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85 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Roman Catholic Roman Catholics to bring about a compromise in the matter such as obtains in England and Canada. Local concessions and arrangements have been sometimes made, as, for instance, in Poughkeepsie, and at Faribault, Minn., in the early nineties, but they have been of short duration, and have gener ally failed to satisfy either party to the controversy. In the mean time the Roman Catholics have gone on building and equipping their schools, and accord ing to the official statistics of the year 1908 the total number of such schools in the United States was 4,443, the number of pupils 1,136,906, and the number of professional teachers, lay and religious, 20,755. The amount of property invested was esti mated to be over $100,000,000, with an annual ex penditure for school purposes of about $15,000,000. A few years previous to this date an important move ment was inaugurated for the better organization and unification of the system throughout the coun try. This is a part of the work undertaken by the Catholic Educational Association which aims at carrying out a similar aim for all the Roman Catho lic educational establishments in the United States, theological seminaries, colleges, academies, and high schools, under the general supervision of the Catholic University of America located in Wash ington, D. C. To aid in the accomplishment of this general purpose the professors of the latter institu tion have begun the publication of a Catholic Edu cational Review. JAMES F. DRlscoll..
BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. A. Burns, The Catholic School System in thefUnited States, its Principles, Origin and Establishment, New York, 1908; Annual Reports of the Catholic Educational Association, 1903 sqq., Columbus, Ohio; The Official Catholic Directory, published yearly by the M. H. wiltzius Co., Milwaukee and New York.
ROMAN CATHOLIC POSITION ON THE BIBLE IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: This topic has frequently been a matter of controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics, particularly in the United States. The custom of reading the Bible as a part of the regular school exercises is doubtless a survival from the earlier days when educational institutions were in the main denominational, and consistently imparted religious as well as secular instruction. The attitude of Roman Catholics toward the practise is determined not by hostility to Bible-reading as such, but by certain considerations of principle. In the first place, they are not convinced of the utility or expediency of indiscriminate Bible-reading especially for young children, unless it be accompanied by suitable explanation, and consequently this mode of imparting Scriptural knowledge is rarely employed in Roman Catholic elementary schools. It is judged preferable to reduce the voluminous and often bewildering narrative portions of the Bible to the simpler form of Bible histories, while its dogmatic, ethical, and religious teaching finds expression in catechisms and religious instruction. If it be proposed as an alternative to have the Bible-reading in the public schools accompanied by commentary on the part of the teachers, Roman Catholics object, not only because they question the authority of these exponents and their competency for such a task, but also because such commentary is liable to be tinged with sectarian bias.
Furthermore, Bible-reading in the schools is sometimes connected with the recitation of prayers and the singing of hymns, thus taking on the character of a religious service. All these elements may be very good in themselves and free from any inherent denominational tendencies, but Roman Catholics consistently, with that exclusiveness which is traditional in their church, refuse to take part in a non-Roman Catholic (or, as they claim) heterodox act of public religious worship. This prohibitive principle, logically reducible to what the theologians term communicatio in divinia, obtained originally in most of the Protestant denominations as well as among the older branches of Christianity, but of late, and for obvious reasons, it has been rapidly disappearing from the various forms of Protestantism, and though among Roman Catholics it is now less acutely emphasized than formerly, it is nevertheless maintained as an integral element of the Roman Catholic position-a principle which can not consistently be sacrificed.
Exception has also been taken by Roman Catholics to the fact that the Bible read in the public schools was the " Protestant " or King James version, whereas a long-standing decree of ecclesiastical authority had made it obligatory for lay Roman Catholics (unless otherwise permitted) to use currently only those vernacular translations of Holy Writ which had received the approbation of their church, and were provided with suitable notes for the proper understanding of certain passages. This objection flows logically from the general Roman Catholic principle according to which the Church is held to be the divinely appointed guardian of the Scriptures and their sole authoritative interpreter. The prohibition in question, which is as old as the Council of Trent, was based on the assumed danger (now doubtless more remote than in the sixteenth century) which, especially in those troubled times, might result for the faith of Catholics from an indiscriminate use of the various unauthorized translations then in vogue. It was assumed-end not entirely without cause-that doctrinal bias had influenced the rendering of certain passages supposed to have a bearing on the religious differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics. As instances of this Bishop Kenrick (Theologia Dogmatica, i. 427 sqq., Philadelphia, 1839) calls attention to such passages in the Authorized Version as Matt. ix. 11; 1 Cor. vu. 9, ix. 5, xi. 27; Heb. x. 38, etc., as being erroneous dogmatic renderings due to golemical preoccupation. In this connection Roman Catholics quote also the words of Robert Gell, the chaplain to George Abbot (q.v.), Protestant archbishop of Canterbury (one of the translators), who says: " Dogmatic interests were in some cases allowed to bias the translation, and the Calvinism of one party, the prelatic views of another, were both represented at the expense of accuracy." To this may be added a recent Protestant admission, vi,., that of Bishop Ellicott: " In spite of the very common assumption to the contrary, there are many passages (in the version of 1611) from which erro. neous doctrinal inferences have been drawn, but where the inference comes from the translation, and not the original " (Considerations on the Revision q/