Vacation Bible school goes Catholic.

Driving or walking by a church a generation ago and seeing a "Vacation Bible School" sign in front meant one thing: The church was Protestant. It was a sure bet, money in the bank, should anyone have been so foolish to bet otherwise.

Not a good bet today.

Vacation Bible schools, once the exclusive domain of Protestants, have become a summer staple for more and more Catholic parishes. Some churches discreetly advertise their vacation Bible school through announcements in the church bulletin or from the pulpit. Others hang huge banners outdoors heralding this event or park a trailer with illuminated marquee lettering advertising this special summer activity smack in front of church.

Activities such as vacation Bible schools are mainstream for the majority of the world's Catholics under the age of 35. They have no recollection of the pre-Vatican II religious education that made only scant references to the Bible and never used it as a text. They have no memory of the epistle and gospel read in Latin during Mass, mysteriously muttered by the priest with his back to the congregation.

The proliferation of Catholic vacation Bible schools this past generation is just one result of an almost century-long struggle to get the Bible back into Catholicism. One milestone was Pope Pius XII's 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which promoted modern biblical study. But even after this papal encyclical, some biblical scholars had difficulty getting their work published.

John L. McKenzie, for example, finished his groundbreaking book The Two-Edged Sword (Bruce) in 1953, but it languished unpublished until 1956 thanks to censors who had not yet absorbed the biblical encyclical penned a decade earlier. Nine years later, when he completed the Dictionary of the Bible (Bruce), McKenzie made oblique allusion to his previous difficulties in the preface: "Were censorship always conducted in the manner in which these gentlemen [the dictionary's censors] fulfilled their responsibility, there would never be any complaint about the process." The Second Vatican Council, whose revolutionary constitutions and decrees were firmly anchored in biblical images, affirmed the work of McKenzie and other pioneering biblical scholars.

As you prepare to send your kids off to vacation Bible school or if your parish is so fortunate as to have a summer Bible school for adults, remember that such opportunities were not officially available to our Catholic parents or grandparents. No doubt a few of our more adventurous and ecumenical Catholic ancestors slipped into the Protestant church's vacation Bible schools. These family members, years ahead of their time, did see a new heaven and a new earth, just as the biblical scholars who struggled mightily to bring the Bible back home to Catholicism during the middle of the 20th century did.

You can bet on it!

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.