3058 AUL Fr Moloney on Bible
austraLasia #3058

When Catholics dropped the Bible

MELBOURNE: 26 April 2012 -- In an interview that you could watch if you wished (click on Frank's photo!) given on 17th April 2012, Fr Frank Moloney, described by Eureka Street as as "Australian Salesian priest, one of the world's leading biblical scholars" reflects on where the Catholic Church is at in terms of its approach to the Bible and biblical scholarship today in a year that we celebrate 50 years since Vatican II.

Asked how Protestants and Catholics have differed in their approach to the Bible, Frank stresses how the Word of God, certainly since Martin Luther's time, has always been fundamental to Protestant life and practice (The Word, Christ, and Faith). Catholics, on the other hand, 'treasured' the Bible but during the Counter Reformation moved to a more defensive position which stressed Mass, Sacraments and saw less need for the biblical text. The Bible simply 'dropped out', as he put it.

Vatican II changed the Catholic stance towards the Bible, radically. Not once but three times it insisted that there is the 'table' of Word and Eucharist and both nourish us. This affirmation the then young scholar Moloney found 'exciting' as he completed his doctoral studies, but since that time, he has seen the Church yet again adopting a more defensive position where the Bible has not taken up the role that ot should have taken.

That said, Frank, asked if Catholic and Protestant Biblical scholarship had come any closer after Vatican II, assures the interviewer that this is indeed so: 'you'd hardly distinguish between them', he says. 'We share the same methods, the same desire'. Scholars - there are always fringe elements of course, who diverge from the mainstream, be they Catholic or Protestant - have a very close association and in fact publish in the same Journals.

Perhaps the nub of the interview occurs when Frank is asked how we should interpret the biblical texts today. It is at this point that one senses the tone change, the passion coming through: 'These texts still speak to us' he says, 'but it's how we get there that matters!'  How we get beyond a fundamentalist reading is what matters.  We have to rediscover the faith experience of those early Christian communities which gave birth to the Gospels, recpature and re-present this experience for today.

Which leads to the inevitable question about fundamentalism, especially in the light of events which have unfolded in contemporary society, and which lead back to fundamentalist interpretations of sacred texts. There is a tendency to want to find ready-made answers to contemporary problems. Frank cites the obvious case of predictions from Revelation about the end of the world, which amount to interpretations imposed on the texts that its authors never intended. Or the 'Creation story' read as historical, which he cites as a 'worst case'. The problem is that fundamentalist interpretations seem to offer security and the believe that 'God told me'.