Scripture in multimedia - American Bible Society publishing of print and multimedia scriptural materials

National Catholic Reporter, May 14, 1999 by Pamela Schaeffer

American Bible Society, with Catholics aboard, charts high-tech course into future

When the American Bible Society was founded in Manhattan in 1816, Protestant zeal was at its height. Moral reformers and revivalists looked around and saw more than enough to do. Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a Jerry Falwell of his day, warned, "Our vices are digging the grave of our liberties and preparing to entomb our glory." But Beecher had more to worry about than the nation's morals. Looming at its borders was an influx of Irish Catholics that would challenge Protestant hegemony even more. Beecher would soon issue his "Plea for the West," expressing his urgent hope for "saving the West from the pope."

In this post-Puritan, anti-Catholic, missionary-minded world, the Bible society movement served a growing demand for Bibles at home and abroad, becoming the nation's first mass producer of books and achieving so much success worldwide that popes found it necessary to condemn it.

"Pests of this sort must be destroyed by all means," insisted Pope Pius IX, in his 1866 encyclical Quanta Cura, where he ranked Bible societies with socialism and communism on a list of social evils. The pope was tapping into 400 years of vociferous Roman Catholic opposition to the vernacular Bible that began with the Reformation.

By then, the American Bible Society, modeled after an English organization, was half a century old.

In 1897, Pope Leo XIII took up the cause in Apostolic Constitution Officiorum ac Munerum, an exhortation against noxious books. Second after the writings of heretics and schismatics came the vernacular Bible. All Bibles published in the vernacular by non-Catholics were "strictly forbidden," the pope said, "especially those published by the Bible societies, which have been more than once condemned by the Roman Pontiffs."

What a difference 150 years has made.

Today a high percentage of the staff of the American Bible Society are Roman Catholics -- as high as 50 to 60 percent of the society's staff of 350 or so, some staff members estimate, though no one is actually keeping count. Catholics serve on the society's board. One of the society's translations -- the Contemporary English Version -- is approved and widely used for Catholic children's liturgies.

Some of the society's Bibles even carry the imprimatur -- though that stamp of official Catholic approval is becoming increasingly hard to get. Today, as a result of a surge of Catholic interest in biblical scholarship and Bible reading since the Second Vatican Council, Catholics are increasingly a focus of the society's outreach.

Relationships with Catholics are a full-time job for Jeanette P. Russo, director, Catholic ministries, who is charged with increasing the society's visibility among her co-religionists. "We're here to serve the Christian community," she said, "but when the society did some research to find out who is it we're missing, the research pointed to the Catholic community."

Another Catholic staffer, Gary Ruth, whose job is to form links with other publishers, has found Catholic publishers to be especially receptive. For example, Loyola Press has introduced several Bible society products into its catalogs -- primarily products for children, Ruth said.

Emilio Reyes is a pentecostal Protestant, but his job as national director for Hispanic Ministries is to reach out to the 30 million Spanish-speaking people in the United States, an estimated 73 percent of whom are Catholics. Currently he is drawing together Catholic scholars from Latin America for a pilot symposium in New York aimed at helping priests who work with Hispanics to use the Bible to teach theology. He hopes to put on similar programs in dioceses around the country.

Further, Catholics are deeply involved in the society's leading edge: finding ways to present the Bible through "new media" -- that is, in ways other than print. Think MTV-type videos and film; CD-ROMs; scripture set to music in styles ranging from country-western to rock to jazz; interactive scripture comics on the Web. For Catholics, new media is a natural niche because Catholics are comfortable relating symbols to faith, said Robert Hodgson Jr., a Catholic from Springfield, Mo. The society's ventures into video translations for young audiences earned it a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal a few years ago and then went on to earn some international awards.

Research center

Hodgson, formerly professor of the New Testament at Southwest Missouri State University, heads up the society's year-and-a-half-old Research Center for Scripture and Media. The Springfield-based center sponsors research and experimentation around such questions as what does it mean to remain faithful to the text when the medium of communication is, say, music, video, a Web page, comics or a CD-ROM? How do you convey the meaning of a passage -- and satisfy expectations of a contemporary audience -- using sound and video? How can you be sensitive to issues of culture, gender and ethnicity on, say, a CD-ROM?