A note on language and Scripture

The standard Bible of this course is the Catholic Public Domain Version, and Scripture quoted in these pages is reproduced from it word for word. It was chosen for a practical reason: it is genuinely in the public domain, so you may copy, print, and share anything you find here without asking anyone's permission or paying anyone a fee.

You are entirely free to read alongside it in any Western Rite, Catholic, Anglican, Old Catholic, or ecumenically recognised translation you prefer. Nothing in this course depends on a particular English rendering, and the shelf of good translations is a long one.

One small point that catches people out. The Catholic Public Domain Version follows the older Latin numbering of the Psalms, which runs one behind the numbering used in most modern English Bibles for most of the Psalter. A verse cited here as Psalm 95 will usually be Psalm 96 in a modern Bible. You have not lost your place; the Psalms have simply been counted twice in history, and both counts survived.

This course is written for the whole Western Rite tradition — Roman Catholic, Anglican, Old Catholic, and the wider independent sacramental movement. It does not speak for any one jurisdiction, and it does not ask you to belong to one. Where practice differs between traditions, you are told so plainly rather than being handed one tradition's habits as though they were the universal rule.