The Prince of Wales fears that the Millennium Fund has overlooked the Christian character of "2000AD" and supports no large-scale Christian project. Mrs Virginia Bottomley sustains his view saying: "This, after all, is a Christian nation." The first thing to be said is that a nation cannot be Christian. No land, no political entity, can have faith. Faith is a spark in human hearts; it is not a label or a flag. It is dangerous to lump everything together under a title; it removes the need for personal commitment and encourages a very loose sense of belonging, so loose as to be almost meaningless. This Sunday, I read, is "Bible Sunday". One might think that every Sunday was that, but never mind. It is an opportunity to reflect on God's gift of his Word, conveyed to us through inspired writers. Catholics have sometimes paid little attention to the Bible, regarding it as a 'Protestant thing'. Fortunately we are making up for lost time, though it is doubtful if as a whole we yet accord to God's Word the respect we give to his Sacraments. Evangelical Christians have a very strong sense of the power of the Bible, which inspires and fuels their personal faith. Catholic tradition would only add the caution that personal faith must be exercised for the Church as a whole, rather than promoting a strongly individualist search for salvation. But the Scriptures help us answer the question: "Who is Jesus?" and then, equipped with that answer, share his life, and his Sacraments, with enthusiasm. The Bible is not always easy to understand, hence the need for prayerful reflection and study, for homilies, and for reading together, be it in families, in schools, or where 'two or three gather together', If the First Millennium stood on the threshold of the era of stained glass, which brought a pictorial Bible to the illiterate, maybe the Second Millennium should aim, in the manner of modern technology, to do the same. The writer Kafka said: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." Applied to the Bible, that must be one motto for the Millennium, for ourselves, and For a wider field too. DS.