What Might Christ Say to Us in the Confessional?

We enter today into the chief penitential season of the Latin Church’s liturgical year. After the loosening up of the 1960s, it isn’t very penitential anymore, although one might well think that Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are worse than ever because no one has built up a habit of fasting, and so we hit those days like a car without shock absorbers running into mountainous speedbumps. Be that as it may, we are always free in Christ to embrace more mortifications, such as abstaining from all meat, or skipping one of the meals of the day, or cutting back on caffeinated beverages—the possibilities are numerous in the affluent West.

Let us remember that, in the sobering words of Dom Eugene Boylan, “It would seem that there are special graces that will not be given to souls unless someone pays a special price for them in penance and suffering.”

This might be the advice that Our Lord would give us if He were sitting in the confessional and we happened to come in, with our assorted burdens. He would free us from those burdens, but then ask us to take on some other burdens voluntarily, for the sake of His Mystical Body. Not merely to fulfill a penance (which is often easy enough), but to pay that special price that has been put on the rescue of this or that soul, in order to give a lowly believer the dignity of being a little co-redeemer, beneath and with Christ, in union with His Mother at the foot of the Cross.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider, in a book from Emmaus Road that was too little noticed when it appeared—I am referring to Man of God: The Catholic Priest and the Cornerstones of His Life—writes: “Fleeing from or rejecting the cross and the Christian practice of interior and exterior mortification leads to a lukewarm and spiritually sterile life.” He then cites a remarkable passage from Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s book The Priest in Union with Christ, published more than seventy years ago:

There are at present in the world many people who wish to suppress all forms of mortification, penance, and reparation; they are anxious to destroy the cross and the spirit of sacrifice as being opposed to the modern spirit of so-called liberty or license and uncontrolled pleasure. Consequently their lives have become completely barren, because no one has ever been known to scale great heights without a spirit of sacrifice. […]
          In view of this widespread sterility in human endeavor many would-be reformers are asserting that what is needed is a new approach to the priestly and religious life, in order to adapt them to the needs of the modern era. So far as the religious life is concerned, they are of the opinion that its austerity ought to be mitigated since it is now out of date: time devoted to prayer should be cut down to leave more time for external activities. They would also adapt the priestly life to the spirit of the times: to them it seems no longer suitable for priests to wear a special dress or the tonsure or any outward sign of their priesthood, or even to recite the breviary—perhaps even celibacy has become outmoded—and so on.
          Such has been the attitude adopted by many Protestants, and it is of interest to remember that Luther in cutting himself off from the Church immediately renounced the three religious vows…. And why has their enthusiasm for the glory of God and the salvation of souls waned? For want of the spirit of sacrifice. The priest has failed to recognize that he must be a victim in union with Christ, and that he cannot save souls except through the same means as Christ himself used. It is only this spirit of sacrifice which can rectify disorder in the soul of a priest or religious, and thus make way for genuine charity bringing in its train peace and joy, which spread themselves to other souls. Take away mortification and you immediately take away joy, because once the affections of man are allowed to settle on things of sense they can no longer be raised to God and the supernatural.
          There is certainly no need to remodel the priestly and religious lives and thus imitate the modernist renovation of dogma. (pp. 67-68)

Bishop Schneider also quotes a most remarkable passage from the little-known spiritual writer Fr. Claude Arvisenet, who imagines what Christ would say to his priest in the confessional. Now that we are entering into a season in which many Catholics will be seeking out the sacrament of penance, this advice may be timely:

