T HE SECOND Vatican Council was an important moment in the history of Catholic biblical scholarship. That moment itself, however, had a history within the American Church. American Catholic biblical scholarship has achieved international acclaim in the postconciliar years, but it is heir to past efforts. This essay will trace those efforts through three periods. First, from John Carroll to Vatican I, Catholic thinkers considered Scripture as part of the total experience of the Church, as part of tradition. Second, at the turn of the century, American biblical scholarship, just beginning, fell victim to the same forces that condemned Americanism. Finally, scholars through the first session of Vatican II had to overcome charges of Modernism and to combat what was sometimes not doctrine but a theological interpretation of doctrine.
FROM JOHN CARROLL TO VATICAN IJohn Carroll, the nation's first bishop, offered his theological reflections on the role of Scripture within the life of the Church. In 1784 he had to answer attacks from Charles Wharton, a former Catholic priest who had converted to the Anglican Church. To Wharton's charge that certain Catholic doctrines were not to be found in Scripture, Carroll responded by asking how Wharton could "assume as a principle, that God communicated nothing more to his church, than is contained in his written word? He knows, that we have always asserted, that the whole word of God, unwritten, as well as written, is the christian's rule of faith." This rule of faith guaranteed "the authenticity, the genuineness, the incorruptibility of Scripture itself." "Tradition" or "the living doctrine of the catholic church" testified to what were "the true and genuine gospels." 1 Carroll, then, considered tradition to be both the guardian and the interpreter of Scripture, without which Scripture was a lifeless written document.Carroll would have resonated with Vatican II's teaching that "the apostolic preaching, which is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, was to be preserved in a continuous line of succession until the 1 Thomas O. Hanley, S.
