It’s the Douay Rheims, Señor

In addition to throwing down gauntlets, as a family we have taken all manner of plunges that we might not have done even a few months ago. We cast things down and we jump into the depth of waterfalls. Or…we chase down waterfalls? Or…we slide down cellar doors? Perhaps down razor blades, too? How did that childhood song, Say, Say, Oh Playmate, go? As with any absurdly innocent song, most of my childhood friends sang it as slide down my razorblades, and into my dungeon door. This is because children have wicked senses of humor. They are also quite savage and primal until they are trained to be otherwise.

This plunge was jumping into attending a Baptist church to see if a family member we’re caring for would be comfortable there. Baptist doctrine and I don’t get along. And talk about plunges! They like to re-plunge you in the cleansing flood, even if you’ve already been plunged in the waters of baptism. I guess that’s why they call themselves Baptists. To be fair, the particular church we attended is one of the friendliest I’ve ever been to, and the members there prefer old-timey hymns that I adore. But if we continue going, they will find out the truth at some point: that I’m a Catholic and I go to Mass every weekend, if possible. Also, I don’t plan on changing my mind about being Catholic. Honestly, it’s not the mind that would have to change. I would have to have a heart change, and my heart loves the Catholic Mass and the Eucharist. I love being Catholic, despite the arduous journey to get there.

It is unfortunate that Baptist churches in general are anti-Catholic. I got a little taste of it our first Sunday there. There were no direct accusations, no mention of the Catholic church, nothing as direct as that. No, the pastor instead made a claim that the King James version of the Bible was the first English Bible to have been written in 300 years. I leaned over and whispered in my husband’s ear: What about the Latin Vulgate? What I meant, of course, was not the Latin Vulgate, but the Douay Rheims, which was translated from the Latin Vulgate. The New Testament portion of the Douay Rheims was completed before the King James was even commissioned to be written, but it was within fifty years of the other. Therefore, it fit into those 300 years when, supposedly, no English translation was written.

The problem is that the Douay Rheims was a Catholic version of the Bible. And Catholic authorities, you know, wanted to keep the word of God from the unwashed masses. It’s convenient to forget that when they were better equipped to bring the Bible to the world, they did. Does anyone remember these days that the title Latin Vulgate means Common Latin? Latin used to be the language of Italy, and it had a common, nonscholarly form. That form was eventually translated into English (and other languages) after the invention of the Guttenberg printing press. But even if the printing press made it easier to produce approved versions of the Bible, it didn’t make it easier to ensure that scholars were able to do this. It was a complicated process that took time.

Unfortunately, history isn’t as neat and tidy as people would like it to be; there simply wasn’t a far-reaching conspiracy in the Catholic church to prevent people from reading the word of God. Prior to the printing press, most of the population of the world was illiterate. They were illiterate because books were very expensive to produce. They had to be handwritten. The world of lending libraries did not exist; how could they? Books could not be mass produced. RIF was not an organization. It took a long time and a lot of sporadic effort for the world to become educated. It’s actually incredible that after a couple hundred years, a lowly nun in the far reaches of the New World could read and write in her native tongue as well as the scholarly languages that were traditionally taught in universities. I’m speaking of Sor Juana, but she wasn’t an isolated case by any means. Three-hundred years after the printing press, 85% of western countries such as the UK were literate — a similar rate to today.

I’m not going to lie. The Catholic church did try to prevent unapproved versions of the Bible from being promulgated and passed around. Primarily, they were concerned with preserving a trinitarian perspective. There were other dogmas they would “throw down the gauntlet” over — ha, sorry, I had to bring it in again somewhere. You can agree or disagree with the morality, but the world used to be a cutthroat place to live. Even Sor Juana was threatened by the tail-end of the Spanish Inquisition. People fought to the death over many issues, and that included people outside the Catholic political hierarchy. After the Reformation, the new religious authorities were just as cutthroat, forcing their detractors to slide down razorblades into dungeon doors [sigh, not really — that was a joke]. Clearly, they were more like children, savage and primal.

I don’t know how long we will last at this Baptist church. I sorely wish the above-average people of the world, which include pastors who spend a great deal of time reading and studying, would try to have a little more common sense when they delve into history. If they did, perhaps the rest of us would have a more balanced perspective. Wishful thinking, perhaps?

There are many side issues and arguments I haven’t even touched. That’s fine. I’ll leave that up to anyone who wants to make a comment below. I’ve had a long day, and I’ll have another long day tomorrow. The thing about that gauntlet I threw down — it involved applying for and getting hired for a full-time job. But I haven’t actually finished my extant freelance projects…so, freelance plus. Do you remember The Eye of the Tiger? Yeah, that.