Feast of Saint George (23 April 2009)

Since the city of Rome is about six hours ahead of us here in Houston, the morning email from the Vatican Information Service usually brings to us the statements that the Holy Father has made the night before while we were still asleep. Today, there is a very good statement that he made to the members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, the highest Catholic group concerned with the interpretation of the Bible.

Just yesterday, a group of parishioners who had come for our Wednesday luncheon got to talking about the interpretation of the Bible and I was reminded of an incident from my teaching days in Nashville, Tennessee. Although I was teaching in a Catholic college, most of my students were not Catholic since the population of Nashville is predominantly non-Catholic. One day, something came up in class about how many people will be saved. One young woman in my class, a member of one of the evangelistic groups, said that no more than 144,000 will be saved. “It says so in the Bible,” she stated. I asked her if she realized that 144,000 is only about .000002 of the PRESENT population of the earth, to say nothing of the past and future. That means that our chances of being saved are extremely small. But the Bible says it, so she was going to stick with that figure, come what may!

That little exchange points out the necessity of interpreting the Bible correctly. Was she right? Or was I right in holding that we must have guidance in our interpreting of the Bible, and that guidance is available only in the Church?

We believe and hold that God has revealed Himself and the truths about Himself in two ways: we call them Scripture (the Bible) and Tradition (the interpreting of the Bible by the Church and also the teaching of certain truths that are not mentioned in the Bible.) Thus, the Church has never seen the Bible as the one and only source of divine revelation. Catholics who do not know or understand this are sometimes at a loss when a non-Catholic asks, “Why do you believe this or that? It isn’t in the Bible.” The existence of Purgatory, the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven, the value of our praying to the saints —these things are not taught explicitly in the Bible, but they are certainly are a very important part of the Sacred Tradition of the Church.

We must remember that we do not believe only what the Bible teaches, but rather we believe what the Church teaches, including the fact that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Thus, with us, the Church comes first and then gives us the Bible, not the other way around. For the first twenty-five years or so after the birth of the Church at Pentecost, there was no NEW Testament at all—only the preaching of the Apostles. Then Saint Paul and the evangelists began writing what we now call the NEW Testament.

We are tremendously grateful for Divine Revelation, both Scripture and Tradition, and for the security that we enjoy by our acceptance of Christ’s institution of his Church and the Magisterium, which means the teaching function of the Church down through the ages. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.