Ecclesia Militans: Where we got the Bible

The Catholic Bible (Douai)

What was the Catholic Church doing all this time? Well, she was in a state of persecution in England, and could no do very much except suffer.

(1) Many of her best sons went abroad to more favorable lands. The circumstances had assuredly been most unsuitable from bringing out a Catholic version of the Scriptures. She was rather content, indeed compelled, to sit still and from her majestic height look down and watch the rise and fall, the publication and withdrawal, the appearance and disappearance of dozens of different versions, heretical and corrupt, grotesque in their blunders and bitter in their sectarianism, that had been issued by the various bodies. By the end of the sixteenth century no less than 270 new sects had been enumerated, and some that had been extinct for centuries, like Arianism, revived under the genial influence of Luther. Dr. Walton, Bishop of Chester, and author of the famous polyglot Bible that bears his name, laments this fact in his Preface about the end of the seventeenth century. ‘There is no fanatic or clown,’ says he, ‘from the lowest dregs of the people who does not give you his own dreams as the Word of God. For the bottomless pit seems to have been set open from whence a smoke has risen which has obscured the heavens and the stars, and locusts are come out with wings – a numerous race of sectaries and heretics, who have renewed all the old heresies, and invented monstrous opinions of their own. These have filled our cities, villages, camps, houses – nay, our churches and pulpits, too, and lead the poor deluded people with them to the pit of perdition.’ Doubtless the poor Bishop, being a self-complacent Anglican, failed to perceive that he himself was as much of a deluded sectary and heretic as any of them. It was not till 1582 that a Catholic New Testament appeared, and that was not in England, but in France, at Rheims, whence a colony of persecuted Catholics had fled, including Cardinal Allen, Gregory Martin, and Robert Bristow, who were mainly responsible for this new translation. William Allen, formerly Canon of York, later Archbishop of Mechlin, and lastly Cardinal, had founded a college at Douai for the training of priests for the English mission in 1568. He was compelled to remove it to Rheims in 1578 owing to Huguenot riots, and there, as I said, in 1582 they issued the New Testament in English for Catholics. It was a translation, of course, from the Latin Vulgate, which had been declared by the Council of Trent to be the authorized text of Scripture for the Church. Martin was the principal translator, whilst Bristow mainly contributed the notes, which are powerful and illuminative. The whole was intended to be of service both to priests and people, to give them a true and sound rendering of the original writings, to save them from the numberless false and incorrect versions in circulation, and to provide them with something wherewith to refute the heretics who then, as ever, approached with a text in their mouth.

(2) Needless to say, the appearance of this New Testament, with its annotations, at once aroused the fiercest opposition. Queen Elizabeth ordered the searches to seek out and confiscate every copy they could find. If a priest was found in possession of it, he was forthwith imprisoned. Torture by rack was applied to those who circulated it, and a scholar, Dr. Fulke, was appointed to refute it. All these measures, be it noted, kind reader, were taken by parties who advocated loudly the unlimited right of private judgment. In 1593 the College returned to Douai, and there in 1609 the Old Testament was added, and the Catholic Bible in English was complete, and is called the Douai Bible. Complete we may well call it; it was the only really complete Bible in English, for it contains those seven books of the Old Testament which I pointed out before were, and are, omitted by the Protestants in their editions. So that we can claim to have not only the pure, unadulterated Bible but the whole of it, without addition or subtraction: a translation of the Vulgate, which is itself the work of St. Jerome in the fourth century, which, again, is the most authoritative and correct of all the early copies of Holy Scripture. At a single leap we thus arrive at that great work, completed by the greatest scholar of his day, who had access to manuscripts and authorities that have now perished, and who, living so near the days of the Apostles, and, as it were, close to the very fountain-head, was able to produce a copy of the inspired writings which, for correctness, can never be equalled.

We may feel justly proud of our Douai Bible. We need not declare it to be perfect in all respects, either in regard to its English style or its employment of words from foreign languages; we need not feel the less affection or admiration for it though we should suggest the possibility of a revision and improvement in some particulars – it has, indeed, been re-edited and revised ere now especially by Bishop Challoner. But when all is said and done, it is a noble version with a noble history; true, honest, scholarly, faithful to the original. The Catholic Church has nothing to regret in her policy or her action towards English versions of the Scriptures. She has not issued one version one year and cancelled it the next because of its corruptions and errors, its partisan notes, or political doctrines. Nobly she has stood for reverence and caution in respect of translating God’s Holy Word in the vulgar tongue. She was slow in acting, I admit, if by slowness we mean deliberation and prudence, for she saw with unerring vision the evils that were certain to result from a hasty casting of pearls before swine. But when she did act, she acted decisively and once for all. Who is there that has followed the sad story of the non-Catholic treatment of the Sacred Scriptures but will be forced by contrast to admire the wisdom, the calm dignity, the consistent and deliberate policy of the Ecclesiastical authorities of the Catholic Church in England, which stands as a reproof to the violent, blundering, malicious methods of the sectaries and which, if it had been acquiesced in by others, would have saved the Word of God from infinite degradation and contempt?

(3) Hatred against her version of the Bible when it first appeared was so deep that an oath sworn on it was not deemed to be valid. It was on this sacred volume that Mary, Queen of Scots, laid her hand and swore her innocence the night before her execution. The Earl of Kent at once interposed with the remark that the Book was a Popish and false translation, and in consequence the oath was of no value. ‘Does your Lordship suppose,’ was the quiet answer of the noble Queen, ‘that my oath would be the better if I swore on your translation, which I do not believe?’ Thanks be to God, the Douai version has now so established its position, and hatred to it and to its authors has so diminished, that a Catholic may, even in these lands, swear upon it in conscience, and his word is believed as any other man’s in a Court of Law. Found in thousands of pious Catholic homes at the present hour, we may find comfort ourselves with the reflection that, in this kingdom, there has now for long existed the true version of the Gospel of our Blessed Lord and the inspired words of His holy Apostles and Evangelists, as they have been handed down and preserved by the Catholic Church from the beginning, unchangeable and unchanged; and we may feel the most absolute certainty that, as it is the true version, so, at a date not incalculably distant, it will prove to be the only one, for the others will have gone to join their predecessors, and been consigned to a happy oblivion, and only survive in the memory of him who glances at their musty covers and faded pages beneath the glass cases of library or museum.

Chapter Fifteen