Catholic Commentary
Invitation to Contemplate Zion's Glory
11Let Mount Zion be glad! Let the daughters of Judah rejoice because of your judgments.12Walk about Zion, and go around her. Number its towers.13Notice her bulwarks. Consider her palaces, that you may tell it to the next generation.
Psalms 48:11–13 calls Mount Zion to rejoice and invites pilgrims to circumambulate the city, counting its towers and observing its fortifications as an act of devotion and testimony. The passage moves from communal joy rooted in God's past deliverance, through active liturgical survey, to internalized appreciation of God's protective presence within the city's physical structures.
To love the Church, you must learn to see her — not with blind loyalty or cynical distance, but with the pilgrim's eye, counting what God has actually built and preserved.
Psalms 48:11 — "Let Mount Zion be glad!"
The Hebrew verb yiśmaḥ (let her be glad / rejoice) opens this closing section of the psalm with a summons to gladness directed not merely at the inhabitants of Zion but at the mountain itself — a bold instance of personification. Mount Zion, the hill on which Jerusalem's royal and cultic life was centered, is here called to participate in the praise that the "daughters of Judah" (the surrounding towns and villages of the kingdom) are rendering because of God's just judgments (mishpatim). The parallelism between Zion's gladness and Judah's exultation signals that the city and the land form one organic community of worship. The "judgments" celebrated are the mighty acts of deliverance recounted earlier in the psalm — God routing the assembled kings (vv. 4–7) and preserving his city. Joy, then, is not merely emotional but is rooted in the witness of history: Zion is glad because she has seen God act.
Psalms 48:12 — "Walk about Zion, and go around her"
This verse is extraordinary in its liturgical concreteness. The Hebrew imperatives sobbû (go around) and haqqifûhā (encircle her) suggest a formal processional circumambulation of the city — a practice well attested in ancient Near Eastern religion and echoed in Israel's own liturgical memory (cf. the march around Jericho, Joshua 6). The pilgrims are not merely sightseeing; they are performing an act of devotion, bearing witness to the city's integrity. The command to "count her towers" (sappĕrû migdāleyhā) carries a double meaning in Hebrew: sappĕr means both "to count" and "to recount, to tell" — the counting of towers becomes a rehearsal for proclamation, a liturgical inventory that will be converted into testimony. The pilgrims tally what they see so that they will have something specific and concrete to announce.
Psalms 48:13 — "Notice her bulwarks"
The call to "notice" (šîtû libbĕkem) is literally "set your heart upon her ramparts" — an idiom for focused, loving attention. The ḥêl (rampart, outer wall) and the armonôt (citadels, palaces) represent Zion's strength and splendor respectively — the city's capacity for defense and her royal dignity. The pilgrim is asked to internalize these features, to let the sight of them produce understanding: that God is the true defender of Zion (v. 3: "God is her fortress"). The bulwarks, in other words, are not monuments to human engineering but to divine protection. The verse thus completes a movement: from joy (v. 11) to active survey (v. 12) to interior appropriation (v. 13) — a movement that mirrors the classical stages of lectio divina (reading, meditation, contemplation).
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Fathers universally read this passage as a meditation on the Church. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, identifies Zion with the City of God — not the earthly Jerusalem, which has been superseded, but the Church militant on earth and the Church triumphant in heaven. To "walk about Zion" is to contemplate the mystery of the Church: her sacraments (her towers), her martyrs and saints (her bulwarks), her apostolic teaching (her citadels). Origen similarly reads the towers as the virtues of the faithful and the doctors of the Church, erected as strongholds of truth. The act of counting/recounting (sappĕrû) becomes, in the spiritual sense, the mission of evangelization — the Church's proclamation that what she has contemplated in prayer, she must announce to the world.
Catholic tradition finds in these three verses a remarkably complete theology of the Church. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§756) explicitly draws on the imagery of Zion to describe the Church: she is "the holy city, the new Jerusalem" (Rev 21:2), the dwelling place of God among men, and her visible structures — hierarchy, sacraments, creeds — are the "towers and bulwarks" that protect and transmit the faith.
St. Augustine's monumental reading in De Civitate Dei casts the entire drama of Psalm 48 as the story of the two cities — Babylon and Jerusalem — whose conflict is resolved only eschatologically. The "judgments" Zion rejoices over (v. 11) are thus not merely historical but point forward to the Final Judgment, when the City of God will be fully revealed. This eschatological dimension is affirmed in Lumen Gentium §6, which calls the Church "the Jerusalem which is above," already partially realized on earth and awaiting its full manifestation.
The command to set one's heart upon the ramparts (šîtû libbĕkem, v. 13) resonates profoundly with the Catholic understanding of sensus fidei — the supernatural instinct of the faithful to recognize, love, and defend what belongs to the deposit of faith. Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium §119, echoes this when he calls the whole people of God to a contemplative gaze upon the Church, not to self-congratulation, but so that wonder at what God has built might fuel the mission to "tell the next generation" (Ps 48:13). The bulwarks of Zion are ultimately the works of God, and the Church's task is to say so.
For a contemporary Catholic, Psalm 48:11–13 is a corrective to two opposite temptations: cynical detachment from the institutional Church on one hand, and naive triumphalism on the other. The psalm does not ask the pilgrim to pretend the walls are perfect or unscathed — it asks for honest, loving attention (šîtû libbĕkem) to what God has actually built and preserved through history.
A practical application: Catholics can practice this "walk about Zion" by intentionally studying the Church — not just her failures (which are real and must be owned), but her saints, her councils, her martyrs, her hospitals, her schools, her mystics. Visit your cathedral with the eyes of a pilgrim, not a tourist. Attend a Mass celebrated with full devotion and notice the architecture of the liturgy as a bulwark of truth. Read the lives of those who "counted the towers" before you — Catherine of Siena, John Henry Newman, Edith Stein — and let their witness become your proclamation. The goal, as the psalm makes explicit, is transmission: "that you may tell the next generation" (v. 13b). Contemplation of Zion's glory is never private — it is preparation for witness.