During the Middle Ages, did the Catholic Church manifest hostility to the Bible as her adversaries claim? Under stress of special circumstances, various regulations were made by the Church to protect the people from being spiritully poisoned by the corrupted and distorted translations of the Bible; hence opposition to the Waldensians, Albigensians, Wycliff and Tyndale.

THEIR COMMENT: Individual churchmen may at times have gone too far in their zeal, not to belittle the Bible, but to protect it. There is no human agency in which authority is always exercised blamelessly.

FCFC'S ANSWER: Yes, the Roman Catholic church has manifested a great deal of hostility towards the Bible and those who followed it. The Waldensians, Albigensians, Lollards, and countless others suffered unthinkable persecution for clinging to God's word and refusing Rome's bible, traditions and pagan doctrines. The Council of Trent in 1546 called Jerome's Latin Vulgate the church's "authentic version", yet Pope Sixtus, in 1588 declared in a 300 word sentence, that the pope was the only proper person to decide the question of an authentic Bible. So he took it upon himself to rewrite the Bible, which took him 18 months. The work was so disastrous, that as soon as he died, Rome did everything she could to cover up the blunder of her "infallible" pope. The truth is that Rome really has little need for the Bible in her ritualistic system of traditions. Catholicism is obvious in her contempt for the Bible as shown by dialogue from The Question Box Column, Brooklyn Tablet, Nov. 8, 1958:

"Tradition as a source of Faith would suffice without Scripture".

At the Council of Toulouse ( 1229), Gregory 1X forbad the laity to read the Bible and pronounced, "It is the duty of every Catholic to persecute heretics" (Vicars of Christ, De Rosa, 162). Rather than accuse the Roman Catholic Church of not loving God's Holy word, we have decided to let her speak for herself. The following quotes are taken from Catholic sources only.

�The very nature of the Bible ought to prove to any thinking man the impossibility of its being the one safe method to find out what the Savior taught� (Question Box, 67, 1913 edition).

�The Bible does not pretend to be a formulary of belief, as is a creed or a catechism. There is nowhere in the New Testament a clear, methodical statement of the teaching of Christ� (Question Box, 66).

�Again, it has ever been practically impossible for men to generally, find out Christ from the Bible only� (Question Box, 70).

�The Scripture indeed is a divine book but it is a dead letter, which has to be explained, and eannot exercise the action which the preacher can obtain� (Our Priesthood, 155).

�A dead and speechless book� (Question Box, 67).

�The sacred writers may have been unaware of the fact of their inspiration" (Question Box, 80). (Not according to 1Cor.14:37 where Pau1 said, �...the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.�)

�The reformation produced indeed an exaggerated individualism, which by declaring every man equally competent to md out the doctrine of the Savior from his own private reading of the Scriptures, has led millions to the utter denial of Christ� (Question Box, 131).

�At Toledo, A young woman who had gained a reputation of virtue, petitioned to be admitted (to a monastery) to the habit, but added: �I will bring with me my Bible.� �What!� said the Saint (Teresa), �Your Bible? Do not come to us. We are poor women who know nothing but to spin and to do what we are bid�� (Butler�s Lives of Saints, X, 366).

�The Protestants start with the unproved assumption that the Bible is the inspired word of God� (Question Box, 66).

�On the contrary, we do not in any way presuppose that the books of the New Testament are inspired but only that they are genuine, authentic documents, written by honest men� (Question Box, 80).

�Inspiration does not prevent the , author of Leviticus from being the I most boring of lawyers, the compiler of the Chronicles from being totally devoid of talent, or the author of the Apocalypse from making many syntactical mistakes in his Greek� (Henri Daniel-Rops, 20th Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Volume 60, 47).

�There is no reason to suppose the author of the book, i.e., of Esther, received any revelation� (Catholic Dictionary, 450).

�More than this, parts of the Bible are evidently unsuited to the very young or to the ignorant, and hence Clement XI condemned the proposition that the reading of the Scripture is for all� (Catholic Dictionary, 82) (Luke 10:21 records Jesus thanking the Father that He has given unto babes what He has kept from the learned!).

�The Catholic Church is opposed chiefly by three enemies; the civil power...Bible Reading Protestantism; and infidelity� (History of the Catholic Church, Brennan, 242).

�It is said that we deprive the Faithful of the word of God, which is the soul's daily bread. We may answer this falsehood by stating that while, indeed the Scripture is our soul's daily bread, Mother Church purportions it to our needs. Just as parents do not give the whole loaf to their children, or a knife with which to cut it lest they injure themselves, so is it the duty of the Church, of the priest or the preacher, to distribute the spiritual bread of the word of God to the people in portions suited to their requirements. It is said that the word of God is the light of the world. Well indeed we do admit this truth. But we do not place a lighted candle in a child's hands, lest he burn himself� (The Priest, His Dignity and Obligations, �St�. John Eudes, 9).