My son, if thou upbraidest them harshly in the beginning, or even unnecessarily in the course of their confession, what will happen? The last sheep that is at the very door of the fold will flee away in terror, thinking that he has found a wolf, not a pastor…. Thus will perish through they fault they brother for whom I have died, to whom I have sent thee, whom I have trustfully committed to thy care. Remember, my son, that they penitent brother is a man and not an angel, and that thou art not a minister of vindictive justice, but of justice tempered by mercy….
          Nevertheless, my son, compel them to observe all things that I have commanded thee, to cease acting perversely, and to learn to walk in the way of my commandments. Nor deem it mercy to cast pearls before swine, nor to give the bread of angels to those who delight in husks…. O false peace, which leaves war in the heart; O deceptive mercy, which produces sleep and not a cure, death and not life! O unjust judge, who, for the satisfaction of an evil-desiring man, prostitutes my authority!
          Truly, my son, one who knowingly, or even through culpable lack of knowledge, absolves a sinner who is not contrite nor converted from his evil ways, dares to bestow my peace upon my enemy while he still hates me, hands me over to him to be crucified at his hands. See, my son, how sometimes my house becomes a den of thieves; see how these careless priests fail in their duty. O modern Pilates, who thus through cowardice and culpable weakness hand me over to whosoever would again crucify me! O my son, far be such iniquity from thee, such cruel and sinful kindness. Remember that the power and precept was given to thee not only to loose but also to bind.
          Therefore exercise the greatest care, that in thy ministry mercy and truth may meet each other and justice and peace may kiss. Thus shalt thou be a faithful and prudent dispenser of my mysteries.

This is the something which the whole Church needs to be reminded of, a better counsel than the obsessively one-sided “mercy for all and for everything”, or advice to priests that they should “always” absolve everyone who comes to the confessional, and that in some cases those who are in an adulterous relationship should be allowed to confess without an intention of avoiding future sin by living as brother and sister. One only wonders what Arvisenet, who died in 1831, would have said about such brash assertions of the modern era against the divine law. One wonders what the Lord would say—or, rather, has already said.

For, as Msgr. Ronald Knox reminds us, in a literary memento mori well suited to the start of Lent:

“Hodie eris mecum in Paradiso, this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise”—let us remember that today may be the last of its series. When you go to bed, you will wind up your watch just as usual, your letters will be speeding this way and that, assuring your friends that you are well. And then, in the night, just a click in the mechanism of your body, a moment of horror in your dreams; and tomorrow morning the bell will be tolling for you, and your soul will have met God in judgment.

False Antiquarianism and Liturgical Reform

Origin of Corpus Christi procession? Charles Walter Stetson’s “A Pagan Procession” (1892)

Lately my wife and I are reading aloud Ronald Knox’s masterpiece Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, first published in 1950, and not a whit less marvelous today than it was then. The parallels one can see with the Charismatic movement and (to be rigorously fair) among some traditionalists give pause, to say the least.

At one point (p. 60) Knox quotes an author named Monceaux:

It is a common trait among the heretics and schismatics of all ages; schism and heresy have almost always, for their point of departure, a regret for the past, the claim or the dream of going back to the fountain-source of a religious idea, to the discipline or faith of an apostolic age.

As all are well aware, the current leadership in Rome frequently chides tradition-loving Catholics as “backwardists” in the grip of a hopeless nostalgia, etc. The same Catholics find it very tempting to reply that their opponents are themselves quite stuck in the 1960s/70s, and show the keenest signs of nostalgia for those halcyon days after “The Council,” when the first winds of the “new Pentecost” were howling. This is a game easy enough to play; except that the charge of nostalgia really sticks where the average age is in the 80s, and sticks less easily where the average age is about 14, if you look at any typical trad congregation.

Back to Monceaux: it does indeed seem true that all wild-eyed reformers in Church history cry out that they are bringing the Church back to its original purity, to the primitive apostolic faith and practice, discarding centuries of man-made superstitious accretions. We can see this especially among the Protestants, whose entire view of and approach to liturgy is permeated with that assumption, and whose vastly different, indeed contradictory liturgical practices effectively indicate the impossibility of coherently acting on it.

In an article at NLM back in 2019, I quoted a passage from a popular Protestant homeschooling textbook, World History and Cultures in Christian Perspective, published by Abeka:

The pagans who flooded the imperial church [after the Edict of Milan] inundated it with heathen beliefs, practices, and traditions. Public worship was described by Justin Martyr in the second century as a simple meeting of believers on the Lord’s Day to hear the Scriptures read and explained along with the singing of hymns, the offering of prayers, the celebrating of the Lord’s Supper, and the receiving of gifts.
            The influence of paganism began to change the worship service into elaborate rites and ceremonies with all the trappings of heathen temple worship. The presbyters now became sacerdotes who offered up the Lord’s body and blood as a sacrifice for the living and dead. Little by little, these errors and distortions grew and developed into the false teachings and practices of the medieval church. … Some devout followers even purchased and worshipped relics.…
            The demands of their religion led the people to regard Christ as a stern and merciless Judge rather than a compassionate and loving Savior. They sought to placate the Son’s wrath against their sins by praying to His mother, the Virgin Mary, and seeking her intercession. Because even Mary sometimes seemed unapproachable, they also prayed to the long-departed apostles and other saints (deceased Christians officially recognized by the Church as holy because of martyrdom, miracles, or other merits). But the Bible clearly teaches that there is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5).

