The bleeping Psalter

Catholic apologists, many of them evangelical converts to Rome, are wont to claim the Church of Rome gave us the Bible. Erich Zenger was a Benedictine monk and OT scholar. He took great umbrage at how Vatican II “reforms” bowdlerized the Psalter. What Rome gives, Rome can take away:

For this reason, the postconciliar liturgical reform has even rejected certain psalms as unsuitable for the Catholic church’s Liturgy of Hours, and in an act of magisterial barbarism, it destroyed the poetic form of some psalms by simply eliminating individuals verses.

It is undeniable that the object in taking such a stance is, on the one hand, the “rescuing” of the biblical psalms for Christianity. This position aims to avoid the general heresy of Marcion, and yet it partially preserves it. The annoying strangeness of the psalms is attributed to their “less than Christian” Jewish origins…This is evident, with all its consequences and pungent effect, in those authors who regard these psalms, as symptoms and elements of Old Testament religion, as something “alien” in the relationship to Christianity.

In 1962, during the discussions of the reform of the Catholic church’s Liturgy of Hours, the Benedictine Abbot Primate Benno Gut, who in 1969 would become prefect of the new Sacred Congregation of Divine Worship, responded in the Central Commission of the Vatican Council to the question whether the so-called imprecatory psalms would be retained or eliminated…

Among the group are all three of the psalms that have been entirely omitted from the Roman Catholic church’s Liturgy of the Hours (Pss. 58, 83, and 109). Out of the group of nineteen psalms from which ecclesiastical censorship has dropped individual verses, I have chosen Psalms 137 and 139.

E. Zenger, A God of Vengeance?: Understanding the Psalms (WJK 1995), viii, 16-17, 26.