How Do Catholics Read the Bible?

What Protestants Can Learn from Catholic Engagement with Scripture

My advisor at Fordham University, Michael Peppard, tells a story about being approached by a publisher who invited him to write a book on how Catholics read the Bible. As a rising scholar in Catholic New Testament studies, he seemed like an obvious choice. However, Michael declined the offer. When asked why, he responded, politely but pointedly, “They don’t.”

And Michael wasn’t being facetious.

One of the most extensive sociological studies of religion in the United States found that only 29% of Catholics read their Bible on a weekly basis, compared to 66% of White Evangelicals. Even among that small group of Catholic readers, most engage with the same passages that will be proclaimed at Mass. This difference points to one of the most significant divisions between Protestants and Catholics. We Protestants love the Bible. Give us all the genealogies, lists of kings, different stipulations between a guilt offering and a grain offering, we want it all. Keep your creeds, sacraments, obsession with Mary, and observance of Lent; we want the Bible. Sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura.

But in our dismissal of Catholic approaches to Scripture, what might we have overlooked? More importantly, what can Protestants learn from the ways Catholics engage the Bible, insights that could deepen and enrich our own relationship with the text?

In the end, Peppard did write the book. With one caveat, he took out “read” and published, How Catholics Encounter the Bible. In this post, I’ll be engaging with and working off of Michael’s main points to see what we can learn from the Catholic imagination.

The Bible in Catholic Life

When I first heard the words Epistle and Gospel they were not parts of a book, but sides of an altar. I begin here not to prove a point, but to establish a setting. I did not know them as parts of the New Testament or the Bible, cannot even remember those latter terms coming up, and never saw either of them as a book until long after I entered the seminary. What I knew, knew very well, knew eventually by heart were the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, the ecclesiastical missal, and the monastic breviary. Biblical story came to me first as prayer in worship, and nobody spent any time insisting on its factuality, its inerrancy, or its literal truth . . . nobody ever insisted that all was literal or all was metaphorical, but only that all was prayer. - John Dominic Crossan (Cited in Peppard, How Catholics Encounter the Bible, 4-5).

When it comes to traditions, institutions, and denominations, I’ve had a front row seat to the many ways Christians engage with the Bible. I grew up in the Church of Christ, spent time in non-denominational churches, was part of the Acts29 network, and have been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I’ve studied at both an SBC seminary and a Presbyterian seminary, and now I find myself at a Catholic Jesuit institution. (And in case you're wondering, yes, I’m still holding the line on Credo baptism!) At Fordham, as a non-Catholic studying at a Jesuit institution, my colleagues and I often trade playful jabs. They tell me to go say my prayers to Luther and Calvin; I tell them to turn in their Bibles to 1 Hezekiah. (It’s never a great joke, since they usually don’t own a Bible, nor realize that 1 Hezekiah isn’t in there.) But jokes aside, I quickly began to learn a great deal about Catholic devotion and came to deeply appreciate the sincerity of their faith.

But what about the Bible? How does it shape the daily and liturgical life of a Catholic? One of the primary differences between how Catholics and Protestants engage Scripture lies in the mode of encounter. While Protestants often emphasize personal Bible reading and study, Catholics primarily engage Scripture through hearing it proclaimed. Since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Catholic Sunday liturgy has followed a structured lectionary composed of four readings: a selection from the Old Testament, a passage from the New Testament epistles (referred to as readings from the Apostles), a responsorial Psalm, and a more extended reading from the Gospels, (these readings are not presented in this exact order, and the Psalm, while usually drawn from the biblical text, may be adapted for liturgical use). This stands in stark contrast to many Protestant traditions. While some Protestant churches retain a structured set of readings, many do not. In practice, the sermon often centers on a relatively small portion of Scripture. For example, I recently preached at my church and read just ten verses. From a Catholic perspective, accustomed to hearing multiple readings from across the biblical canon each Sunday, a Protestant service might prompt the ironic question from a Catholic, Where’s the Bible in this service?

