Pope Leo XIV has urged Catholics to approach Sacred Scripture with both faith and intellectual humility, warning that readings detached from history and human experience risk distorting God’s revealed Word.
During his weekly General Audience, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on the Second Vatican Council, focusing once again on the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, which he has described as “one of the most beautiful and important” documents of the Council, according to Vatican News.
Reflecting on divine revelation, Pope Leo XIV emphasized that Sacred Scripture is not a distant or abstract message, but a privileged place where God continues to speak personally to humanity. The faithful, he recalled, encounter in Scripture a living God who desires to be known and loved by people of every age.
According to the Pope, the human form of Scripture is itself a sign of God’s love. He noted that the biblical texts “were not written in a heavenly or superhuman language,” but instead reveal that God “chooses to speak using human languages,” working through authors inspired by the Holy Spirit. This, he explained, mirrors the mystery of the Incarnation, since “the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse,” just as Christ took on human weakness.
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Because Scripture is rooted in real history, Pope Leo XIV stressed that interpretation cannot ignore context. “A correct interpretation of the sacred texts cannot dispense with the historic environment in which they developed and the literary forms that were used,” he said, warning that abandoning this study can lead to “fundamentalist or spiritualist readings of Scripture, which betray its meaning,” according to Vatican News.
The Holy Father applied the same principle to preaching and teaching in the Church today. If the proclamation of God’s Word becomes disconnected from lived experience, he cautioned, it loses its power. “If it loses touch with reality, with human hopes and sufferings,” or if it relies on language that is “incomprehensible… uncommunicative or anachronistic,” the Pope warned, “it is ineffective.”
Especially within the liturgy, Pope Leo XIV insisted that Scripture must speak directly to the present moment. The Word of God, he said, is meant “to touch their present lives with their problems, to enlighten the steps to be taken and the decisions to be made.”
At the same time, the Pope cautioned against reducing Scripture to social activism alone. While the Word of God nurtures charity and life among believers, he emphasized that it “cannot be reduced to a mere philanthropic or social message,” but remains “the joyful proclamation of the full and eternal life that God has given to us in Jesus,” according to Vatican News.
Concluding his catechesis, Pope Leo XIV invited the faithful to gratitude and self-examination, encouraging them to thank God for the nourishment of His Word and to pray that their own words and lives never obscure “the love of God that is narrated in them.”
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