�From all which it must be abundantly clear that the Bible alone is not a safe and competent guide because it is not now and has never been accessible to all, because it is not clear and intelligible to all, and because it does not contain all the truth of the Christian religion� (Finding Christ's Church, John O'Brien, 20).

�His (Ezekiel's) book is amazingly confused. It claims to have been written in exile at Babylon. But the many obvious and curious editorial tricks have given rise to the hypothesis that the oracles were uttered in Palestine, then touched up and published at Babylon... Numerous obscurities in the text...It is for exegetes and the theologians and, in the last resort, for the teaching authority of the Catholic church, to discriminate between what is mythical in the Biblical text and what in the myth deserves to be retained as true. That a serpent spoke is a myth" (20th Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Vol. 29 and 63).

�The events related in Holy Scripture are only occasionally correlated with events of secular history and are seldom dated according to an era or epoch... Those that precede the time of Abraham, cannot be determined even approximately. In Genesis 5 and 10, we have fables of chronological units, but for various reasons the numbers given in our present text are considered corrupted and the fables themselves incomplete...During the period of the two kingdoms we come to the first dates on which all authorities agree, because they are found recorded on Assyrian monuments� (Catholic Dictionary, Vatican Edition, 212).

�The chapters with which the Bible begins, the book of Genesis, obviously belong to a complex species of literature in which history, popular tradition and folklore, moral teaching and cosmogonical revelation are all mixed together and borne aloft on the wings of admirable poetry. As for the actual history to be found in the Bible, it is perfectly obvious that it does not obey the often ridiculously artificial criteria of the historical science of today" (20th Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Vo1.60, Henri Daniel-Rops, 52).

�Here is a chapter that presents formidable difficulties. Ever since Galileo it has been the object of learned discussion. Moses described God's creating the universe in six days. But science has proved that our earth broke off from the sun millions of years ago. The gradual cooling and hardening of this earth, the formulation of continents and seas, the invasion of glaciers, form an epic narrative of staggering time proportions. Only in quite recent times did this earth bring forth the animals and vegetation of today, these having evolved gradually from different forms. Can the six days of which Moses speaks be these long periods described by geologists? �Answering the oft-repeated query, the association replies: �Certainly they are not�. Moses knew nothing of modern science: his picture of the universe is quite naive, no further advanced, in fact, than that of the people among whom he lived three tbousand years ago�� (Getting the Most Out of'the Bible, O'Brien, 16).

�Yet it does happen that some devout Christians experience a certain disappointment when they open the Bible. They expect to find uplifting and heartwarming phrases and are faced instead with dry lists of ritual observances, fierce imprecations of some of the prophet and the enigmatic sentences of the Apocalypse-if not the matrimonial adventures of the Kings. It must be admitted that the Bible in no way resembles a manual of devotion; apart from the Gospels and sapiential books, it has little to offer the believer nourished on the Imitation even the Spiritual Exercise St. Ignatius of Loyola� (20th Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Vol. 60, Henri Daniel- Rops, 112-113).

�In other spiritual books the truths of the Bible are presented more fully, and in a more modern and familiar style, so that we can hardly wonder that they are, as a rule preferred" (Plain Facts For Fair Minds, Searle, 154).

To sum up Catholic teaching on the Holy word of God, we see they feel the Bible is "not a safe book�(Question Box,.67), it was "forbidden for hundreds of years" (Catholic Dictionary, 82, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 273-278), that "other books are better and are preferred" (Plain Facts, 154), that "Bible reading has led millions away from the Catholic Church (Question Box, I 31 ), that Bible reading does" "more harm than good" (Council of Trent, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 274), that "the Catholic Church does not need the Bible" (Plain Facts, 33), that "the Bible is not clear" (Question Box, 66), that "it is impossible to learn the truth from it" (Plain Facts, 132,133), and that it is "not fit to read" (Catholic Dictionary 32, 1937 Franciscan Almanac, I 14).

FCFC�S COMMENT: God declares His word is pure, perfect, inerrant, infallible, living, sure, truth, light, holy, eternal, forever settled in heaven, illuminates, cleanses, saves, heals, sanctifies, brings conviction, gives knowledge, gives wisdom, it frees, produces faith, is a guide, converts the soul, is sweeter than honey, it is meat, milk, bread, a seed, a lamp, a hammer, our only weapon (a sword), a fire, it quickens, judges, defeats Satan, refutes error, irrevocable, it searches the heart and mind, equips for every good work, is above His Name (Prov.30:5; Psa.138:2, 119:9, 28, 43, 50, 89, 103, 105, 130, 140, 160, 169, 19:7, 8, 107:20; Isa.40:8; Eph.5:26; 2 Tim. 3:15-17; Jer.5:14, 23:29; I Pet. 1:23, 2:2; Acts 20:32; Jn. 8:32, 10:35, 12:48, 17:17; Heb.5:12-14).

�The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the LORD; and what wisdom is in them.�

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page