Synod: Christianity not a 'Religion of the Book'
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
Much mischief in Catholicism often results from over-emphasizing one or another pole of a continuum. For example, push too hard on the church as a hierarchy, and the result is an inflated notion of authority; put too much stress on the church as the ?people of God,? and you get congregationalism.
Applied to the current Synod of Bishops on the Bible, this "both/and" feature of Catholicism means that the bishops need to do two things at once: foster a deeper knowledge and love for the Scriptures, without generating an exaggerated cult of the printed word divorced from broader notions of tradition and the living church. A more succint way of phrasing the point is this: How can the church stress the Bible as fundamental, without turning Catholics into fundamentalists?