EWTN News reports that nearly 500 “faith leaders,” including U.S. President Donald Trump, will gather in Washington, D.C., from April 19–25, 2026, to read the entire King James Version of the Bible aloud at the Museum of the Bible, in an event called “America Reads the Bible,” organized by the group Christians Engaged and timed to coincide with the nation’s 250th anniversary. The event will feature Catholic speakers such as author Allan Wright, CatholicVote president Kelsey Reinhardt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, actress Patricia Heaton, and others, alongside Protestant, evangelical, and “Christian nationalist” figures. The organizers describe the event as “a spiritual celebration of our nation’s founding ideals and a call to rediscover the truth that still anchors us today,” inspired by the book of Ezra’s public reading of Scripture. President Trump himself read from 2 Chronicles on April 21, declaring that “in every generation, through every trial and triumph, God’s Word has guided our people and our country to new heights.”
This event, draped in the language of spiritual renewal and national repentance, is in reality a textbook manifestation of the very errors the Church has condemned for centuries: the reduction of religion to a naturalistic, civic exercise; the erasure of the distinction between the true religion and false worship; and the substitution of the Church’s supernatural mission with a Protestant-tinged, democratic spectacle that serves the agenda of the post-conciliar apostasy.
The King James Version: Reading a Heretical Translation as “God’s Word”
Let us begin with the most elementary and yet most revealing detail: the version of Scripture chosen for this national celebration is the King James Version, a Protestant translation produced in 1611 under the authority of an Anglican monarch who was, by definition, a heretic and schismatic in revolt against the Chair of St. Peter. The Catholic Church has never approved the King James Version for liturgical or devotional use. The Church’s own approved English translations — the Douay-Rheims Bible for the Vulgate tradition, and later the Confraternity and Revised Standard Version (Catholic Edition) — exist precisely because Protestant translations are notorious for omitting books (the Deuterocanonicals), mistranslating key passages to support heretic doctrines (e.g., rendering *metanoeite* as “repent” rather than “do penance,” or *presbyteros* as “elder” rather than “priest”), and reflecting the theological biases of the Reformation.
That Catholic speakers — including those holding or aspiring to public office — would participate in a public reading of a heretical translation without the slightest objection or correction is itself a damning indictment of the state of catechesis in the post-conciliar wasteland. It demonstrates either ignorance so profound as to be culpable, or indifference so complete as to constitute material cooperation with the propagation of error. As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus of Errors, Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” — a proposition condemned as an error. The Catholic Church teaches, and has always taught, that she alone is the custodian and authentic interpreter of Sacred Scripture, and that no private individual, no civic body, and no secular government has the right to appropriate the Bible for purposes contrary to the Church’s mission.
The Erasure of the Church’s Exclusive Authority Over Scripture
The event’s stated inspiration is the book of Ezra, in which the public reading of the Law sparked national repentance. But the organizers have conveniently omitted the essential context: in Ezra, it was the Levitical priesthood, acting under the authority of God’s covenant with Israel, who read and interpreted the Law. The reading was not a democratic, interfaith, civic spectacle — it was an act of the true religion, conducted by its legitimate ministers, within the framework of the covenant community.
By contrast, “America Reads the Bible” is an exercise in religious indifferentism, the very error condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos (1832) and by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus, Proposition 17: “Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.” The event treats the Bible as a kind of national talisman, a cultural artifact whose public recitation by actors, politicians, and “faith leaders” of every stripe — Catholic, Protestant, evangelical, and otherwise — will somehow spiritually benefit the nation. This is not Catholicism. This is Americanism, the very heresy condemned by Pope Leo XIII in his letter Testem Benevolentiae (1899), in which he warned against the error of reducing the Church’s mission to the cultivation of civic virtue and natural religion.
The Catholic Church teaches that Sacred Scripture is not a book to be read aloud in a museum for civic purposes. It is the Word of God, entrusted to the Church, to be read within the context of the liturgy, under the guidance of the Magisterium, and interpreted according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers. As the Council of Trent declared in its fourth session (1546), the Church alone has the authority to judge the true sense and interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures. The idea that a public reading of the King James Version by a Catholic actress, a Catholic cabinet secretary, and a Catholic governor — in a museum founded by the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby and proponents of a distinctly evangelical Protestant vision of Scripture — constitutes a “spiritual celebration” is not merely absurd; it is sacrilegious.
The Substitution of Natural Religion for Supernatural Faith
The event’s framing is revealing. It is described as “a spiritual celebration of our nation’s founding ideals” and “a call to rediscover the truth that still anchors us today.” The “truth” in question is not the truth of the Catholic faith — the divinity of Christ, the necessity of the sacraments, the authority of the Roman Pontiff, the reality of sin and the need for grace. It is, rather, a vague, naturalistic “truth” that anchors a nation — a political entity — in its “founding ideals.”
This is the religion of laicism dressed up in biblical language. It is precisely the error that Pope Pius XI identified in Quas Primas (1925) as the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors,” which “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations.” Pius XI taught that the Kingdom of Christ “encompasses all men” and that “men united in societies are no less subject to the authority of Christ than individuals.” The reign of Christ is not a civic ideal to be celebrated in a museum; it is a supernatural reality that demands the submission of every soul, every family, and every state to the laws of the Gospel and the authority of the Church.