Surely, a caricature of this magnitude will not be found in reputable Catholic authors; yet one will find passages that are too close for comfort. A book entitled Catholic Faith Handbook for Youth, published by St. Mary’s Press in 2008, is a case in point. Here is how it describes the changes in the liturgy:

The liturgy we experience today is quite different from that of fifty or sixty years ago. Over the ages, what began as a gather of friends and followers of Jesus sharing a meal and remembering his teachings became an increasingly elaborate ceremony of sacrifice. The celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, held in secret in people’s homes during the times of persecution, gave way to highly ritualized ceremonies held in beautiful churches. By the Middle Ages, the priest was saying Mass while the people watched in silence. The focus was primarily on Jesus’ sacrifice, which diminished the symbol of a shared meal. Those attending were not participants as much as watchers. In the 1960s the bishop from around the world gathered at the Second Vatican Council. They called for important reforms to renew the liturgy. The language of the liturgy changed from Latin to the vernacular, so that for the first time in hundreds of years, the people could hear and understand the prayers being said. People were also encouraged to receive Communion, in the hand, and from the cup. The idea of a shared meal around a table was reclaimed from the early years of Christianity.

This book comes equipped with nihil obstat and imprimatur.

Traditionally, a more typical line of thought: Gustave Doré, “Le triomphe de Christianisme sur le paganisme” (1868)

Self-consciously modern liturgists follow this line of thought completely. A case in point is an interview with Sr. Marie-Aimée Manchon, a professor at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, conducted by La Croix’s Clémence Houdaille (the full article may be viewed here). Sr. Manchon’s initial move is to warn again confusing beauty with aestheticism—a convenient way of signaling that one is actually not all that interested in the serious pursuit of beauty in worship. Sister then launches into her main exposition:

When coming to Mass, some people are looking for a friendly, relaxing time with Jesus. Others want a solemn moment, a break from the ordinary. Aspirations differ, and the liturgy will not be able to respond perfectly to them. In his apostolic letter Desiderio desideravi, the pope reminds us that the liturgy is there to help us enter into the great aspiration of God, which is much greater than our small aspirations of the moment. It is not just about the rite, about worship. It is about entering into a gaze, that of God upon us, says Romano Guardini, the major theologian of the Liturgical Movement, who inspired Vatican II.

(Pause: it is highly doubtful that Guardini would have been able to recognize his thought in the “plumber’s work” of the Consilium. Resuming with Sister:)

God’s great desire is to make us his sons and daughters, saints, and that all be saved. There is a filial, eschatological, and missionary dimension to the liturgy that flows from the Paschal Mystery. We do not celebrate it for ourselves. When we understand this, it does not matter if it does not correspond to our sensibility. The pope reminds us that the liturgy guarantees us the possibility of an encounter with Christ. Isn’t the key to getting out of the divide to remember that? The liturgical celebration must allow this encounter with Christ in the sacraments and in the brothers and sisters. For this, the rubrics and rituals are necessary, the pope tells us again. It is not a question of military discipline, but of allowing it to flow from the source and that we find ourselves there.... There is a good habit of the rite which allows us to inhabit the actions we make. But this habit must not become a routine, otherwise we fall into the trap denounced by Charles Péguy, that of being a “habitual Christian,” “impervious to grace.”

As before with “aestheticism,” so too with the attack on routine, habit, discipline: all this is code language for an anti-ritual mentality, the justification for changing things up to avoid “ossification.” It is not habit that is the problem, but a lack of spiritual or interior life, and this lack will not be met by liturgical experiments. On the contrary, the stability of traditional rites, their silence, their contemplative nature, is more likely to encourage higher levels of prayer. In any case, Sr. Manchon does not leave us guessing about her fundamentally anti-liturgical stance:

Some people are convinced that they are great liturgists because they know the form, whereas they do not seek the spirit. But form must be erased, and returned to the presence of Christ, because it is at the service of this encounter…. Liturgy in the Church differs from the sacred, which exists in all religions and can remain very pagan. The sacred is important for people, but it can also be a vector of separation and domination, of power, through prohibitions (do not touch, etc.). Through the Incarnation, we pass from the sacred to the holy.

