FRIDAY POTPOURRI: THE PHONE COMPANY USED TO CHAIN PHONE BOOKS TO THE PHONE BOOTH TOO

There was story about the Catholic Church that it used to chain its Bibles in the back of the church so that lay people could not take them away with them and have access to the Bible in their own home.  This is absolutely true.  Although the allegation was that they were doing so in order to keep Sacred Scriptures out of the hands of the faithful and therefore have greater control over the faithful, it was actually because all books were written by hand and were exceedingly expensive, rare, and time consuming to produce.  If you remember bank pens that were chained to the table where you wrote your deposit slip, the bank wasn't trying to keep pens out of the hands of non-bank personnel, they were trying to keep pens available to everybody.

 

In today's paragraph of Dei Verbum (22) the Council Fathers state that the Scriptures ought to be open to all the Christian faithful.  Not as easy a task as you might imagine.  A friend of mine has a parish not too far from here.  Once an exclusively English speaking neighborhood (after being heavily Italian) it then turned Spanish speaking then to be overwhelmed with (I believe) Korean speaking persons.  Now, if you have a few monks writing things out by hand and you are trying to make Scriptures available and it takes a couple of years to produce a book, how do you even get one done before a whole new group speaking a new language takes over the neighborhood assuming you have someone who can translate the Bible into their language in the first place? 

Easier it is today but not easy.  Who speaks Korean?  How do you have Mass and preach?  How do you find money to buy new song books and etc.?  If only we had a universal language.  But even if you do (and we do as reaffirmed by the Vatican II documents) that doesn't mean everybody understands it either.

 

Be that as it may, the Church promotes the translation of the Scriptures into all languages and even encourages, when it is possible and is deemed helpful, to translate them in cooperation with "separated brethren" so that one translation may be read by all Christians.