The event’s organizers speak of “national repentance and renewal” — but repentance from what? Renewal toward what? There is no mention of sin, no mention of the sacrament of confession, no mention of the necessity of conversion to the Catholic Church, no mention of the social reign of Christ the King. The “repentance” envisioned is not the supernatural repentance that leads to baptism and life in the Church; it is a civic repentance, a nationalistic ritual of self-congratulation dressed in the language of faith. This is the very “natural religion, a natural inner impulse” that Pius XI described as the end point of the laicist error — the replacement of the supernatural religion of Christ with a vague, civic spirituality that serves the interests of the state.
The Participation of Catholic Figures: Complicity in Apostasy
The participation of Catholic figures in this event is not merely imprudent; it is scandalous. Marco Rubio, Sean Duffy, Greg Abbott, Patricia Heaton — these are Catholics, or at least persons who identify as such, who are lending their names, their voices, and their public standing to an event that treats the Bible as a civic artifact, that uses a heretical translation, that erases the distinction between true and false worship, and that substitutes natural religion for the supernatural faith of Christ.
The Church has always taught that Catholics are bound to profess the faith publicly and to avoid any action that would imply the equality of true and false religions. As Pope Pius IX declared in the Syllabus, Proposition 77: “In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” — a proposition condemned as an error. The participation of Catholic officials in an interfaith Bible reading that treats all “Christian” versions of Scripture as equivalent, and that places Catholic and Protestant “faith leaders” on the same stage as equal participants in a national religious celebration, is a public denial of the Church’s exclusive claim to be the one true religion.
Moreover, the event is organized by “Christians Engaged,” a group whose mission is “to discipling Americans on biblical worldview and their responsibilities as citizens to pray, vote, and engage for the well-being of our nation.” This is not the mission of the Church. The Church’s mission is to teach, govern, and sanctify the faithful, to lead souls to eternal salvation through the sacraments, and to establish the social reign of Christ the King. The reduction of the faith to “biblical worldview” and “civic responsibility” is the very essence of the Americanist heresy, which Leo XIII condemned as the error of those who would “embrace a form of religion which regards the knowledge of merely natural things, and only, or at least primarily, the ends of earthly social life” — the language of Syllabus, Proposition 48, condemned by Pius IX.
The Museum of the Bible: A Temple of Biblical Illiteracy
The venue itself is significant. The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., was founded by Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, and is an institution dedicated to presenting the Bible as a cultural and historical artifact rather than as the inspired, inerrant Word of God as understood by the Catholic Church. The museum has been criticized by scholars of every stripe for its historical inaccuracies, its Protestant bias, and its treatment of Scripture as a museum piece rather than as the living Word of God entrusted to the Church.
That Catholic speakers would gather in this institution to participate in a public reading of a Protestant Bible is a symbol of the capitulation of the post-conciliar Church to the forces of Protestantism, secularism, and religious indifferentism. It is a visual representation of the abomination that has taken place in the structures occupying the Vatican since 1958: the abandonment of the Church’s supernatural mission in favor of a naturalistic, ecumenical, civic religion that is no longer recognizably Catholic.
The Silence on What Matters Most
Perhaps the most damning aspect of this event is what it omits. There is no mention of the necessity of baptism. There is no mention of the sacraments. There is no mention of the authority of the Church. There is no mention of the social reign of Christ the King. There is no mention of the reality of hell, the necessity of grace, the danger of mortal sin, the obligation of Catholics to work for the conversion of non-Catholics, or the exclusive salvific mission of the Catholic Church.
In the words of St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), the modernists — and their successors in the post-conciliar structures — have reduced Christianity to “a certain religious movement, applied or applicable to different times and places” (Proposition 59), and have proclaimed that “contemporary Catholicism cannot be reconciled with true knowledge without transforming it into a certain dogmaless Christianity, that is, into a broad and liberal Protestantism” (Proposition 65). This Bible reading event is precisely that: a dogmaless, sacramentless, authority-less “Christianity” that is indistinguishable from liberal Protestantism and that serves not the Kingdom of Christ but the kingdom of this world.
Conclusion: The Abomination of Desolation in the Temple
The “America Reads the Bible” event is not a celebration of the faith. It is a parody of the faith — a civic ritual that uses the language of Scripture to sanctify the nation-state, to erase the boundaries between true and false religion, and to reduce the supernatural mission of the Church to a naturalistic exercise in civic piety. It is the fruit of the post-conciliar revolution, which has systematically dismantled the Church’s teaching on the social reign of Christ the King, the necessity of the Catholic faith for salvation, the exclusive authority of the Church over Scripture and doctrine, and the supernatural mission of the sacraments.
Catholics who participate in such events — whether as speakers, attendees, or silent accomplices — are not serving the Kingdom of Christ. They are serving the kingdom of the Antichrist, which is the kingdom of naturalism, indifferentism, and the worship of man and nation in place of the worship of God. As Pope Pius XI declared in Quas Primas: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” And the happiness of the state, like the happiness of the individual, is found only in the recognition of the royal dignity of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the submission of every aspect of public and private life to His law.
Let those who have ears to hear, hear. And let those who profess the Catholic faith — truly, integrally, without compromise — reject this abomination and return to the immutable Tradition of the Church, which alone is the Ark of Salvation.
Source:
Nearly 500 leaders will gather in Washington, D.C., to read the entire Bible aloud (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 15.04.2026