants that don’t either. I do admire that Protestants focus heavily on Scripture and the memorizing of it. It’s something all Christians should do.

Make no mistake though, if you go to a Catholic Mass, you will get a heavy dose of Bible reading. There are three Scripture readings. We sing a Psalm. Most of everything we say in our prayers is quoted from Scripture. We are encouraged all the time to read our Bibles. I actually just finished reading the Bible all the way through last year. Late, but better late than never. 

The Catholic Church up and down the ages has been for the Bible and wants it’s people to know what is in the Bible. Nobody has or is deliberately keeping it from us, I promise.