How strange

1. Darwin the dolphin left...

Before Vatican Council II, it wasn't allowed to read the Bible, just excerpts of it chosen beforehand by authorities of the church. I like the Gospels more than anything else in the Bible and I'm glad we can read them fully.

2. Spacefrog left...

The Bible does contain a lot of sexual and violent content, and I think it ought to be subject to the same rules as any other book. If the rules would lead to the Bible being restricted to over-18s then I think it's the rules themselves are too restrictive, not the Bible that should be given special treatment.

I'm sure there are lots of other 18-rated films and books that portray rape and violence but don't encourage it. I wonder if the Rev Wu Chi-wa would want to see them de-classified.

3. BlackPhi left...

It always makes me smile when people talk about 'Biblical family values'.

There is a difference, though, between the Bible being realistic about the fact that there are families which are broken in some way, yet somehow God can work through those messed up situations; as opposed to a magazine encouraging its readers to fantasize about incest and bestiality. It depends really on what the criteria are in the relevant Hong Kong law - is the problem simply mentioning such issues, or is it to do with how they are mentioned?

4. BlackPhi left...

Incidentally, the Roman Catholic Church has officially been in favour of lay people reading the Bible since the early 17th century. For example the official RC English translation for several centuries, the Douai-Reims Bible, was published in 1610, before the King James version (actually the New Testament was published back in 1582, but the OT took rather longer). Second Vatican emphasised the continuing importance of Bible study, but as a corrective to what was seen as a waning in such an important spiritual discipline.

5. Darwin left...

Maybe in English it was an exception. In many other parts of the world and until the beginning of the XX Century only an elite had direct access to the Bible. Not exclusively but one of the main reasons was, according to Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, that "some eclesiastic authorities distrusted the reading of the Bible by lay people". This distrust, he adds in his writing, started when some religious groups in the Middle Ages promoted the direct contact of lay people with the Scripture, because they were doing it outside of the ecclesiastical context. Paul IV in 1559 and Pius IV in1564, while announcing the index of forbidden books, forbade also printing or having Bibles written in vulgar languages if it were not with a special permit. The Latin Vulgata was in print, yes, but not many understood Latin. By 1757 vulgar language editions of the Bible, translated from the Vulgata, were allowed only if approved by the authorities and only if having notes to explain the content. Scholars of course were allowed to study the Bible and also other people if for good reasons, but generally speaking, reading by lay people was discouraged until the XX Century. Women of my mother's generation tell me that for them the church prepared special books with stories from the Bible, and of course there was the Catechism, with all the needed answers. It was until Vatican II that the direct reading of the Bible was really popularized. According to my sources, that is.

6. BlackPhi left...

England, and therefore English, was a big battleground between Protestant and Roman Catholic faiths in the late 16th Century, of course. When Protestants started producing English versions of the Bible, the RC authorities seem to have suddenly changed track - they wanted their laity to read their version, which, as you say, was heavily annotated, as well as being based on the Latin Vulgate, rather than the Greek commonly used by Protestants. Somewhere round the house I've got an old Knox Bible from the early 1950's which also has lots of interesting annotations.

I think one of the many problems that Vatican II tried to address was that local practice around the world differed so much from the official position of the central authority; lay use of Scripture was likely one of these. For example Pope Pius XII in 1943, in Divino Afflante Spiritu quoted Leo XIII in 1893 as promoting the use of the Bible by all the members of the (RC) church: "that such an excellent source of Catholic revelation might be more securely and abundantly available to the advantage of the Christian flock". Similarly he quotes Pius X as promoting reading and meditating on Scripture, "to dissipate the idea that the Church is opposed to or in any way impedes the reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular". How far back these ideas go before Leo XIII is hard to tell, not least because of the habit popes seem to have of claiming that their ideas are never anything new - they are always 'what the Church has always said'.

Clearly, official approval of lay Bible reading goes back at least to the nineteenth century, well before Vatican II; but, from your mother's experience, it is also clear that the official view didn't always reach the ground.

7. Jonathan left...

Check out EvilBible.com - I don't think any contemporary book or magazine could even come close to competing with the carnage and horrors contained in the Bible.

8. Darwin left...

If the magazine includes some articles on Iraq and terrorism, it would reflect a lot of evil too.