It may have outsold every other book in history and continue to top best-seller lists around the world but, according to a major survey held across nine nations in the northern hemisphere, in the West these days the Bible is hardly ever opened by most people.
Some 13,000 people took part in the survey, commissioned by the Catholic Biblical Federation (CBF). Its findings are expected to feed into preparations for October's synod on the "Word of God in the Life and the Mission of the Church", which hundreds of bishops from across the world will attend in Rome.
Overall the survey found that despite secularisation in the countries surveyed, the Bible is still considered interesting and true, and in six of the nine countries surveyed, a majority of people believed it had an impact on everyday life. This amounts to a "positive prejudice" towards the book, said Bishop Vincenzo Paglia of Terni, president of the CBF.
The survey polled the general population in eight European countries - Britain, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Russia - as well as the United States. Its preliminary findings were presented at a press conference in the Vatican on Monday attended by Bishop Paglia, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, and Professor Luca Diotallevi of Roma Tre University, curator of the survey.
The study also found that more than half of those polled in Russia, Poland, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom were in favour of children studying the Bible at school. Professor Diotallevi noted that reading the Bible was not found "in any way" to echo political polarisation between Right and Left.
But the survey also revealed that the Second Vatican Council's call for a wider knowledge of the Bible among Catholics has mostly remained unheeded. It showed that, in the last 12 months, fewer than a third of Europeans, on average, had read a passage from the scriptures: the percentage was 36 per cent in Britain, but fell as low as 27 per cent in Italy and 20 per cent in Spain, and even in Catholic Poland rose only to 38 per cent. This is in stark contrast to results from the US, where three out of four Americans have read the Bible in the last 12 months.
"The US has a different way of living out their modernity from Europe," said Professor Diotallevi. "No one could say that they are not a secular country, but in the Anglo-Saxon world Christianity has managed to remain at the heart of society even during periods of change."
In the United States, just seven out of 100 households are without a Bible, as opposed to more than half in France.
Bishop Paglia reflected that the Bible was the most effective place for ecumenical dialogue and that there no longer existed diversity among various Christian traditions regarding their relationship with scripture. However, the survey also found that most people also considered the Bible a "difficult" book.
"There is a widespread need for interpretation and help in understanding the Scriptures," said Archbishop Ravasi. But he felt this was positive because it showed a need for the Church to teach the scriptures. He also said lectio divina must be given "new spaces and new forms until it becomes the habitual way of approaching the word of God in our Christian communities".
The survey also shows that a significant minority of Bible-readers in the US, Italy, Spain and Poland think that the scriptures should be interpreted "literally" as God's word. And according to Professor Diotallevi, Europeans tended to be considerably more biblically ignorant than Americans and preferred to approach the Bible through homilies or television programmes rather than directly.
The synod's Special Secretary, Mgr Wilhelm Egger, said that the synod would also tackle doctrinal issues of interpretation and the role of the Church, as well as pastoral problems.
Professor Diotallevi said separate data for Christians would be released at a later date, and another survey into southern hemisphere countries including Australia, South Africa, Argentina and the Philippines would follow.