This tidy formulation suggests that the history of liturgy after Constantine is a passing from the holy to the sacred, that is, from informal spontaneity and improvisation to formal rigidity and fixity, from humble homes of hospitality to grand worldly churches rife with sacerdotalism, from the post-religious breakthrough represented by Christ the New Man to the reasserted paganism of regimented rituality. And so forth. In short, “the pagans flooded the imperial church”, and the early Christian “breaking of bread” was swept away.

If you dig, dig, dig, you will always find this antiquarianism at the root of all the arguments in favor of the liturgical reform. It is the essential premise, the unquestioned axiom, the point of departure. It is not a Catholic premise and cannot yield anything worthwhile. In fact, it will yield interminable disagreements because there is no way to arrive at a definite, knowable, actionable truth; everything is lost in the mists of speculation and imagination, subject to the agenda of a given sect of antiquarians.

Károly Ferenczy, “Archeology” (1896)

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The “Liturgical Little Way”: The Spiritual Value of Following Detailed Prescriptions

One of the great strengths of the traditional Latin liturgy is that it leaves nothing to the will or imagination of the priest (and the same may be said of every minister in the sanctuary). It choreographs his moves, dictates his words, shapes his mind and heart to itself, to make it clear that it is Christ who is acting in and through him. In the words of the Psalmist: “Know ye that the Lord he is God: he made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture” (Psa 99:3). Sheep are to follow the lead of their shepherd. The clergy is not and will never be the first principle of the liturgy; as St. Thomas Aquinas says with sobering humility, the priest or other cleric is an “animate instrument” of the Eternal High Priest: “Holy orders does not constitute a principal agent, but a minister and a certain instrument of divine operation.”

Ministers are like rational hammers or chisels or saws, by which a greater artisan will accomplish His work of sanctification, while conferring on them the immense dignity of resting in His hand and partaking of His action. Here is how Monsignor Ronald Knox expresses it:

The philosopher Aristotle, in defining the position of a slave, uses the words, “A slave is a living tool.” And that is what a priest is, a living tool of Jesus Christ. He lends his hands to be Christ’s hands, his voice to be Christ’s voice, his thoughts to be Christ’s thoughts; there is, there should be, nothing of himself in it from first to last, except where the Church graciously permits him to dwell for a moment in silence on his own special intentions, for the good estate of the living and the dead. Those who are not of our religion are puzzled sometimes, or even scandalized, by witnessing the ceremonies of the Mass; it is all, they say, so mechanical. But you see, it ought to be mechanical. They are watching, not a man, but a living tool; it turns this way and that, bends, straightens itself, gesticulates, all in obedience to a preconceived order—Christ’s order, not ours. The Mass is best said—we Catholics know it—when it is said so that you do not notice how it is said; we do not expect eccentricities from a tool, the tool of Christ.

The clergy are privileged tools, to be sure, but they are still tools; and the liturgy remains the work of Christ, the High Craftsman, the carpenter of the ark of the covenant, the architect of the heavenly Jerusalem, the New Song and its cantor. In its external form, in text and music and ceremonial, the liturgy should luminously proclaim that it is the work of Christ and His Church, not the product of a charismatic individual or a grassroots community.

In an interview in February 2016, Bishop Athanasius Schneider was asked what lessons he has learned from celebrating the traditional form of the Mass. Here is the bishop’s revealing response:

The deepest lesson I have learned from celebrating the traditional form of the Mass is this: I am only a poor instrument of a supernatural and utmost sacred action, whose principal celebrant is Christ, the Eternal High Priest. I feel that during the celebration of the Mass I lose in some sense my individual freedom, for the words and the gestures are prescribed even in their smallest details, and I am not able to dispose of them. I feel most deeply in my heart that I am only a servant and a minister, who yet, with free will, with faith and love, fulfill not my will, but the will of Another.

How much does a priest stand to gain or lose by his cooperation or lack of cooperation with the “smallest details” of the liturgical rite bequeathed to him by tradition and ecclesiastical law?

