"Ignorance of scripture is ignorant of Christ"

Last Sunday we celebrated bible Sunday. In today's world,  reading the Bible may not seem as attractive or enticing as reading a best selling novel.  This beautiful event reminds me a beautiful quote stated by St. Jerome, which he once said " ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ." Saint Jerome is the doctor of the church where the church remembered for his great work in translating the bible into Latin, the edition known as vulgate. I guess for many people, the thought of reading the bible from cover to cover comes across as a daunting task. As a young adult like me, my enthusiasm was slowly waning as I found it more difficult to understand the Old Testament. I have heard over the years that other people also faced similar hurdles.

In the past, there were few opportunities for the laity to attend bible study. But, today there is a renewed desire to know the Word of God seeing that there are many programmes like prayer meeting that we have each week in our campus, faith formation in our parish, bible knowledge for school goers. Even though these programmes have rekindled the desire in many to understand better out scriptures, those attending are still only a fraction of the general catholic population in our campus. 

Programme organizer might be wondering why is it that people are not rushing to understand the scriptures. I guess many do not see the need to read or even study the Word of God and choose to remain ignorant.

This is a very sad reality that probably captures the general apathy shown by many Catholics. This lack of knowledge is also seen when many "good" Catholics give up their faith when challenged by Bible weilding Christians or other faith believer for that matter.

I guess one of the reason why many Catholics throw in the towel easily is because they do not realize that we Catholics actually quote scripture all the time. Yes, nearly everything we say at Mass has its roots in sacred scripture. When we attend mass, we hear a reading from the Old Testament, we recite or sing one of the Psalms; we listen to a reading from the Epistles and followed by a Gospel reading. The whole structure fits together so that the Eucharistic service is focused on Christ in the Gospels. The church's liturgical calendar follows three years cycle of scripture reading. So a catholic who goes to church faithfully will have heard almost the entire bible read over the three years.

Furthermore, the responses, and the words of the communion service are almost all from scripture. So a church going catholic does know and use scriptures for their primary meditation and worship (ps.119:48), but they failed to recognize that it also act as a personal information and instruction for life. Even our catholic doctrines and moral teachings are biblically based and permeated and upheld with scripture. We need to understand the scriptures better to see how our faith is rooted and grounded in the bible.

Pope Francis once said, "to live according to the Gospel is to fight against selfishness. The Gospel is forgiveness and peace; it is love that comes from God."

So don't be ignorant, read and understand the Bible.