Madam, - Commendable though it is to point to the merits of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Joe Foyle, May 2nd), it is little short of a disservice to it to compare it over-favourably with the Bible.
The Catechism itself stresses early on that while the Christian faith is not "a religion of the book" (article 108), "we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures".
Article 109 adds: "In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words".
Article 124 declares: "The Word of God, which is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, is set forth and displays its power in a most wonderful way in the writings of the New Testament which hand on the ultimate truth of God's Revelation".
Finally, article 133 states: "The Church forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faith ... to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures". And, this paragraph further declares: "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ".
Obviously, then, a particular merit of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is the stress it lays on the unique role of the Bible in the life of the Church and the conviction that "the inspired books teach the truth". - Yours, etc,
DES CRYAN, Blackrock, Co Dublin