In 2021, Ascension Media’s Bible in a Year podcast, hosted by Fr. Mike Schmitz, was released to great response and acclaim. At several points in 2021 and 2022 it was the most dowloaded program on Apple Podcasts. I do not mean the most dowloaded Catholic podcast or most downloaded religious podcast–I mean the most downloaded podcast, full stop. It was a sensation, and perhaps still is. More than three years after the last episode was released, I am still hearing people in my parish talking about how they are working through it slowly, or listening through a second time, or just now discovering it. Knowing a good thing when they see it, Ascension has followed it up with Catechism in a Year in 2023, and the ongoing series Rosary in a Year which will run until the end of 2025.
My mom has been an avid listener of both the Bible in a Year and Rosary in a Year podcasts, so I receive some secondhand benefit from them by hearing my mom’s insights and observations. As for my own media consumption, however, I am trying to spend less time on my phone, not more, and if that wasn’t enough, I have an unfortunate and cantankerous allergy to celebrity priests and apologists. I recognize this is unreasonable of me, but I think Solomon says somewhere in Ecclesiastes that “of the making of podcasts there is no end,” and at this point in my life what I really want to listen to when I am alone in the car is a muffled recording of some heavily accented mumbler reading the works of the Church Fathers on Librivox.
For people like me, though, there are a few options for the person who wants to plow through the scriptures in 365 manageable and spoon-fed chunks. I happen to own two of them.
My Daily Catholic Bible (Our Sunday Visitor)
This book was published by Our Sunday Visitor in 2004 and edited by Paul Thigpen. This uses the RSV-CE first edition, so the Psalms have plenty of thees and thous and someone is going to get a nasty surprise in early September to find that Isaiah 7:14 says “young woman” and not “virgin”. In the introduction Thigpen writes that he based his reading plan on one found in the book How to Read the Bible Every Day by Carmen Rojas, a booklet that Servant Publications published in 1988. Each day contains two readings, generally two to three chapters from the Old Testament and 15 to 30 verses of the New Testament. Saint days from the universal calendar are marked in bold and each day has a quote from a saint—sometimes the same saint being celebrated that day, sometimes not. There are some obscure ones here—flipping through to remind myself I saw some quotes from Abba Poeman and Abba Arsenius, two Desert Fathers for whom I have a great fondness.
The cover of the book claims “20-Minute Daily Readings”, but there can be quite a variation from day to day in the reading commitment. For example, on July 29th one reads all of Psalm 119 and 16 verses of John’s Gospel: about six pages of double column text. The next day one reads Psalms 120 through 127 and the first 24 verses of John’s sixth chapter: almost exactly three pages. The reading plan begins with Genesis and Mark and ends with Malachi and Revelation. The Gospels are spread out over the year. For example, when one finishes Mark, the reading plan takes the reader through Romans, Hebrews, 1 Peter, and 1 Corinthians before Matthew begins on April 7. Note that this reading plan works off of a calendar, in contrast with what we will see below with the Augustine Institute’s offering. In My Daily Catholic Bible, February 1st is February 1st; it is not “Day 32”.
The book is a conventional glued paperback of that era. It feels cheap, but this allowed me to be at peace with stuffing it in a backpack and reading it in my parents’ pool when I worked through it over the course of 2022 and 2023. It can take a beating, but eventually the shiny plastic coating of the cover will start coming off. For something like this book, I can take a page or two being bent, but I hate the look and feel of that coating coming off.
The text is clear. There is ghosting, and the line matching is inconsistent, but c’mon–we are talking about a twenty year old book published by Our Sunday Visitor. This is a book which contains the Holy Scriptures, yes, but it is a tool, and I liked the fact that I could take this places I wouldn’t take my main Bible.
This exact edition of My Daily Catholic Bible is out of print, but there is an updated version which features the NABRE text. There is also an edition with daily readings from the NABRE New Testament available.
Before I talk about the other similar product I own, I want to recognize Paul Thigpen, who seems to be a figure from an earlier, simpler age, from before Catholic media was dominated by Ascension Presents and Pints with Aquinas and other similar programming. He, like Mike Aquilina, seems from afar to be a humble servant of the Church, someone who wrote dozens of books meant for clearing up issues experienced by beginners in the spiritual life and, I suppose, people with the wisdom to know that they will always be a beginner. I do not mean to say that either man is or was a spiritual master, but we could say the same of them as Ronald Knox said of Bishop Challoner: that they saw the need for certain books and filled up the lack themselves. May their reward be great.
Bible in a Year (Augustine Institute)
This is not Fr. Schmitz’s podcast put into a book. This is the Augustine Institute’s ESV-CE reading plan in a book. I always thought that this was an attempt to piggyback on the success of the podcast, but the product I own was released in September of 2020, three months before the first episode was available for download. I do not know if anyone bought this book out of confusion, meaning to purchase the Great Adventure Catholic Bible that was actually the edition used on Fr. Schmitz’s podcast, but I must say that if you are going to have a Bible arranged in a reading plan, this is the one.
First, much more attention has been paid to the reading plan’s arrangement. Rather than having a huge chunk of the Old Testament and a small chunk of the New Testament, each day has three parts: 1. a section of the narrative books of the Old Testament, 2. a section of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and 3. a section of the New Testament. Psalm 119, for those wondering, is split over the course of nine days.
The variety presented by having a Psalm between the day’s reading from Deuteronomy and the selection from Mark’s Gospel brings me back to this book with more joy than was my experience when I was reading My Daily Catholic Bible. The classification of wisdom literature is not slavishly kept to by the editors. Job, for example, is placed as a first reading rather than in the second slot with the other books of the same genre. I suppose this is due to the book’s length and a desire to keep the selections of the wisdom literature short.
