The Ave Catholic Notetaking Bible (Hardcover)

Review

SECTION ONE Some Bibles are read. This one is meant to be used. The Ave Catholic Notetaking Bible from Ave Maria Press is a hardcover Scripture edition designed around an active reader — someone who wants to write in the margins, mark passages across years of prayer, and return to the same verses with new eyes at different seasons of life. The format answers a practical question that serious Catholic readers face: how do you build a personal relationship with Scripture rather than reading it in disconnected fragments? The intended audience is broad — adult Catholics in parishes, students in Catholic schools, retreat participants, or anyone beginning a more structured prayer life. Where most study Bibles load the page with commentary that crowds out the reader's own response, a notetaking Bible reverses the proportion: the white space belongs to the reader. That structural choice makes this edition less a reference tool and more a formation companion. SECTION TWO - **Created**: Scripture is the Word addressed to persons made in the image of God — beings capable of receiving divine communication precisely because they bear rational souls ordered toward truth. A Bible with space for personal response treats the reader as an active subject, not a passive recipient, which is consistent with the Catholic understanding of the person as a rational agent made for dialogue with God. - **Fallen**: The notetaking format implicitly acknowledges a real feature of the fallen condition: the human mind is scattered and forgetful. Without physical anchors — a dated note, an underline, a question written in the margin — the insights gained in prayer dissipate. The Augustinian tradition understood this well: memory is not merely cognitive storage but the place where God is found again. This Bible gives memory a physical home. - **Redeemed**: Repeated, marked engagement with Scripture is one of the classical instruments of ongoing conversion. When a reader returns to a passage annotated three years earlier and finds their understanding has changed, they are reading their own redemption in miniature. The notetaking Bible makes that arc visible, which is a modest but real participation in the Redeemed state's logic of gradual transformation. - **Prudence (memory and teachability)**: The act of writing while reading slows the cogitative process — it moves words from the eye to the hand, which deepens retention. This is not incidental; it is a small technology of prudence-memory, building the habit of learning from what the Word has already said before moving on to what it might say next. - **Justice (worship and devotion)**: A Bible that accumulates personal history becomes an object of devotion in the best sense — a physical record of the reader's sustained effort to give God the attention owed to him. Over time it functions less like a book and more like a log of prayer. SECTION THREE The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum called directly for Scripture editions 'provided with suitable footnotes' so that 'the children of the Church may safely and profitably become conversant with the Sacred Scriptures and be penetrated with their spirit'[^1] — a mandate this notetaking format answers not with scholarly apparatus but with something more personal: room for the reader's own encounter with the text to accumulate in writing. The roster does not contain a close scholarly interlocutor beyond this conciliar warrant; the Ave Notetaking Bible stands well on its own terms as a practical formation tool. ## References 1. Vatican II (1965). *Dei Verbum*. Chapter VI, Article 25. — 'editions of the Sacred Scriptures, provided with suitable footnotes, should be prepared also for the use of non-Christians and adapted to their situation'

✓ Strengths

• ✓Positions Scripture not as a text to be read passively but as a living document to be marked, questioned, and returned to — a formation practice that cultivates the habit of lectio divina over time.
• ✓The notetaking format concretely supports the integral virtue of docility (prudence-teachability): the reader is structurally invited to receive the Word with attentiveness rather than speed, building an active posture toward divine instruction.
• ✓Published by Ave Maria Press, a Catholic institution with a strong catechetical tradition, the Bible carries implicit ecclesiastical trust appropriate for parish, school, and retreat contexts.
• ✓The hardcover format signals durability and repeated use — a physical object designed to accumulate personal spiritual history, which supports prudence-memory by making visible the reader's own growth in understanding over time.
• ✓Rooted in the Catholic tradition of annotated Scripture editions called for by Dei Verbum, which explicitly urged 'editions of the Sacred Scriptures, provided with suitable footnotes' for the formation of the faithful.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The notetaking format may inadvertently frame Scripture engagement as primarily an intellectual or journaling exercise rather than a liturgical and communal one; formation directors should supplement with guidance on reading within the Church's lectionary cycle.