Mother Mectilde (Catherine de Bar)

To find an answer, let us turn to a great writer of the golden age of French spirituality, Catherine de Bar (1614–1698), or, in religious life, Mother Mectilde of the Blessed Sacrament. In her correspondence with the Countess of Chateauvieux, Mother Mectilde writes:

The first thing I notice in you, my very dear daughter, is that you do not have enough esteem for small things. You do not consider them in the light of divine Providence; that is why you have little attention and respect for them and you lose therein a great deal of grace. … God sometimes asks only for a small act of fidelity in order to make us great saints. You should always be in a state of holy and loving attention towards God, in order to give yourself to Him in all ways . . .  If you could conceive the loss you cause when you act in a purely human way, you would be inconsolable. Is it not a great fault in a soul who is able to give glory to God and who nevertheless deprives Him of it in order to give precedence to his [own] reasoning that the small actions of life are only trifles and that they do not need to be governed. O my child, if you had truly understood how you are ransomed and how you belong to Jesus Christ, you would have much more solicitude about honoring Him. If one beat of your heart does not belong to you, then so much the more your smallest action, which is always more extended than one heart beat.

In these words we find a striking anticipation of the better-known “Little Way” of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Mother Mectilde sees clearly that small acts of fidelity are the proving ground of our desire to be great saints, and that we should try never to act in a purely human way, out of our own creaturely resources.

Applying Mother Mectilde’s doctrine to Msgr. Knox’s comparison and Bishop Schneider’s experience, we can arrive at a new insight into the enormous spiritual benefits of the traditional Roman liturgy for the ministers who submit to its thousand little demands, which are occasions for placing them in a state of holy and loving attention towards God. Not one word or motion is considered a trifle that does not need to be governed; all actions are ordered to honoring Him.

Mother Mectilde develops this point in another passage from the same correspondence:

The gospel tells us today in two words what Christian holiness consists in. It is a wonderful lesson, listen to this please. The law says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind.”  Ponder these things well and you will see how much you are required to give to God, even to the smallest of your actions. …
       You will find in an infinity of places in Holy Scriptures your incapacity to dispose of yourself, indeed even one of your thoughts, if you do not want to steal it from Jesus Christ. For by right you cannot. You have been bought: the one who buys the tree buys the fruit, thus you are not your own. Ponder this truth well, repeat often these words: I am not my own, I belong to Jesus Christ. He has ransomed me by love, I am thus necessarily the slave of His love. O worthy slavery! …
       You see, next, how much you are obliged to give yourself to Him. That is, to consent to all the rights, powers, and authority He has over you, and to remain in Him. That is, to never depart from His holy presence, and to do all things by His spirit. As much as is possible for you, to never have in your ideas any other object than Him. In short, that His pure glory cause you to act in everything, even to the least of your actions. Do not think that there is anything small in regard to God: all is great, all is holy, His love sanctifies everything.
       Be thus very exact in the smallest things. All is done for a great God. It is necessary that you do everything mindfully, that is to say, with attention to God, and with a simple desire to glorify and please Him in everything. … He wants you to have this fidelity [in the smallest things] and then He will raise you to even greater ones. The man who does not value the little things will soon fall into great disorders.

How compelling is Mother Mectilde’s doctrine of holy slavery to Christ, expressed in the constant giving over of every little thing, every small act, done for the great God, the Lord of heaven and earth!

We are looking here at a gloss on Our Lord’s own teaching: “He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in that which is greater: and he that is unjust in that which is little, is unjust also in that which is greater” (Lk 16:10). Note the emphasis on justice: the one who is unfaithful to God in little matters will prove unjust to Him in greater ones, too — not unloving, but unjust. It is about justice, the “rights of God,” since, as we saw Mother Mectilde so vividly saying, we belong to Him as His property.

In speaking of fidelity and justice, Our Lord is making reference to the virtue of religion, that is, giving to God that which we owe Him, to the best of our abilities. If we do not give Him our controlled limbs, our bows, genuflections, kisses, averted eyes, and careful pronunciation of syllables, why would we deceive ourselves into thinking that we shall give him our mind and will, our love, our service to others?

