Divino Afflante Spiritu

The Roman Catholic Church has substantially moved away from this problem in recent decades, though the historical rigidity persisted far longer than many realize.

For centuries, the Church treated the Latin Vulgate as infallible—the Council of Trent (1546) and Vatican Council (1870) both declared it “sacred and canonical” and containing “revelation, with no admixture of error.”[1] This doctrine of Vulgate authority created genuine difficulties for Catholic scholars as errors became increasingly apparent and widely acknowledged.[1]

The turning point came with institutional change. In 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which permitted Catholic translations to be based on original Hebrew and Greek texts rather than exclusively on the Latin Vulgate.[2] This represented a fundamental reversal. The Confraternity subsequently produced an Old Testament translation based on original texts, with the complete project finished by 1969 and published as the New American Bible in 1970.[2]

By 1966, Catholic scholars were collaborating with Protestant scholars on ecumenical projects like the Common Bible (1973) and New Oxford Annotated Bible (1977).[2] This collaborative approach would have been unthinkable during the Reformation era.

However, the Church didn’t entirely abandon the Vulgate—it remains historically significant—but it no longer insists on its infallibility or exclusivity. The shift from defending an indefensible position to embracing scholarly engagement with original languages represents genuine institutional reform. Modern Catholic Bible translations now function similarly to Protestant ones, drawing from the best available manuscript evidence rather than claiming preservation through a single authoritative version. The problem has been substantially resolved, though it took nearly four centuries after the Reformation for Rome to acknowledge what Protestant scholars had argued from the beginning.

[1] Loraine Boettner, Roman Catholicism (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1962), 88.
[2] Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986), 563.