Catholics use a different Bible to Protestants. Can Catholics tell me a bit about the extra books included in your Biblical canon, and what they say? It's very hard to find Catholic Bibles in a tradtionally Protestant country...
This isn't a hard one even for a Protestant pastor to answer.
First, Catholic versions of the Bible are easily available on the internet:
The Douay Rheims 1899 American Edition (DRA Bible) is the KJV of Catholic Bibles, though I think
The New Jerusalem Bible is more popular today, and the Catholic edition of
The Good News Bible provides an easy to read paraphrase.
Second, the difference is that the Catholic Bible contains 73 books, 7 more than do protestant Bibles, and all contained in the Old Testament. These 7 books: Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch are a part of what protestants know as the Apocrypha and are sometimes referred to as Deutero-Canonical books. However, for Catholics they are just simply a part of the Canon of scripture and have always been so.
Third, it isn't just Catholics who include them; with some minor variations, so does the Orthodox Church.
The reason they were originally included as part of the Catholic canon has to do with the relationship between the NT church and the OT. Though Christianity is a descendant of Judaism. Very early on, most of the new converts to Christianity were found in the Greek speaking world. They may have been religious Jews, but they were living in a Greek culture. Even the apostles, when we find them quoting passages from the Old Testament, we can see that they were quoting directly from Septuagint, the Greek text of the Old Testament, rather than translating into Greek themselves out of the Hebrew Tanakh. And so, it was this Greek edition that was the "Bible" of the NT Church. Over the course of time, the writings which would eventually be termed the New Testament also developed. And as they did the Church also utilized them, along with these writings from their Jewish roots, and lots of other things that were found to be helpful as well. None of this was in book form like we have it today. Some was on parchments, some on scrolls, some in a new invention called a codex (very similar to a modern book), but they were just collections stored together in a library. As time continued to progress it was mutually agreed that the Church needed to articulate which of these writings were to be set apart as useful as a rule for faith and practice (that is what the term canon means -- standard or rule), and they did so by simply noting that a consensus had been reached to use the present 27 books that are found in the NT and the 46 books that were part of the Greek edition of the OT that they had received from their formerly Jewish heritage. And that's the way it was, unquestioned for centuries, until the time of Luther.
By Luther's day the Bible was available mostly in Latin. Luther thought that the scriptures needed to be in the common language of his people, German. And so he began the task of translating them. As he did, he tried to get back to the original texts. Not an easy task in his with most of the oldest texts stored in the Vatican, a place he was most certainly not welcomed. But he had access to Greek texts of the NT and there were Jewish communities living in Germany from which he could get Hebrew texts of the OT. Also, as this would involve translating directly from Hebrew into German rather than translating out of something that was itself a translation, this seemed better to Luther. But an interesting had happened in the Jewish community between the time that the Church has established the canon of scripture in the 4th century and Luther's 16th century. The Jews themselves had never actually bothered to establish a canon for the Hebrew scriptures. They had the Torah, that was settled, but the rest of it, that which were called the prophets and the writings was unsettled. For centuries Jewish scholars had written reflections on the Torah and had produced a Midrash, Mishnah, and Talmud all as commentary on the Torah. And these commentaries were generally accepted on par with the other writings. But now the Jews saw how Christians were using parts of their texts to prove that Jesus was who Christians said he was, and quite plainly they didn't like it. So, when a movement finally arose within the Jewish community that they needed to be more clear as to what was scripture and what was other, they specified as the "official" Hebrew Bible only 39 books, leaving out 7 of those that had been part of the 46 books of the Greek Septuagint that had been accepted and used by the NT Church as prophetic with regard to Jesus. But of course, those 7 had been part of the history of the Catholic Church.
With the discord between the protestant reformers and the Catholic Church, Luther's list of books was picked up by other protestant groups and the rest, as they say, is history. So, you have to decide if you agree more with Luther, that since the Jews never actually considered those 7 books to be part of their Hebrew Bible there is no reason to include them in the Christian's Bible (the protestant position), or that you agree that since the NT Church accepted and used them as a part of their scriptures that they should continue to be used by the church of today as well (the Catholic position).
