Citing St. Jerome, the great fifth century Bible scholar, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (133) tells us:

The Church “forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful. . . to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ, by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”

That is, if we wish to know Christ more fully, we need to know and understand the Scriptures more completely.

We designed this new thirteen-part Wyoming Catholic College distance learning course to facilitate both knowing the Scriptures and knowing Christ.

Rather than being the territory of Protestant Evangelicalism, Sacred Scripture belongs to the whole Church and every individual in the Church. Yet often Catholics shy away from Bible reading and study. And while there are, no doubt, many reasons for that, one is certainly that we don’t know where to begin.

PART ONE: For six weeks beginning May 13, 2021, we discussed the basics of reading and studying the Sacred Scriptures. Where did the Bible come from? How do we understanding what it says? How do we read Scriptures with the Church and as individual believers? We also considered practical matters such as picking translations and the use of commentaries.

PART TWO: In Fall 2021, we spent seven weeks looking at the various genres in Scripture. The Bible is an anthology of books including poetry, prophecy, history, wisdom, gospel, letters, and apocalypse. We can’t approach the Psalms the same way we approach Genesis or John’s Gospel or Revelation. So how do we read and study each type more effectively so that we might better understand the Bible and better know Christ?