Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Some readers open a Bible looking for answers to specific questions. Others keep one on the nightstand and dip in when the day goes wrong. What most of them lack is any structural guide for understanding what they are reading — why Paul wrote to the Galatians when he did, what covenant framework underlies the Psalms, or how a passage in Leviticus connects to what Catholics actually believe in the pew. 'Loved as I Am,' published by Ave Maria Press, addresses that gap by binding a complete Catholic Bible with comprehensive cross-references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church on nearly every page, alongside introductions to each biblical book that lay out historical context, an outline, and the text's central themes. The large single-column format and lightly lined margins are designed for active annotation — journaling, drawing, and note-taking directly alongside the sacred text. The audience is any Catholic Christian who wants to read Scripture not as a private devotional exercise but as a conversation with the living tradition of the Church, understanding the Bible the way the Church has always understood it: as a text that belongs to a community of faith across time. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The title itself carries an anthropological claim. To be loved 'as I am' is to be received prior to any achievement or correction — the reader's standing before God is given, not earned. This corresponds to the CCMMP's first premise: the person exists as imago Dei, with a dignity that precedes moral performance. The Catechism cross-references reinforce this by connecting specific Scripture passages to the Church's teaching on human dignity, preventing the reader from abstracting the biblical text away from the concrete person God addresses. - **Fallen**: The historical and literary introductions to each biblical book make the Fall legible within salvation history. By situating texts in their original crisis — exile, persecution, communal rupture — the reader encounters Scripture as addressed to genuinely broken people in broken circumstances, not as a manual for the already-virtuous. This specificity prevents the spiritually naive reading that treats biblical commands as achievable by willpower alone. - **Redeemed**: The Catechism cross-references function as a map of redemption: they show the reader how each scriptural passage has been received, interpreted, and applied by the Church across centuries of theological reflection. Reading this way trains the theological virtue of hope — the reader learns that Scripture is not a closed archive but a living word that the Redeemed community continues to inhabit and understand more deeply. - **Prudence (docility)**: The margin space and journaling design are not incidental. They slow the reader down and ask them to respond — to write, to draw, to sit with a text before moving on. This trains docility in the classical sense: the openness to being taught, which Aquinas treats as an integral part of prudence. A reader who journals through Romans over six months is practicing a different cognitive habit than one who reads it in an afternoon. - **Justice (devotion)**: The Catechism cross-references make explicit what Catholic tradition has always maintained — that Scripture reading is an act of worship, not merely intellectual inquiry. The format structurally supports the virtue of devotion by linking the reader's private encounter with the text to the Church's public, authoritative voice. SECTION THREE John Paul II[^1], in Veritatis Splendor, draws a direct line from the natural law to the moral content of Scripture, arguing through Aquinas that the divine law is not foreign to human reason but its fulfillment — a claim the Catechism cross-references in this Bible make navigable for ordinary readers who might otherwise encounter Paul's moral teaching without knowing its doctrinal ground. Benedict XVI[^2], in Spe Salvi, reads Scripture as the grammar of hope, arguing through the Catechism that the theological virtues are not additions to the moral life but its animating structure — which aligns with the way this Bible's apparatus teaches the reader to hear a promise in the text, not merely a command. Francis[^3], in Lumen Fidei, argues that faith has a social and ecclesial character and that the Church's magisterium is the proper channel of authentic scriptural interpretation — exactly what the Catechism cross-references in this volume instantiate on every page. ## References 1. John Paul II (1993). *Veritatis Splendor*. Page 1. — 'Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2070' 2. Benedict XVI (2007). *Spe Salvi*. Page 1. — 'Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1817-1821' 3. Francis (2013). *Lumen Fidei*. Page 1. — 'it recognizes its living, supernatural character... it bases its teachings on it'
✓ Strengths
- ✓Integrates Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church in a single volume, giving readers a structural bridge between divine revelation and the Church's authoritative interpretation of it — an embodiment of the Catholic principle that Scripture and Tradition are inseparable witnesses to a single deposit of faith.
- ✓The single-column layout with lined margins is a pedagogical choice, not merely a design preference: it invites the reader into active lectio divina rather than passive consumption, training the virtue of docility by slowing reading to the pace of reflection and notation.
- ✓Contextual introductions to each biblical book — covering historical setting, outline, and key themes — form the memory faculty of the reader, equipping them to situate a passage within salvation history rather than read it in isolation.
- ✓The Catechism cross-references operationalize what John Paul II described in Veritatis Splendor as the unity of moral teaching and divine law: the reader can move from a Pauline command directly to the Church's doctrinal elaboration, preventing arbitrary private interpretation.
- ✓The title 'Loved as I Am' signals an anthropological commitment: the person is received before they are formed, beloved before they perform. This anchors the entire reading practice in the Created state — the reader approaches Scripture from within the prior fact of being known and loved by God.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The journaling-and-drawing format, while pastorally accessible, may inadvertently privatize Scripture reading; without guidance on how personal reflection relates to communal interpretation through the Magisterium, readers risk a therapeutic individualism that the Catechism cross-references alone may not fully correct.