Why doesn the Catholic Church have Bibles in the pews for people to use during a service?
Sometimes the implication from this question is that the Catholic Church is not biblical and nothing can be further from the truth. The world owes the Catholic Church a debt of gratitude because it alone defined the canon of the Bible used by Christians. The Bible itself is a book. The Word proclaimed from it is God and, of course, sacred and infallible. Catholics refer to their “service” as the Mass. The Mass has two parts: the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (the Word made Flesh). In the Liturgy of the Word for weekend Masses, a lector first reads (proclaims) the Word from the Old Testament. This is followed by a Responsorial Psalm sung by a cantor. Then the lector reads a selection from the New Testament. This is followed by the priest reading from a Gospel. The Catholic Church sets all the readings for each day in advance and in accordance with the liturgical year and the selected readings have relevancy to each other: OT, NT, Gospel. As such, if one attended M