In contrast to My Daily Catholic Bible, the New Testament is placed in order in this reading plan, meaning that for the first half of the year you read through all the Gospels and then work through the Acts, letters, and Revelation for the second half of the year. Every time I have systematically read through the New Testament, I have spread the Gospels out so that my eyes wouldn’t gloss over Gospel parallels due to familiarity and also because I have a special love of the Gospels and I didn’t want to use them all up right at the beginning. It seemed to my reasoning that to read all four Gospels right at the start was like taking all the pepperoni off the pizza and eating it first.
I am only a few weeks into my use of this reading plan—I started just before Ash Wednesday—but I am willing to play along with the frontloaded arrangement with the Gospels. The features of this book are keeping me more fresh than I expected as I have been reading through. Perhaps this is maturity on my part, or just a growing love for the New Testament letters.
This edition is not as tied to the calendar as My Daily Catholic Bible. Yesterday, as of this writing, I read Day 80, March 21st. As you look at the arrangement of the page, note that “Day 80” is bolded, but the date is in a typeface even lighter than the text. As for me, I am following the dates. I have a little metal book dart style bookmark on the day I started and my Our Lady Undoer of Knots bookmark has been advancing through the volume day by day since then. I could have started on day 1, but I wanted to start with Numbers and Deuteronomy, two books that I have only read through four or five times. They still pack surprises for me; seeing the selections with which I am familiar from Mass or the breviary in their original context is still revelatory.
There are seven editions of this product as far as I can tell: paperbacks in four different covers, two bonded leather versions, and one in leather. The one simply marked “leather” is the same price as the bonded leather editions. I am not interested in getting a tool like this with a leather cover, but if you do, it will cost you 49.99. One of the paperback and one of the leatherbound editions are in the RSV-2CE; the rest have the ESV-CE. In my research for this silly little article, I discovered that the RSV-2CE editions were actually released in 2018, which gives me further reason to repent that I have spent the last three years thinking this edition was exploiting a media phenomenon.
The general editor of this edition is Tim Gray, and with the help of his team of writers he has created a very helpful little tool for adding a lot more scripture to my day. Readers of this blog might recognize one of the contributing writers: Mark Giszczak, who authored a commentary on the Book of Wisdom, the first Old Testament volume from the wonderful Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture series.
Besides the biblical readings each day contains a short reflection which ties themes together from the readings in a very satisfying way. They seem as well constructed as the weekday homilies from when I lived in Providence and was lucky enough to hear lots of Dominican preaching. They also remind me of the little italicized preface to the liturgy of the day which can be found in Magnificat issues. In short, they are very well done. The example in the photo below is a representative example of the reflections.
The introductory matter of this Bible includes the original preface to the ESV, a preface to the Catholic edition of the ESV, an announcement from the bishops of India who were the first impetus for the ESV-CE, and a very good two page note from Tim Gray welcoming you into the Bible in a Year. The next page gives some options for how to read the book: 1. One can read it all in one sitting. 2. One can read the first reading in the morning, and the second and third readings in the evening. 3. Read through it in two years, reading the first readings over the course of the first year and the two shorter readings in the second year.
There is also a helpful page with all the books of the Bible in alphabetical order, with the dates which you will be reading them should you use January 1st as Day 1.
The physical book feels a lot more solid than my Daily Catholic Bible felt like when it was new. The font size is ever so slightly smaller in the Bible in a Year. There is some ghosting, but that is nothing new for a Catholic Bible. The lines actually seem fairly well matched in my flipping through as I wrote this article.
Conclusion
Are these books necessary? Most certainly not. Are they helpful to some? Most definitely yes.
I am finishing up my formation to become a Benedictine Oblate this year, and the experience has really made me hungry for the Word of God. Using this book this Lent has fit hand in glove with my praying of the Liturgy of the Hours and some lectio divina in the evening. I cannot say for sure, but I do not think I would have kept up with this little addition to my spiritual routine if I was just nightly marching a ribbon marker forward in my regular Bible.
One thing to keep in mind if you are thinking of using one of these books is, what will you do if you skip a day? I remember being laid low by COVID in the fall of 2022 and not opening up My Daily Catholic Bible for six days as I recovered from the exhaustion and brain fog. I think it took me until Halloween to catch up. I suppose the healthier thing would have been to just skip those days. One will have much more serious problems than that, but it is worth thinking about, as Tim Gray suggests to us, where you will read this and when in your routine it will be added in.
Now, where would you buy these? If you want the RSV-CE edition of My Daily Catholic Bible, I would suggest eBay or Abe Books, where it looks like there are decent copies going for 10 dollars. My suspicion is that getting a used copy on Amazon or Thrift Books might result in getting a NABRE edition accidentally due a seller checking the title but not the ISBN. If you want this in the NABRE, it is in print and easily available.
As for the Bible in a Year book, I am so glad I have it and have been enjoying it, but I think it is overpriced at 29.99. (But maybe I am a cheapskate. In a world where a half gallon of milk is 7.99, I suppose thirty dollars is right for this book.) Recently it has been available on Amazon with a coupon. You should be able to find it for about 17 dollars plus shipping.
I worked through the leather covered edition of the Augustine Institute ESV-CE Bible in a Year and found it a rewarding experience, although much of the stamped lettering on the cover has worn off from repeated use. I found the reflections less helpful than your columnist. You can listen to the readings via the Amen app. I can’t listen to the Fr Mike Schmitz podcasts. He speaks too quickly and often gabbles in a breathless way. I know that it’s possible to slow down the playback but his style just gives me a headache. Sorry, Fr Schmitz.