Our thanks to Mr Sean Pilcher for sharing with us review of a new reprint of a very beautiful edition of the Clementine Vulgate. He is the director of Sacra: Relics of the Saints (sacrarelics.org), an apostolate that promotes education about relics, and works to repair, research, and document relics for religious houses and dioceses; last year we published a three-part article by him on that subject.
St Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible stands with St Benedict’s Rule and the Roman Missal as one of the most copied and circulated texts in the Christian tradition. It is surely a sign of the times, then, when the number of affordable editions of our canonical Scriptures wanes and the text accordingly loses its place in our daily lives. If we can wince at the scarcity of editions of these books, then we can also be encouraged when they return to print in useful, affordable, sometimes rather fine editions.
The Vulgate is the basis for most of our liturgical books, and is a locus of prayer, meditation, and commentary for so many saints and Fathers of the Church. It is the constant source of reference, and a primary text for lectio divina. In more recent decades, one of the most widely-purchased editions of the Latin Bible is the German Bible Society’s big green Bible.
This version is useful for scholars of manuscript variants and text history, but is not the common, ‘catholic’ Vulgate text. It contains many critical notes of variant readings, and can seem more like a car or computer manual than the inspired Word of God. It is perhaps not the kind of thing one would normally take up for devotional reading, and its physical presentation and strain on the eye do not encourage it. The text also lacks punctuation, as the oldest manuscripts of the Bible itself do. A new copy costs around $100, not an impossible price for a Bible, but considering its limited usability, I suggest another edition.
A more accessible edition for Catholics is the so-called Colunga-Turrado, named for the two principal editors, published by Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos (BAC): a workhorse that can be had relatively cheaply ($40-$90). The text is the Clementine Vulgate, the version used in the liturgical books. Earlier editions (bound nicely in cloth) can be found ‘used’ for an even more reasonable price, and some include helpful illustrations.
This Bible contains prefaces, some relevant decrees of the magisterium, and has a helpful index–all in Latin. I recommend this edition to students and people interested in having a reliable Bible for daily reference and reading. The notes are simple and not distracting, noting where one book references another, or where Our Lord or one of the apostles quote the Old Testament. They are helpful for study but easily ignored during quick reading or meditation. There are some spelling errors, but we shall notice this in most Bibles if we actually read them.
Most recently, Church Latin Publishing Company has reprinted a very nice edition of the same official Clementine Text, originally typeset and designed by Desclée and The Society St John the Evangelist in 1901. This book, even more than the BAC version, looks like a Catholic book. It contains clear, devotional line art very much in the tradition of older liturgical books; in other words, it looks like a prayer book, not a critical monograph. Each book or group of books of the Bible begins with an illustration of its author or principal figure, and each chapter has a very nice drop-cap letter to focus the eye.
St Jerome’s original prefaces are included at the beginning of the volume, which ends with some additional texts and indices. I emphasize that the book looks Catholic because so much of modern biblical study, and even publishing, follow protestant conventions. Biblical scholarship can certainly be undertaken by parties outside the Church, but if the way we treat the Sacred Scriptures, the names we have for the books, the critical methods we use, and even the physical books we print all resemble those used by protestants, we may be perhaps inclined to perceive the Bible as a ‘stand-alone’ or ‘independent’ text equally used by any ecclesial body.
The reason that the Bible should look and feel like a Catholic book is because it is a Catholic book–loved, preserved, copied, read, studied, and proclaimed by Holy Mother Church throughout the centuries.
Church Latin Publishing Company’s ‘resurrected’ edition of the Vulgate is a serious contribution to the shockingly small pool of editions currently in print, and as such, a good sign of renewal. Its appearance and construction inspire reverence for the written Word of God, and echo the text’s shared place in the Missal or the Breviary. Its competitive price ($100) and devotional character make it ideal as a gift or as a Bible for daily reading and meditation. The text, while ornamental, and if perhaps on the small side, is still suitable for study, and wide margins leave room for annotations or marking if desired.
Of course, having nice (or many) editions of the Bible does not do us any good if we do not make them familiar objects of study and prayer. We would do well to take up such a beautiful book and put it to use.
“Crebrius lege et disce quam plurima. Tenenti codicem somnus obrepat et cadentem faciem pagina sancta suscipiat. – Read often and learn all you can. Let sleep find you holding your book, and when your head nods let it be resting on the sacred page.” St Jerome, letter to Eustochium.
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| St Jerome in His Study, 1442, by the workshop of the Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck (1390 ca. - 1441; public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) |