“For Catholics, the Bible is almost always and everywhere framed by prayer and the liturgy, especially the hearing of excerpts during worship…the Bible is incorporated into their prayer, but they are not reading it as a book.” - Peppard, How Catholics Encounter the Bible, 5

More specifically, the Bible in the Catholic experience is inseparably linked with prayer. The prayers spoken at Mass are filled with biblical quotations, and the language surrounding the Eucharist is saturated with scriptural allusions. For many Catholics, the line between the Bible and the Roman Missal (the prescribed prayers, chants, and instructions for the celebration of Mass) is nearly indistinguishable. As a result, Scripture in the Catholic tradition is not only read but encountered through a rich tapestry of sensory, liturgical, and devotional expression. It may be read in Latin or the vernacular, sung in chant, woven into call-and-response prayers, or embodied through gestures such as sitting, standing, and kneeling. In short, Catholics don’t simply read the Bible; they hear it, experience it, pray it, and respond to it as a living part of worship. For a Catholic, the readings at Mass, the prayers, and the Eucharist are all integral to encountering the Bible. In many ways, within both the Catholic Mass and the broader Catholic experience, the Bible may appear to be absent; yet it is profoundly and constantly present. It is heard, recited, internalized, and proclaimed, though rarely read in the way many Protestants might expect. Peppard captures this dynamic well: “From the opening rites of blessing and penitence through the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the Bible resounds as a proclaimed Word—even if there is not a single printed Bible to be found in the room” (Peppard, 46).

In my own experience, I’ve noticed a growing number of friends yearning for a more historically rooted expression of Protestantism. While some within my circles are deconstructing Christianity as an institution, others are turning away from seeker-sensitive, pop-style evangelicalism in search of something deeper, something liturgical, ancient, and grounded. Many are rejecting the music-stand TED Talk sermon model in favor of a return to the lectern. And honestly, I don’t blame them. I get it. In many ways, the previous generation was offered a new kind of Christianity. But today, more and more people want the old.

This is precisely where I believe we can learn from our Catholic brothers and sisters. One of the most popular movements in evangelicalism right now is John Mark Comer’s call to move beyond thinking about Scripture to living it. But in the Catholic tradition, this idea isn’t new. The Bible is not just a text to be studied; it is something to be encountered. It is heard, felt, prayed, and sung. It’s not a book to check off a reading plan, but a sacred script that shapes a life. For evangelicals, this offers a welcome and necessary invitation. Quiet time is good, I recommend it. But a life saturated by Scripture, one marked by its rhythms and resonances, is even more powerful.

The Catholic Imagination

There’s a familiar caricature: Evangelicals create art for other Evangelicals, while Catholics create art for the masses (pun intended). But this caricature isn’t entirely unfounded. Within the Evangelical subculture, there has emerged a parallel ecosystem, complete with its own films, music, news outlets, publishing houses, colleges, and theatrical productions, largely created by Evangelicals, for Evangelicals. It functions as an alternate universe, where the barrier to entry is low and much of the output consists of Christianized adaptations of secular cultural forms. The same, however, cannot be said of Catholics; rather than subverting mainstream cultural outlets, they have historically helped shape them, often setting the standard rather than reacting to it.

From the unsettling, subversive fiction of Flannery O’Connor, to Bruce Springsteen’s Jesus Was an Only Son, to Martin Scorsese’s Silence, the Catholic imagination is unmistakably present. It’s hard to define precisely, but again and again, in the world of art, one encounters a Catholic, not merely an artist who happens to be Catholic, but one whose faith deeply informs the way they tell stories and reimagine ancient narratives for a modern world. There is an uncanny ability within the Catholic imagination to encounter the biblical world and reinterpret it for modern life.

