Do Catholics Read the Bible?

This is the subject of a Jimmy Akins post. It ends with an interesting idea that Catholics yet might be redeemed of their fault of not reading Scripture is they start listening more intently at Mass.

I worked as a team member on the RCIA for a few years. One of my goals was to encourage the participants to engage Scripture; to read it as if it was written specifically for them. There was a reluctance to engage Scripture amongst many prospective Catholics in RCIA. It seemed as if there was either an excessive humility: "how can I interpret the holy books?"; or a deracinating (oh how long have I waited to use that word) rationality:"isn't anything you or I say about this particular passage simply our own subjective opinions?" Attitudes like this lead one to either read Commentaries ("they're experts, they must know what they're talking about") or to, more commonly amongst Catholics anyway, simply not reading Scripture at all.

By engage I mean being open to receiving something new from a passage of Scripture, even if it has been heard (or read) many times before. It takes, istm, an openness to the action of God inside of us, thus overcoming the rationalism that makes us reluctant to read (or hear) the Bible personally. But humility is absolutely necessary. Thus the Community that gave us the Bible (and, in an ecumenical mood, I mean the Christian Community of the First to Fifth Centuries that sometimes called itself Catholic) must be our guide to what acceptable range of meanings these passages might have.

So we Catholics need to sit up and listen closely and actively when the three Readings are done at Sunday Mass. There are messages in there for us, waiting for us to hear them. And reading privately at home wouldn't come amiss either.