New New Testament

Refuting the oft-repeated libel that Roman Catholics are not allowed to read the Bible, the Holy Name Society will start a drive next week to put a new New Testament into all the 4,500,000 Catholic homes in the U.S.

Occasion of the drive is the first authorized Catholic English-language revision of Holy Writ since 1749, a simplified text which omits inverted phrases and archaic word forms, changes "tidings" to "news," "concupiscence" to "lust," "wilderness" to "desert," "bier" to "stretcher." Even the words of the sign of the cross, with which every Roman Catholic begins and ends his prayers, have been changed--the Holy Ghost is now called the Holy Spirit. Typical modernization: Matthew XIll's reference to Christ's miracle-working powers from "Whence therefore hath he all these things," to "Then where did he get all this?"

Not only is the text simplified but (as in The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature) it is arranged in paragraphs instead of numbered verses. Poems are printed as poems, letters as letters.

The New Testament is ready now. Bishop Edwin Vincent O'Hara of Kansas City, head of the revisory committee, says that by 1944 U.S. Catholics should have a new Old Testament as well.

Roman Catholics have never accepted the King James version of the Bible used by Protestants. Their Bible is based on a translation made by exiled English priests at Douai and Reims in the 16th Century. Seventy-two U.S. bishops have already urged Catholics in their dioceses to adopt the new revision. No Protestant denomination has as yet taken any comparable step in urging its members to discard the King James version for one of the several modernized translations offered in recent years.

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