American Catholics and the Intellectual Life

Abstract

By tradition I mean the intellectual heritage of the past. In this usage tradition comprehends the Bible. At one time it might have been thought that Catholics were less linked to the Bible than were Protestants, and at the level of popular religious culture Catholics were in fact less educated in the Bible than Protestants up until Vatican II. In the centuries follow ing the Reformation Protestant emphasis on alone generated a Catholic de-emphasis on Scripture. With the rise of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century Catholics were handicapped by the absence of critical Catholic hermeneutics. Only since Divino afflante spiritu of Pius XII has Catholic biblical scholarship been given high ecclesial encourage ment; only since Vatican II has there been restoration, at a popular level, of the primary place of the Word of God; so that it is less than a generation that the whole Bible has been put forward as an integral element of Catholic culture. But at no time was even popular culture cut off from the Bible. The Epistles and the Gospels of every Mass came from Scripture. The Good Samaritan, the Woman Taken in Adultery, the Good Shepherd, the Nativity, the Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus, the Resurrec tion — these were stories and events and persons familiar to Catholics in scriptural language, part of the Catholic consciousness. At all times for Catholics seriously interested in theology Scripture was starting-point and bedrock. To have access on a weekly or daily basis to this cultural treasure is an immense intellectual advantage. Imagine a people formed by listen ing every Sunday to Homer or to Vergil: they would have a range of reference denied to Sunday golfers. The people brought up on the parables of Jesus, the exhortations of Paul, and the lessons of the Prophets

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 69 citations exist upstream.