They Will Know We are Catholic by How We Highlight Our Bibles

The other day, while waiting for my laundry at the laundromat, I read St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans in my Jewish Annotated New Testament. There I was, sitting on the floor, book open in front of me, highlighter in one hand and soda in the other and it dawns on me. I see that I’ve been highlighting the notes twice as much as I’ve been highlighting the actual text. What a Catholic thing to do?

What on Earth do I mean by that? As a Catholic, I recognize that I can’t just read Scripture and interpret what it says on my own. What would keep me from making something up that’s completely wrong? As a Catholic, I have centuries of scholars and theologians to lean on. That doesn’t mean I can’t have some new insight, but it does mean that I don’t have to start from scratch.

The Catholic Church has two authorities: Scripture and Tradition. Tradition can never contradict Scripture and, in a sense, Scripture is a product of Tradition. They are dependent upon one another. Neither can be really understood without the other. The Second Vatican Council’s document, Dei Verbum (Word of God), puts it better that I ever could:

“Hence there exists a close connection and communication between sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit. To the successors of the apostles, sacred Tradition hands on in its full purity God’s word, which was entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit. “Thus, by the light of the Spirit of truth, these successors can in their preaching preserve this word of God faithfully, explain it, and make it more widely known. Consequently it is not from sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same devotion and reverence.”

So, as Catholics, reading the commentary is mandatory. The Church’s teachings keeps us safe from errors and helps us to understand scripture better.

And consider the patience of our Lord as salvation, as our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, also wrote to you,speaking of these things as he does in all his letters. In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures.- 2 Peter 3:15-16

St. Peter, a contemporary of Paul, had difficulty understanding St. Paul’s writings. How can we, two thousand years later, expect to understand Paul’s letter to the Romans any better without the aid of Tradition?