St. Clare Bible Study Clarifies Mass Readings

Living and Leading in God's Word

Marie Connors, Class of 2012, helps a group at St. Clare, East Haven, to engage the Sunday readings more thoughtfully. This kind of Lectionary-based catechesis is modeled after the process of initiating adults into the church through the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) and is an excellent way to shed light on the central texts of our Sacred Scriptures.

"Generally, we review the three readings we will hear on the upcoming Sunday," explains Connors. "I use many resources, some of which I read throughout my four years at the Catholic Biblical School... I try to present the information in an interesting and understandable fashion. Most weeks, I also bring in the Bible atlas to show the different cities/regions that are mentioned in the scriptures."

"Broom Tree" in Bloom

Connors also notes that there are often “unknowns” presented in the readings. She provides handouts to explain these unfamiliar elements. "As an example," she writes, "an Old Testament reading described a prophet sitting under a 'broom tree.' I looked this up on the internet, and printed a description and photo of the broom tree."

That kind of attention to detail helps stir the religious imagination in ways that allow us to "go back wholly in spirit" to the biblical world, as Pope Pius XII urged us way back in 1943:

What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. (Divino Afflante Spiritu, No. 35).

photo credit: Retama Amarilla via photopin (license)