Q&A: A friend of mine gave me a copy of the True Devotion recently. It comes as a surprise to me that Saint Grignion de Montfort uses the Bible so often in his writings. Were Catholics at that time permitted to read the Bible in their own language?
Father J. Patrick Gaffney, SMM
In spite of any rules and regulations which served as a deterrent to the personal reading of Sacred Scripture by lay people, certain events strongly promoted the rather wide-spread reading of the Bible by lay people in France at the time of Saint Louis de Montfort (1673-1716). For example, the Monastery of Port-Royal, (the “center” of Jansenists) with its Cistercian Nuns and its group of “Gentlemen of Port Royal” (Pascal was one of them) made huge efforts to translate the sacred texts into the vernacular. From 1672 to 1693 Port-Royal worked on and published the Bible in a French edition which became known as the Bible “de Sacy” from the name of its important Scripture translator and commentator, one of the “Gentlemen of Port-Royal,” Le Maistre de Sacy. This version was apparently quite widespread.
Moreover, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, over a million books were distributed, on the initiative of Church authorities, to the “newly converted” from Calvinism. Half of these books were copies of the New Testament plus the Psalms and the Imitation of Christ, all of course, in French. Everyone easily got copies of these texts distributed primarily to the newly converted.
Therefore, those who attended the missions preached by Saint Louis de Montfort had access to Scripture, directly if they could read or indirectly through close relatives or friends who read and explained it to them if they were illiterate. In drawing up a way of life for those who returned to the Church during a parish mission, Saint Louis de Montfort mentions – in passing, as if it were taken for granted – that Scripture should be at the very top of one’s reading list: “After Scripture, I read devotional books . . . ” (Hymn 139:56).
