If you’re Catholic and curious about the Bible, The God Who Speaks website is the place for you. Here you’ll find great resources, activities and ideas to help you deepen your faith and love of the Scriptures.

Being a Christian happens because of an ‘encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon‘. That person, that event, is Jesus Christ, and an encounter with him is possible because we have a God who Speaks.

This initiative takes its name from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2010 document Verbum Domini which beautifully unfolds the place of the Bible in the life of the Church. In that document, Pope Benedict says: ‘God becomes known through the dialogue he desires to have with us.’ That dialogue is accessible to us through the words of Scripture and through prayer. The aim of this initiative is to equip people to approach that dialogue and to enter into it so that we can have life-altering encounters with Jesus Christ and come to know him more and more.

It is an extraordinary, revolutionary claim to say that God is a God who speaks. If you look up into the night sky and see the panoply of the stars above you, you might say with the psalmist: ‘what is man that you are mindful of him’? (Psalm 8:4). We can feel so small in this enormous universe of which we are a part, yet the amazing message of our Catholic faith is that the creator knows each of us by name and calls out to us, wanting us to come to know him.

“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2). These words from Hebrews remind us, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church reaffirms, that ‘God speaks only one single Word’ (CCC 102) – Jesus Christ. The entire Bible in all its pages and all its words reveals Jesus to us in so many different ways; in poetry, in story, in narrative, in instruction. It’s like a symphony; each instrument playing different notes, combining together to create a harmony that reveals the beauty of God. Some of those instruments can seem quite small and insignificant – perhaps a difficult or complicated passage or one in which we struggle to find Jesus – but remove it, and the symphony will sound slightly off, and incomplete.

The God Who Speaks initiative provides a range of resources for you to explore the Scriptures in their fullness. You will find outlines of the many different books of the Bible and a basic orientation to help you open up the Bible for yourself. You’ll also find inspiration for how the message God conveys in the Scriptures, is relevant for you in your daily life.

During this month of March The God Who Speaks project is also celebrating some of the most inspiring women in Scripture through art, poetry and music. What is their story? How do they speak to us today?

Fleur Dorrell, the Catholic Scripture Engagement Manager for the Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales and the Bible Society, explores paintings of 16 different women in the Bible as interpreted by some inspiring artists. You can also listen to podcasts by 16 women from the Archdiocese of Birmingham describing the representation of 16 women in scripture and there is a celebration of seven key women in the Bible through a unique collaboration of art, poetry and music.

To find out more about the God Who Speaks Women in Scripture resources, go to: