The Church of Rome recognises the Scriptures, together with the Apocrypha, as the Word of God. In Paragraph 105 the Catechism says, “The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. For Holy Mother Church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and New Testament, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself ”.

this statement is qualified by Par 80- 82, “As a result the Church to whom the transmission and interpretation of Revelation is entrusted, ‘does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the Holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honoured with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence’ ” (my italics).

 Again in Par 119, “…all that has been said about the manner of interpreting Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgement of the Church, which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God”.

This merely confirms what the Council of Trent wrote in 1546 in the Fourth Session, “…no one relying on his own judgement, shall in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the Holy Scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presumed to interpret them contrary to the sense which holy mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge their true sense and interpretation, has held and holds…”

 Pope John Paul II ratified this in 1995 in his encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint (that they may be one), when he said, “the relationship between Sacred Scripture, as the highest authority in matters of faith, and Sacred Tradition, is indispensable to the interpretation of the Word of God”.

Dermot Nash