The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible—a Bible decades in the making, under the editorship of Steubenville scholars Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch—recently arrived in our bookstore. Students from the new College of St. Joseph the Worker were pushing to get in the door for a copy. “We want to learn how to read Scripture,” one of them said when I asked what the fuss was about. (According to the product description, the Ignatius Study Bible contains “explanatory notes for each biblical book, extensive cross references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and an array of visual and educational aids to bring the message of Scripture into clear focus for Catholic readers.”) As soon as I opened the box, I turned to Psalm 137. What I saw was extremely promising. Then the hordes arrived and took the books away.
Psalm 137 is perhaps the most beautiful of the psalms: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.” These are the last two verses:
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!
St. Benedict made the psalm part of the Monastic Office every day. (Most other psalms occur once a week.) He clearly believed these last verses were significant enough to ponder daily. Yet official policy at the Vatican since 1971 has been to silence them entirely. That year, St. Paul VI excised three whole psalms (57, 82, and 108), and parts of nineteen others, including the last three verses from Psalm 137, from the Liturgy of the Hours. And at his general audience on June 19, 2024, Pope Francis stated, “Not all Psalms—and not every part of every Psalm—can be repeated and assimilated by Christians, and even less by modern man.”
There is a reason for the omission, of course: These psalms contain vengeful and violent—the euphemism in biblical studies is imprecatory—language. So what are we supposed to do with them? Surely the all-loving God doesn’t want us to dash any babies against a rock. Why, then, should we read them?
We should read them because it is in these verses—the “dark passages,” as Benedict XVI called them—that the traditional Catholic way of reading Scripture shines. Catholics believe that we read with the mind of the Church, in communion with the saints. St. Benedict mentions these particular verses in the prologue to his Rule, noting that we should “dash the Devil’s thought-babies upon Christ.” St. Benedict himself was reading with St. Augustine—whose position on this passage is included in the Ignatius Study Bible: “What are the little ones of Babylon? Newborn evil desires. When lust is born, before it is strengthened by evil habit, while it is still little, dash it against the rock which is Christ.”
Catholics believe in reading the Bible together with authority. For our authority we take Christ, who said that “the entire Law and Prophets” are summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. St. Augustine elaborated on this in De Doctrina Christiana: “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”
What are your vices? Deal with them—your wicked desires, your wicked thoughts, the things that keep you from loving God and neighbor—when they are little, say these verses. The traditional Catholic reading of Psalm 137 builds up the twofold love that God himself says is the meaning of the Scriptures. St. Augustine tells us to be confident, even with interpretations that may seem far-fetched (though he welcomes corrections as well): “If, on the other hand, a man draws a meaning that may be used for the building up of love, even though he does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express in that place, his error is not pernicious, and he is wholly clear from the charge of deception.”
Christians have been wrestling with these psalms for centuries. And we shall continue to wrestle with them. The Bible is not a telephone book: It is shrouded in mystery, because mystery, the hiding of meaning behind a veil, teaches humility. The God who made the Scriptures made the universe. We do not understand. We must learn to suspend judgment. The God who made the Scriptures also made the Mass, which is our teacher of mysteries. Outer appearance and inner reality may diverge. What appears under the species of bread and wine may be something else. What appears under the species of a Babylonian baby may be something else. In the Mass we also learn that God feeds us; it is up to us, in our inner life, to digest that nourishment into a new form. In Scripture reading this is called “rumination,” where we by long meditation on a passage of Scripture digest its true meaning. The meanings of some passages, like the meanings of some events in our lives, may only be disclosed by careful attention and the passage of time. They are parabolic parables: an upward journey disguised as an initial descent. The Bible, as the Steubenville scholars at Franciscan University keep telling us, is a thoroughly Catholic book.
Every time these “dark passages” appear, it is an opportunity for a good preacher to explain these mysteries: that we may need to seek wisdom from authority, that things may not be as they appear, that understanding comes with patience, that love is the meaning of it all. Since 1971, the Catholic Church has neglected to perform this duty, with predictable results. The Bible is one of our foundations. When you start taking bricks away from the foundation, what happens to the building that rests upon it? This is why students were pushing to get a copy of the Ignatius Study Bible—there is a hunger out there for these truths. The Ignatius Study Bible satisfies this great modern hunger, and should serve as an example of the kind of return to tradition that promises to bear fruit in our age.
John Byron Kuhner owns Bookmarx Books in Steubenville, Ohio. He writes at https://johnbyronkuhner.substack.com/.
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Image in the public domain. Image cropped.
