These passages form a backdrop for a reflexion on the Sunday of the Word of God. It is fitting that the Pope wants us to have a firmer grasp of God’s Word because we keep hearing that Catholics do not know the Bible. Time and again the point has been hammered home that Catholics are weak in their biblical knowledge.
Maybe the Sunday of the Word of God can offer a corrective to the oft-repeated label that Catholics are scripturally ignorant. To contextualise, this lack of biblical proficiency would not have been a problem 500 years ago. This label may not have risen if we did not undergo the tumultuous division of the Protestant Reformation. Prior to Luther’s revolt, Catholics were also “illiterate” but that presented no difficulty because their “ignorance” was not what we would designate it as such today. The present measure for literacy is based on the ability to read and write. It is quite a modern standard. 500 years ago, a person who does not know how to “read” or “write” formally could not be considered as entirely illiterate.
Prior to the application of this contemporary norm for literacy, Church buildings were catechetical. The Church taught through the sacramentals of buildings, statues, stained glasses, colours, gestures and formalised rituals. In other words through signs and symbols we communicate. We learn not solely through reading and writing—not purely through the faculties of the intellect. If we consider the acquisition of knowledge beyond these two abilities of reading and writing, then we would expanded the capacity to grasp knowledge through signs and symbols. For example, the colour red is now festooned all over our Mary’s Square. What is red if not the colour of prosperity used to signify the coming Lunar New Year?
The Latin adage “lex orandi, lex credendi” is helpful to illustrate why Catholics have remained “scripturally illiterate”. As mentioned above, in the past, our knowledge of Sacred Scripture did not come solely from “studies”, understood as formal education. The term “praying theology” was used to describe the Scholastics. For the early Church Fathers and subsequently, the Scholastics, theology was as much a formal discipline as it was a praying matter. Praying or "orandi" was part and parcel of coming to know. In other words, in coming to know “about” God, they also knew God personally through praying. A theologian was also a kneeling theologian. What is different today is that one can be a professional theologian without having even to believe in the studies one is engaged in. Theology is merely an academic interest on par with reading law or biology or mathematics. St Thomas Aquinas would make an excellent portrait of what it means that theology was a praying matter and not just a speculative exercise.
If we conceive of theology in terms of praying, then we may be able to recognise that our liturgy is steeped in Sacred Scripture. Just one of myriad examples, one of the triple blessings given at the end of baptism implores that the Lord may bless the newly baptised so that he or she can keep the flame of faith of alive until Christ comes. This benediction is an echo of the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. What this means is that we may not know the Bible precisely but our liturgy is pregnant with references to Sacred Scripture.
In the 3-year cycle of Sunday Readings, Years A, B and C, we cover all four of the Evangelists. Together with the 2-year cycle of Daily Mass Readings, the celebration of the Eucharist would have allowed us to embrace a substantial corpus of the Bible. All we need is to attend Mass faithfully for the 3 complete years and we would have engaged the Bible extensively.
Catholic rites and liturgies allow us to act out the Bible in the fullest sense of the word because Christianity is a story to be proclaimed and heard. After all, “in the beginning was the Word”. God spoke and the world with all its wonders were created. John’s Gospel did not open with the line “in the beginning was the Video”. Hence, through proclamation and hearing, we are carried into the heart of God’s Word. In hearing, the best place is usually within the context of a meal where food is shared and stories are passed on from one generation to another. The Jewish meal setting became our Catholic Eucharist.
Soon, that was not enough. Incrementally, the experience had to be formalised. For Catholic, the Road to Emmaus slowly developed into an ordered “meal”. The Emmaus experience, which is the Lucan depiction of the Eucharist, slowly became ritualised. Likewise, the canon of Sacred Scripture had to be specified to avoid confusion. In due time, the Church settled on the 27 books we know as the New Testament. Long before Johann Gutenberg made his appearance through the printing press, the Bible was both heard and seen through the Eucharistic rituals. Prior to mass printing, sacred texts were painstakingly copied in scriptoria of monasteries and as such, manuscripts were rare. Hence, the seeing part and the “illiteracy of the Bible amongst Catholics”. But we were not left with no biblical imagination as St Francis of Assisi brought the birth of Christ to life through the re-enactment of the crèche or crib-set. Thus through statues and stained glassed, the Church sought to inspire the minds and hearts of believers.
What Gutenberg’s printing press heralded was the possibility of Luther’s “Sola Scriptura”. In the meantime, Catholic Scriptura remained rooted in the vast living tradition as experienced through the Church’s liturgical rites, her art and architecture and pious devotions.
There is a verse from the first chapter of John’s Gospel, imprinted on the frieze of the altar in Loreto’s Holy House of Nazareth, where Mary was born, and it states, “Hic Verbum caro factum est”. “Here the Word was made flesh” is essentially the basis for the Catholic fondness or predilection for the Sacraments. We are not sacramental for the sake of the Sacraments. Instead, there is an interplay between the Word and the Sacraments and by extension, the sacramentals. There is a reciprocity between hearing the Word proclaimed and seeing the Word in action. Pope St Leo the Great in a sermon on the Ascension memorialised Christ’s going away in a quote that asserted, “the Redeemer’s visible presence has passed into the Sacraments”. Christ is no longer with us physically but He remains with us Sacramentally. For that way, we can reinterpret St Jerome’s warning that “ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ” as “knowledge of the Sacraments is the knowledge of Christ”.
In other words, Catholics may not know the Bible the way the Protestants do but we do know the Sacraments. We know Christ through the Sacraments. In short, through the faithful and reverential celebration of the Sacraments, we live and breathe the Bible. What remains for Catholics is to catch up with formal knowledge which brings up two points for us to consider.
We ought to know our Scriptural texts, not because of the Protestant shaming us for our lack of academic, explicit and precise knowledge. At it says in 1 Peter 3:15, “Always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you all have”. Knowledge of the Catechism and Sacred Scripture gives us the added advantage of explaining and defending our biblically-founded faith. Secondly, how much more real and personal, as we heard in the 1st Reading, when we begin to appreciate how scripturally-steeped our liturgy is. Our Sacraments are fertile rituals that spring from a Biblical oasis.
If the Sunday of the Word of God is to make us know the bible more intimately, perhaps we should start with knowing our liturgy more deeply for it is in our rites and ceremonies of 2000 years that Sacred Scripture is alive. Time for Catholics take ownership of a faith that is biblically sound. Be proud but not in a triumphalistic manner. Be proud as in be assured that the Church founded by Christ did not deviate from the Word that He is. “All He was on earth has now passed into the Sacraments” means that we must celebrate our Sacraments with greater reverence, rigour and response so that the Bible can come alive as we begin to acknowledge how every Sacrament is Christ Himself acting for us.
We should heed the Pope. Sunday of the Word of God is the Church desiring us to be enveloped in a “sensum scriptura”, if my pig Latin can be trusted, that is, in the sense of Sacred Scripture, but not according to Luther’s “sola scriptura”. Our Catholic sensibility takes us through the liturgy where the Word is proclaimed, heard, seen, tasted, smelled and touched. To know and love the liturgy gives us a chance to appreciate God’s Word—Jesus Christ—more profoundly alive and acting through the Church. In the liturgy, touched by His grace, we gather His strength to live Him more radically and to serve Him more readily. In an age which has lost its mooring in God, we might just be the only living Bible the world may hear, see and touch.
