How can a billion people be so consistently misunderstood?

I came across this article about the Catholic Church today and was amazed--a group of bishops in Britain has released a paper which seems to state absolutely nothing new in terms of Catholic dogma, and yet it is big news:

The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

Let's be clear here: the Church has long taught that large parts of the Bible can only be understood as allegory or in other literary senses. The fetish with the Bible as inerrant history is a product of the Fundamentalists. They would probably argue strenuously that Alexander visited Jerusalem (as it is claimed in Maccabees) when the Catholic Church's position is more like "so?" Check out any of the Church's writings on the subject and you'll see. But I also have little patience for people that look to apocalyptic literature for prophecy, rather than using it in its proper context as a code sign of conditions at the time of composition.

There is also a bit of a slam on "intelligent design," linking it incorrectly and unnecessarily to Biblical passages: "Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing 'intelligent design' to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began."

But the worst of this article is its misstatement concerning Pope St. Pius X (above), whose crusade against Modernism is often referenced by modern commentators but which is almost always misunderstood. The article says

Only a century ago, Pope Pius X condemned Modernist Catholic scholars who adapted historical-critical methods of analysing ancient literature to the Bible.

And yet this has very little to do with the truth: St. Pius was not opposed to such scholarship, but only the notion that scripture could only be understood in this way. What he abhored, as is indicated by his famous Oath Against Modernism (1910), is a scholar who "with no prudence or restraint adopts textual criticism as the one and supreme norm."

The Oath makes for excellent reading and is, frankly, extremely relevant today, given the current fashionability of the argument that eternal truths somehow need to "evolve" with the times.

Tags: Catholic, Catholicism, Pius X, Bible