The school par excellence of utmost fidelity in small things as well as great ones is the sacred liturgy, wherein we obey little rubrics as we handle the greatest thing, the very flesh and blood of God. Prompted by Mother Mectilde’s teaching, should we not say that a liturgy that offers the celebrant or the participant a greater number of opportunities to submit to the mind of another and serve His will, especially in the “smallest details,” is a liturgy that will produce more abundant fruits of holiness?

If I may coin a phrase, this is nothing other than the “liturgical Little Way” — the teaching of St. Thérèse applied to that area in which it had always been practiced without fanfare until recent decades, when the rubrics were severely curtailed, celebrant options were multiplied, a casual approach was adopted, and a millennium of Western piety was dismissed as obscurantism. With the abandonment of this Little Way came an ever-increasing flood of infidelity, impiety, and depravity. “The man who does not value the little things will soon fall into great disorders.”

Thanks be to God we are seeing a restoration of the little things, so that someday we may see once again great sanctity emerging from the liturgy.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s website for selected articles, sacred music, and books from Os Justi Press, his SoundCloud page for lectures and interviews, and YouTube for talks and sacred music.

Looking for New Insights into Scripture?

In his famous treatise De Doctrina Christiana, destined to be one of the most widely read works in the later Western tradition, St. Augustine recommends that Christians who are serious about studying the Word of God should work to know a number of languages and, at very least, have multiple translations at their disposal. Speaking about the large number and variety of Latin translations in his day, the bishop of Hippo observes:

In fact, this state of affairs has been more of a help than a hindrance to the understanding of the Scriptures, provided only that readers are not casual and careless. The examination of several versions has often been able to throw light on obscurer passages, as with that text of the prophet Isaiah (58:7), where one translation has, And do not despise the household of your seed, and another has, And do not despise your own flesh. Each corroborates the other; that is, each can be explained by the other ... [P]utting the minds of the translators together, we hit upon the more probable meaning that we are being commanded, according to the literal sense, not to despise our blood relations.[1]

The Bible has been translated now hundreds of times into English, over a period of more than half a millennium. Most of these translations have come and gone, for reasons both intrinsic (having to do with the translation) and extrinsic (cultural or political). But among Catholics who are in earnest about the long use of Scripture in public worship, the Douay-Rheims has surely come to occupy a position of permanent honor, for the simple reason that it gives us a close rendering of the Vulgate.

Now, I am all in favor of the Douay-Rheims translation. It is my go-to Bible when working with liturgical, patristic, or medieval texts, or when studying the psalms of the Divine Office. I can't imagine life without it. Still, all the same, I have often been surprised at the extent to which some Catholics insist on using no other Bible than the Douay-Rheims. This is truly unnecessary and even unhelpful when studying Scripture. As we saw the Doctor of Grace point out, we can often come to a much deeper understanding by reading a passage in multiple versions. I have found in my own life that lectio divina benefits tremendously from taking up a familiar book in an unfamiliar translation. Obviously, whatever translation we use ought to be accurate and possessed of some literary merit, unlike (for example) the New American Bible, which is written in Nabbish.

Enter the Knox Bible.

I first came across this sui generis translation by Msgr. Ronald Knox in college, long before I was capable of appreciating its peculiar virtues. Years later, when I was reading a spiritual writer who prefers to quote from the Knox Bible, I was reminded of what a marvelous and intriguing version it is. The great strength of Msgr. Knox's rendition is its sonority and creativity of diction, its poetic breadth, its surprising twists and turns, and its clever solutions to many intractable verses. Some have observed, and I would tend to agree with them, that Knox makes more sense out of St. Paul than most translations do, because he seems to have a connatural feel for the inside of the apostle's argumentation, what he is "driving at," and finds a way to convey that in our language. Knox also shines brightly in the Wisdom literature: Psalms, Proverbs, Sirach, the Song of Songs, and so forth. He is the only one who seriously attempts to convey the literary form of Psalm 118. Yes, Knox can be idiosyncratic; yes, he can get carried away with rhetoric; but the text is usually so brilliant, illuminating, and moving that you find yourself reading with greater pleasure than you would have thought possible.

