The CYB highlights the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) with over 650 short articles. These articles are designed to teach something about the Bible or make suggestions about how to live these teachings.

The CYB claims to be Catholic because "its introductions and articles reflect Catholic interpretation of the Bible and [because it] contains all seventy-three books and letters that form a complete Catholic Bible (pg. vii)." Throughout the CYB, however, "Catholic Christians" are referred to in the third person and their "beliefs" are presented as subjective opinion. Some articles, under the heading, "Catholic Connections", are intended to show the biblical basis for some Catholic beliefs and practices. This heading is rather confusing in that it implies that only certain sections, and not the whole of Sacred Scripture, have a connection to the Catholic Faith.

Other articles, intended to show how the Bible is "multicultural", represent distinct cultural perspectives. These articles introduce irrelevant cultural experiences, traditions, and poetry. Some even present non-Christian religious ideas and prayers. Ironically, these articles foster racial fixation in the context of Sacred Scripture which otherwise transcends racial difference.

Also, some of the "Live It" and "Did You Know" articles contain unnecessary and disturbing images. One article, for example, gives an account of the group rape of a teenage girl (pg. 43 No Way Shechem!). Another considers what menstruation must have been like for women of the Old Testament (pg. 123 Monthly Periods).

Ostensibly a version of the bible that will appeal to "modern" Catholic Youth. But it doesn`t take much searching to find objectionable content in the CYB. According to the CYB the author of Sirach is "sexist" (pg. 810 The Sexism of Sirach), the author of John's Gospel is anti-Semitic (pg. 1249 "The Jews" in the Gospel of John), and the sin of the Sodomites is ``inhospitality`` (pg. 25 Be Kind To Strangers). The rest is predictable. There is far more error in this Bible than I could possibly address in this space.

As the CYB purports to be Catholic, however, let us take a look at how it presents Church teaching. On page 1237 under the heading "Catholic Connections" and titled "The Eucharist" we find, "In Luke's account of the Last Supper, Jesus asks his disciples to remember him and all that he did, as they share the loaf of bread that he identified as his body given for us and the cup of wine that he identified with the New Covenant sealed by his blood." This is not consistent with Church teaching, which states "by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the wine into the substance of his blood (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1376)."

I do not recommend this Bible to anyone, for any reason. (TiberRiver review).


Really good Bible!   October 7, 2003
 15 out of 17 found this review helpful

I'm a student at a Catholic School and we use the Catholic Youth Bible as our text book in Religion class. It's a good book that includes all the footnotes from the New American Bible. It has information on the various writers of each book, footnotes that make the Bible much more easy to understand and a section in the back with good pictures of holy places and things like that. The footnotes about different cultural religious beliefs are kind of stupid because they have little to do with Catholicism or the Bible. I reccomend it to children and adults who need a better understanding of the Bible from a Catholic point of view.