Originally published at crisis magazine
It’s a longstanding Protestant trope that “Catholics don’t read the Bible.” To be fair, there is some truth in this. Throughout much of Church history, most Catholics did not read the Bible, simply because most people couldn’t read. Widespread illiteracy and the massive costs of producing a Bible before the advent of the printing press made it nearly impossible for the average lay Catholic to read, much less own, a Bible. (This, by the way, is the origin of the infamous locked Bibles in Catholic medieval churches; parishes were simply protecting an expensive item from theft) Protestantism can’t even exist in a world without a printing press and a literate populace.
Even after literacy increased and publication costs dropped, Protestants continued to repeat this stereotype, and there was still some truth to it. The fact was that Catholics often did not read the Bible as Protestants did—at home on their own. This doesn’t mean that Catholics weren’t exposed to the Bible. In the Mass of the day (now known as the traditional Latin Mass), Scripture was infused into the entirety of the Mass. Of course there were the two Scriptural readings (the Epistle and the Gospel), and also most of
