The Catholic Church and the Bible

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 29, 1906

The Catholic Church and the Bible

At the Winona Lake Bible Conference, held last August at Winona Lake, Ind., Jeremiah J. Crowley, a Catholic priest who is working for a reformation in his own church, delivered an address upon “The Real Attitude of the Catholic Church toward the Bible.” From the verbatim report of this address, printed in The Bible Record, we take the following paragraphs:—

The Roman Catholic hierarchy does not want the Catholic laity to possess and to read the Holy Bible. Such possession and reading would lead to the exercise of the right of private judgment. The teaching supremacy of the church goes down before the exercise of private judgment. An open Bible in the hands of the Catholic laity means the annihilation of the autocratic power of the Catholic hierarchy. If the Catholic laity could be induced to study any one of the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, they would be emancipated from clerical tyranny. . . .

The Roman Catholic hierarchy does not want Catholic priests to be students of the Holy Bible. The divine Word might be the leaven of a reformation in their private lives, and they might attempt reformations in the church at large, looking to the ending of the usurpations of the hierarchy. . . .

What about those papal deliverances which apparently favor the circulation of the Holy Bible among the Catholic people? . . . All such papal utterances must be read and interpreted in the light of the hierarchy’s uncompromising hatred of the exercise of the right of private judgment. How nonsensical it is to urge the laity to read the Bible, and at the same time to forbid them to exercise any right of judgment in interpreting it! Such a course is equivalent to giving a loaf to a starving man, and at the same time forbidding him to cut it! The Roman Catholic hierarchy well knows that it is an absolute impossibility for any man, who is not an idiot, to read the Holy Bible and not to indulge in the exercise of private judgment. . . .

The Holy Bible is full of things which bear on esoteric Catholicism, and a Bible-reading laity could not help interpreting them as being so many rebukes of the unchristlikeness of their priests and prelates, and as being so many anathemas against their hierarchy’s greed of gold, fever of ambition, and lust of power. . . .

The apparently liberal attitude of the hierarchy toward the circulation of the Holy Bible among the Catholic people is a position which it is forced to take by the mighty influence of the enlightened scholarship of this day of grace, and by the general spirit of progress which is in the very atmosphere of Christendom. At heart, however, the Catholic hierarchy cherishes the same hostility toward the diffusion of the knowledge of the Word of God which possessed it in the heyday of its power, when it persecuted unto death devoted readers and followers of the blessed Book. . . .

The Catholic people are in abject ignorance of the Holy Bible. If they own a copy of it, it is not that they may read and ponder it, but that they may have it as a sort of charm. Not five per cent of the Catholic people of America possess Bibles, and in benighted Catholic countries Bibles are like angels’ visits—few and far between. . . . I beg you never to forget that the real attitude of the Roman Catholic hierarchy toward the circulation of the Holy Bible among the Catholic people is one of studied duplicity.

In determining the truthfulness and reliability of this testimony concerning the Catholic Church and the Bible, it should be remembered that these statements are made by one who defines his position thus: “I am not ‘a deposed priest,’ I am not ‘an excommunicated priest,’ I am not ‘a former priest’—I am a Catholic priest. Whoever says that I am not a Catholic priest, in good standing, utters, in the same breath, a falsehood and a calumny.” These charges are therefore not made by a Protestant or by an ex-Catholic, but by a Catholic priest. Furthermore, they are in harmony with the history, the spirit, and the policy of the Roman Catholic Church, which places tradition above the Bible, and teaches its communicants to look to man instead of to God. Catholicism could not stand before an open Bible in the hands of the people, with the divine right of private judgment granted.