As Catholics we all have to thank God for the gift of Magisterium to the Church.  The word Magisterium taken from Latin means teaching office.  Because of the Church’s teaching office (Magisterium), we have the assurance that the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church are not human interventions and opinions but they are divinely revealed truths. Without this there is every possibility of confusion and differences of opinions as far as interpretation of the Bible and teaching of  truths are concerned.  It is not the matter of private interpretation. Some may feel that there is no need of any authority to interpret and teach the Bible to us. They claim Bible alone (SOLA-SCRIPTURA) is sufficient. It is the sole rule of faith and morals, the only infallible authority.

The pitfalls of holding to the position that only Bible alone is sufficient and that  there is no need of any authority to interpret and teach the Bible to us has led to the division in the Body of Christ.  With just Bible-alone principle there are multiplications of denominations especially after Protestant Reformation.  They believe that anyone can interpret the Bible.  This private interpretation has led to more than 30000 Christian sects which are quarrelling among themselves in spite of all having the same Bible. What is the reason for this? It is because they rejected the one teaching authority to interpret and teach the Bible.

Already in the fifth century (434) one of the Fathers of the Church, St.Vincent of Lerins  warned: “all do not take the scripture according to one and the same sense, but this man and that man interpret it severally in their own fashion, so that as many men so many opinions.”  In the first fifteen centuries the principle of Bible-alone and private interpretation was unheard. Scripture too clearly states that private interpretation cannot be done by anyone. We need an authority to interpret the Bible. In the second letter Peter instructs us, “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy is a matter of one’s own interpretation” (2 Pt 1:20).  Further he warns us and says that “there are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction” (2 Pt 3:15-16).  It is not that easy to understand the scripture.  In Acts, Philip inquired about Ethiopian Eunuch “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said: “How can I unless someone guides me” (Acts 8:30-31).  What we see here is that individual interpretation is not permitted.  The rejection of teaching authority will definitely lead to misunderstanding and distorting the thought and message of the biblical authors.

IMPORTANCE OF THE TEACHING AUTHORITY IN THE CHURCH

We know from our day-to-day conversation that sometimes the other person has misunderstood us. In order to clarify the misunderstanding don’t we say “I didn’t mean that”.  If this misunderstanding can take place in spite of the other person being present, how much more we can misunderstand the written document like the Bible which is not one book but library of books written more than 2000 years back, spanning several centuries and written by different authors in different writing styles. What will assure us of correct interpretation? Not surely individual interpretation which has led to division and forming of more denominations but one teaching authority of the Church.

It is unthinkable that Jesus, the eternal Word of God, would go to the trouble of becoming human, establishing the Church, and dying on the cross to save us from our sins and leave the truth to be decided by an individual.  It is illogical that Jesus would do this without providing a guarantee that the Church would continue to preserve and proclaim his teachings faithfully.  Jesus entrusted this same teaching authority, or Magisterium, to his Church (Luke 10:16), he established the college of the apostles gathered around Peter (Mt 16:18-19), as a living teaching authority (Magisterium).

We need to see how the Magisterium functions much like the Supreme Court of any country or a good umpire of a game.  No government runs its country with just constitution or any sports for that matter with just rulebooks.  Without the Supreme Court and the umpire there will utter chaos.  The Supreme Court serves as ongoing, living authority to interpret and apply that written document called constitution to the concrete situation. No organized sports can settle the argument just with rulebook.  Umpires are a must to give a final decision or interpret the rules and apply them.  If each country felt the need to have some authority like Supreme Court to maintain its unity and every sports association felt the need to have someone who has final say on how the rules are to be interpreted and applied, our Lord Jesus Christ is certainly no less wise than earthly people. This divinely given teaching authority assures that the Church’s pronouncements on faith and morals will be free of error, because the Magisterium speaks with the authority of Christ. “Whoever listens to you, listens to me” (Lk 10:16). The Church’s voice must be God’s voice, her teachings must be His teaching, her authority must be His authority.  This teaching authority also serves as a source and measure of unity.

We find in the Scripture itself instances of the Church exercising her teaching authority. In the early church at the time when New Testament books were not yet finalized the Church was confronted with the question as to whether Christianity would be limited only to the Jews or would be available to all. Acts chapters 10 & 11 show us how the Church ruled in favour of opening the doors to all, including the ‘pagans’ and the non-Jews. In the Acts Chapter 15 we see another example of the teaching authority consisting of Peter, James and others giving an authoritative and important teaching on circumcision with these words “for it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”(Acts 15:28).  This same teaching authority, which acts in the name of Jesus, is passed on from generations to generations.  In last twenty centuries through twenty-one Ecumenical Councils, the Church has exercised its teaching authority in giving number of teachings on faith and morals.

THE ROLE OF THE MAGISTERIUM

If today twenty centuries after Christ we have a copy of the Bible with us it is only because of the Church.  Being custodian of the Bible she guarded and protected the Bible from the enemies and passed it on from generations to generations.  In the absence of the printing,  the Magisterium saw to it that the Church never lacked the copy of  the Bible for its liturgical service. She made an arrangement through her members especially monks to copy the Bible with hands and make it available for the people.

Right from the early church, the Church has exercised her role of teaching and interpreting the Word of God.  Before the invention of printing when the Bible was not freely available and very expensive to buy and not many were literate to read the Bible, the Church communicated the message of Good news through arts of sculptor, painting and architecture.  Stained-glass windows in churches presented to the constant view of the people scriptural events, especially those associated with our Lord.  The Stations of the Cross told graphically the story of Christ’s passion and death.  Statues and images brought to the mind the blessed Mother of God and the saints. The Church made sure that the Bible was available to the people.  She put the Bible in the public place but chained the Bible to the reading desk so that it is not stolen.

The Church was accused that she was opposed to its publication in the languages of the people and only with the reformation in the 16th century that the Bible was made available to the common man.  This is a false charge.    Luther is not the first to translate the Bible in a language other than Latin.  Long before Luther’s German version of the Bible: there were one hundred ninety-eight versions of the Bible in the languages of the various people of England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany etc.  There are also evidences of Biblical manuscripts in different languages of Asia and Africa like Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian etc. But today the scholars have found three thousand faulty translations in the Luther’s version of the Bible.  The King James Version of the English Bible had even more mistakes than Luther’s German version.

The Church protected her children by not allowing its members to read any bad translation of the Bible, which is done by others in order to show that the Catholic doctrines are wrong.  It is for this and similar reasons that the Catholic Church wants only those English, German, or French versions of the Bible to be used by her children, which she approves of as being faithful translations of the original or of the Latin vulgate which is her official version.