What do Catholics Believe about the Bible?
How does God speak to us?
We, as Catholics, believe that God speaks to humans both in our personal prayer life, and also in the community, in the communal prayer life. We also believe that God speaks to us in the Bible, and through the Church.
Essentially, Catholics believe that the Bible is the Word of God. The writers of the Bible, acting under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote what God wanted communicated. While God did not dictate the Bible, God did inspire the sacred writers to put into the text what God wanted communicated. As a result, Catholics believe that the Bible is THE book, in the sense that the Word of God, with a long tradition of reverence in the Christian Community, is active and alive today.
But Catholic also know that the Bible must be interpreted, so we also look to Tradition, to see that the Word of God must be correctly read under the grace of the Holy Spirit. Catholics essentially believe that the Church also provides the context to interpret the Sacred Scripture. Essentially Catholics believe that God speaks to Christians through the Bible and Sacred Tradition.
Catholics, in the quest of interpreting the Bible, recognize that the Bible is a collection of many books written over many different time periods. We believe that in order to understand what God intends, the reader of the Bible must take into consideration such factors as literary style, the language, time written, the needs of the community and other methods of modern biblical scholarship. Therefore we do not interpret the Bible literally, but look to interpret the meaning of the text in our every day lives.
Recognizing that our community of faith is a guide, we look to the Church to help us in finding God in our lives. We also welcome the legitimate advance of other fields of study, such as theology, morality, language, history and science, in the search for the truth.
Much of the Church's belief can be found in the Second Vatican Council Document Dei Verbum.
The Church and the Theory of Evolution
There is much controversy today about the role of the Bible and the Teaching of evolution. Essentially, Pope John Paul II recognizes that the creation stories in the book of Genesis tell us something true about ourselves and our world. But, they are not to be interpreted literally. Therefore, we see no conflict as Catholics between the creation stories of Genesis, which tell us of our spiritual origins and the place of God in our lives, and the theories of evolution, which attempt to explain how humans arrived here on earth.
The primary concern of the Church is that as an article of faith, we believe that creation was a definite action on God's part, and not purely accidental. If however God chose to create in a manner consistent with the theories of evolution, we don't see a conflict. We do not believe as Catholics that the creation stories in Genesis are meant to be a literal explanation of creation.