In any case, this post is not really meant as a full-scale review of Msgr. Knox's version; such would require a far more detailed examination with plenty of quotations. It is meant, rather, as an encouragement to NLM readers to get to know the Knox Bible if you are not already familiar with it. I had forgotten its unique appeal until I received my copy of the Baronius Press edition, which, like all Baronius books, is magnificent in every way, from the hardcover with ribbed spine and gold lettering, to the gilt edges, to the marbled endpapers, to the red and gold ribbons.[2] My favorite aspect of this Bible is the manner in which the text is laid out: instead of the standard two-column approach sprinkled with verse numbers everywhere, which can make the act of reading feel like stepping through a mess of wires, we have the appearance of a regular book, in a single column, with all the verse numbers relegated to the margin.[3]

Here are some observations jotted down while reading different parts of the Knox Bible, to give you an idea of how it can open up Scripture. A site called CatholicBible.Online gives one access to the Vulgate, Douay-Rheims, and Knox, either alone or side-by-side: enormously helpful! The titles below (e.g., Ecclesiastes) are hyperlinks that will take you to the pertinent spot at this site.

Ecclesiastes

I have never felt so close to the mind and heart of the author as I did upon reading this translation of one of the Bible's most puzzling books. Rather than providing a list of vanities, the author seems to be searching through a collection of memories for something worth living for. It didn’t seem that I was being preached at, but that I was witnessing a man’s internal conflict. Chapter 3:1-9 came off very differently. In the RSV, it says “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die,” a time for this, and a time for the opposite, etc. But Knox translates this in a way that stresses the tension between the contrary acts more than the constant similarity: “Men are born only to die, plant trees only to displant them. Now we take life, now we save it; now we are destroying, now building.” Knox's linking of the author’s chain of thoughts causes one to rethink one's own struggle with conflicting emotions or events, and to yield to divine Providence.

Isaias

It would be difficult to imagine a more sublime translation of this prophet: so smooth, fluid, luminous. One strongly senses in the very sound of the words and tone of the language whether Isaias is praising, comforting, mourning, or chastising.

2 Maccabees 7

The story of the martyrdom of the seven sons and their mother is presented in a way that makes it seem both epic and tragic, and also somewhat like a Grimm fairy tale. I’ve never felt so much catharsis upon reading this story before.

Matthew 5-7

The Sermon on the Mount is beautiful, timeless, and challenging. Knox conveys its altitude and grittiness through his translation. Other translators often want to break it up into sections on different issues, which makes it come across like a catechism outline. But there is something lost in the separation into parts that Knox retains by leaving it as a whole and imparting it with poetic language. It’s easier to imagine listening to Jesus saying these words when reading this translation, whereas other translations have felt like a series of little canned speeches.

John 1:1-18

The prologue to John’s Gospel is dense with mysterious truths. Some English translations make it more confusing and ambiguous; here, particularly, we benefit from multiple versions. Admittedly Knox here is anything but modest in drawing out the meaning he finds in the tight phrases of the Greek, but I find, on the whole, that is resonates with freshness: "And the Word was made flesh, and came to dwell among us; and we had sight of his glory, glory such as belongs to the Father's only-begotten Son, full of grace and truth. ... No man has ever seen God; but now his only-begotten Son, who abides in the bosom of the Father, has himself become our interpreter."

Hebrews 11

Knox’s translation begins with a question, "What is faith?," whereas others begin with the answer. It is more effective to teach a definition of something if the student first asks for it. By beginning with the question, the reader experiences the asking and is thus more receptive to the answer. The Douay-Rheims translation, although accurate, is often totally uninteresting in poetic technique. In this passage, it repeats “By faith” at the start of 18 lines. The rhetorical device called ‘anaphora’ can be effective, but it loses its effect when overdone; more than three lines in a row is probably too much. Realizing this, Knox repeats the same idea in different ways by anaphoras of three. He uses “by faith” three times, but also “in faith” three times, and “Faith . . .” three times, etc. This re-emphasizes the same idea without repeating the same exact phrase too often. It is part of the reason why Knox's version generally makes for excellent reading aloud.

Consider giving this translation a chance in your lectio divina, Bible study, or academic work, adding it to the arsenal of tools you may already have for breaking open the Word of God and feasting upon it.

NOTES

[1] Teaching Christianity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1996), II.17, p. 136.
[2] For more photos, see this review from a while ago.
[3] In this respect it is akin to what are called nowadays "reader's Bibles," the best of which is the high-end 5-volume Bibliotheca, about which I hope to write a separate article someday.

Msgr. Ronald Knox