It depends entirely on what “literally” means — and the confusion hides a real distinction. Catholics are bound to take Scripture truly: every word is inspired by God and free from error in what it asserts. But “true” is not the same as “literalistic.” When the psalmist says God will shelter you “under his wings,” he is not teaching that God is a bird. Reading poetry as if it were a police report is not more faithful to Scripture; it is less, because it ignores what the author was actually saying.

The Church has always taught that the first task is to find the literal sense — which she defines not as “the most wooden reading” but as “the meaning conveyed by the words… discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation.” And sound interpretation means reading each text as the kind of writing it is. The Catechism is explicit: the reader must take into account “the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current.”1 History is read as history, poetry as poetry, parable as parable.

This is why the Church has never required anyone to hold that the world was made in six twenty-four-hour days or that the cosmos is a few thousand years old. Genesis teaches, infallibly, that God created all things freely and good, that man bears His image, that sin entered through a real fall — truths no microscope can touch. It does not thereby bind you to a particular scientific chronology; that was simply not the question the sacred author was inspired to answer. “All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach” (2 Timothy 3:16) — profitable for what it means to teach, which is the way of salvation, not the mechanics of geology.

Which raises the deeper point: who decides the genre and the sense? Left to each reader alone, “take it literally” quietly collapses into “take it however I please.” That is precisely why Christ did not hand the world a book and wish it luck; He founded a Church to be the pillar and ground of the truth, with the authority to read Scripture rightly across the centuries. The Bible is the Church’s book,2 read within the Church’s living tradition. So: take it literally where it speaks literally, poetically where it speaks poetically — and always humbly, within the Church that handed it to you.