Last year, I had the opportunity to attend a screening of Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat. A biopic about the great Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). It’s a great example of academic studies in New York City, just another event at my school featuring a world-renowned actor reflecting on how a writer had shaped his Catholic faith. Flannery O’Connor wrote short stories populated by often grotesque characters and driven by suspenseful plots, stories that are frequently puzzling, sharp-edged, and challenging to interpret, with shifting perspectives that can make it hard to discern who’s who. But in the end, Flannery’s work was thoroughly biblical. She brought biblical themes and stories to life. Her writings are uncomfortable. She comforted the disturbed and disturbed the comforted. She assumed the role of a prophetess in a wayward generation, one that often scorned the marginalized and dismissed the mystery of grace. Flannery O’Connor, in many ways, embodied the Catholic imagination. She viewed the biblical narrative not as a relic of the ancient world, but as a living reservoir of stories and themes meant to be reanimated, absorbed, reinterpreted, and re-presented for the modern age. Her goal wasn’t to transport readers back to the Ancient Near East; it was to confront them with the enduring, often unsettling implications of Scripture in the here and now. It’s no wonder that when Bruce Springsteen was asked about the most important book in his life, he didn’t name the Bible:

“…the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.”

What becomes clear is that, in the Catholic imagination, the Bible is both nowhere and somehow everywhere. It’s not always quoted or overtly referenced, yet it dwells in the depths of characters, in the reimagining of a mother and son’s relationship, in prophetic oracles reframed through the lens of 20th-century racism. The Bible shapes their creative and artistic endeavors, not as a text to be merely cited, but as something to be embodied, proclaimed from within, and expressed through their art. Or as Peppard says, “…the Bible thrives among Catholics as a proclaimed and incarnate Word, even if its printed text seems often to be missing” (Peppard, 8).

The Catholic imagination of the Bible is a much-needed element within the Evangelical tradition. For many of us, the stories of Scripture are things to be mastered, memorized, and discussed, and all of that is good. But there is often a disconnect between reading and imagining. Catholics don’t merely reflect on the life of Mary; they feel it. Mary isn’t just someone to be cited and compared across the Synoptic accounts; her story is expanded, contemplated, and brought to life in art, prayer, and song, often in ways that go beyond the biblical text. Not to diminish Scripture, but to honor it, because they recognize Mary as a person: a young, unwedded woman, bearing joy, grief, and mystery. Entire narratives are built from what Scripture leaves unsaid. Their devotion and prayer life doesn’t stop at the text; it enters into it. It asks, What did she feel? What did she fear? It’s a kind of theological empathy that breathes life into the biblical story, not by rewriting it, but by inhabiting it. Their art flows from a place of deep familiarity with the Bible, even if they never read it.

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I’ll close with an example Michael gives in the book: Michelangelo’s Pietà. It’s a stunning work of art, a seemingly young Mary cradling the body of her crucified son. The sculpture captures a moment of pure suffering, a mother’s love rendered in marble. It sits in St. Peter’s Basilica, where thousands come to witness and feel the weight of that biblical scene.

But here’s the catch: it never happens in the Bible. Mary never held Jesus after his death. And yet, most Catholics wouldn’t know that, and more importantly, wouldn’t care. For them, aligning their art with historical-critical reconstructions of the life of Jesus isn't the point. What matters is making these moments come alive. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to watch someone we love be crucified, but nearly everyone knows what it’s like to be loved by a mother, or to grieve.

The Catholic encounter with the Bible moves the text from story to lived reality. It invites people to experience, feel, touch, and imagine the biblical world as fully present, not just then, but now.

In the end, Evangelicals have much to learn from Catholics. And I say that fully aware of the theological differences between our traditions. But that’s not what this post is about. This is about recognizing that while many Catholics may not “read” the Bible in the ways Evangelicals often champion, daily quiet times, inductive study, and expository sermons, they may, in fact, live the Bible in ways we long for.

In summary, buy Michael’s book.