Dear Deacon:

Sorry for the delay.

This subject and the disingenuous comments about this subject made by anti-Catholics reminds me of an illustration. If there were some Political Science books that printed the Constitution of the United States that said that blacks were 2/3 persons and that women cannot vote, could we expect those textbooks to be pulled from the classroom and destroyed? Yes.

That is what this issue is about. Any Bibles disapproved by the Holy See and destroyed were translations of the Bible that were doctrinally flawed. The Church has a responsibility to protect the faithful from heretical material. With a book as important for the faith as the Bible, the Church has a responsibility to ensure that nothing adulterates it.

Yet we have bigots who say, "One of the greatest dangers the Bible faced was the period when the Popes of Rome controlled the world. Pope Innocent III, 1199, had French Bibles burned and would not permit the people to have more."

From Cardinal Merry de Val, "Forward," in the Index of Prohibited Books, revised and published by order of His Holiness Pope Pius XI (new ed.; [Vatican City]: Vatican Polyglot Press, 1930), pp. ix-xi:

   [p. ix] What many, indeed fail to appreciate, and what, moreover non-Catholics consider a grave abuse — as they put it of the Roman Curia, is the action of the Church in hindering the printing and circulation of Holy Writ in the vernacular. Fundamentally however, this ac- [p. x] cusation is based on calumny. During the first twelve centuries Christians were highly familiar with the text of Holy Scripture, as is evident from the homilies of the Fathers and the sermons of the mediaeval preachers; nor did the ecclesiastical authorities ever intervene to prevent this. It was only in consequence of heretical abuses, introduced particularly by the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the followers of Wyclif, and by Protestants broadly speaking (who with sacrilegious mutilations of Scripture and arbitrary interpretations vainly sought to justify themselves in the eyes of the people; twisting the text of the Bible to support erroneous doctrines condemned by the whole history of the Church) that the Pontiffs and the Councils were obliged on more than one occasion to control and sometimes even forbid the use of the Bible in the vernacular...
    [p. xi] Those who would put the Scriptures indiscriminately into the hands of the people are the believers always in private interpretation — a fallacy both absurd in itself and pregnant with disastrous consequences. These counterfeit champions of the inspired book hold the Bible to be the sole source of Divine Revelation and cover with abuse and trite sarcasm the Catholic and Roman Church.

OUR SUNDAY VISITOR ON BANNING VERNACULAR BIBLES:

Is it not an historical fact that the church forbade the reading of the Bible in the vernacular?

   It is and it is not. The Church never issued a general prohibition that made the reading of the Bible in the vernacular unlawful; but at various time she laid down certain conditions regarding the matter, which had to be observed by the faithful, so that they might not wrest the Scriptures to their own destruction. It was not until the Albigenses, the Wyclifites, and later on the Protestants, issued editions of the Bible that bristled with mistranslations, and the most arbitrary changes of the original text, that the Church made stringent regulations in regard to the reading of the Scriptures. These regulations did not make Bible reading unlawful, but required that only approved editions, well supplied with explanatory notes taken from the writings of the Early Fathers, should be used. In this matter, as in so many others, Protestants failed to distinguish between the actions of the Church and the actions of the Provincial Synods. It is indeed true that the Synod of Toulouse, in 1229, the Synod of Tarragona, 1233, and the Synod of Oxford, in 1408, issued formal prohibitions against the reading of the Bible by the laity, but these prohibitions had only a local application, and were revoked as soon as the danger that threatened the faith in these localities had passed. The Church's legislation in the matter of Bible reading was never prohibitive, but only tended to the enactment of such restrictions as the common good evidently required.

The historical fact is that it was the Catholic Church who first translated portions of the Bible into the vernacular. Even the Latin Vulgate was a translation on this sort in that Greek had fallen into disused.

The first English translations of portions of the Bible were done by the Catholic Church in the eight century. The Douay-Rheims Bible was translated into English before the King James Version.

Tyndale, for example, in his translation had many flaws. That was the reason the Church condemned it.

God bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary