Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Marie-Joseph Legrange

My Catholic Church has a problem with being wrong.  It finds it very hard to be on the wrong side of an issue.  My church was a bit slow to get into the archeological research trend in bible study.  We thought that Moses wrote the first five books of the bible.  Then along came a Dominican Priest, Fr. Lagrange who in 1890 founded our first school for such research in Jerusalem, a good place for bible research at that time.  The Protestants had been at it for a good part of the 19th century, and you know how it was back then.  If the Protestants do it, then it must be wrong.  We were not too much into working together with other denominations.  But bible research was where we began to study with "outsiders."  Lagrange faced relentless criticism and some censorship within the Catholic Church.  But Lagrange loved the church and carried on quietly with his research.  He died in 1938 before Pius XII, who became Pope in 1939, backed his research efforts.  By the mid-sixties the Catholic Church was all in on biblical research and study.  So maybe it is a wait and see on modern issues in which you think the Catholic Church is way behind.  Of course, you could die first, as did Lagrange.  Institutions tend to move titanically while individual life is short.

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