The Demise of Catholic Scripture Scholarship

How did we reach a point where the higher levels of Catholic scholarship take almost nothing in the Bible at face value? This book traces that story. During the reign of Pius XII, a turning point came: in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, Pius judged it beneficial for Catholic scholars to use the exegetical tools of what is called historical criticism, which seeks to apply scientific analysis to a written document, asking whether it is authentic, when it was written, who wrote it, what sources lie behind it, and how far the author was shaped by his culture.

Historical criticism is not bad in itself, and used properly it can serve the study of literature well. But when good tools fall into agenda-driven hands, bad things follow. Catholic liberals, dissenting since the late 1800s, took advantage of Divino Afflante Spiritu and turned biblical scholarship into something Pius XII would scarcely have recognized. Today the resurrection of Christ, the Virgin Birth, and the very function of the papacy and the priesthood are questioned or rejected on historical-critical grounds, with the little that is granted as true confined to matters of salvation, drawn from a distorted reading of Vatican II's Dei Verbum 11. Robert Sungenis names the men and the moves behind this shift and shows what was lost.