Can you cite a source for this? Certainly an authorized version must be used liturgically, but I was not aware of such a restriction officially for personal reading. I understand that a Catholic version is preferred for many reasons, but to say that a Catholic must use an authorized version of the Bible just doesn’t seem right to me. There are many reasons why a Catholic might prefer to use, for example, a NIV Bible when having an apologetics discussion with an Evangelical. If we insist upon using our own Bible, we will lose credibility because Protestants will get the idea that their Bible says something different that ours, thus leading them to believe that we have a “different” Bible.
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (c.1992) has a section on translations of the Bible. This book has an imprimatur and nihil obstat.
The NJBC says it’s ok to use a non-Catholic translation, unless it is really anti-Catholic.
An earlier post has a link to an article about Catholic and Protestant bibles. That article is fairly accurate, but it simply glosses over a couple issues.
Luther apparently wanted an excuse to not use the authorized Catholic Bible. And, he made a decision that he preferred the original Hebrew texts for the Old Testament. Little did he or anybody know that there WERE Hebrew versions of those extra books that seem to come out of nowhere and are found in the Septuagint and thus in Catholic Bibles. These Hebrew texts were among the scrolls found at Qumran, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls.
Protestants of all types have “made up their mind” which is to say that they let Luther make up their minds for them – and — Luther was wrong.
The Septuagint was a translation into the more-common Greek, so that JEWS could study the scriptures better. So, there’s a whole lot of weight that should be attached to the Septuagint, which was so widely used.
Modern Jewish biblical scholars simply can’t ignore the Septuagint, because it was a product of Judaism itself, to begin with. That woud be embarrassing, wouldn’t it? if they ignored this important work?
I’ve read that St. Jerome ALSO preferred the Hebrew texts as a basis for translating the OT. But, he didn’t seem to scoff at the deuterocanonical books.
The books of the Bible were “canonized” or accepted as appropriate for readings and meditations at Mass.
I would agree with MOST of the posts here, that you should use a Catholic Bible – as a beginner. THEN, as befits your comfort level, you could look at other translations. The NIV like the NAB is considered to be a paraphrased version,and so it reads better in modern English.
Recall that ancient Hebrew had no upper and lower case, no punctuation, no vowels, no parenthesis or footnotes, etc. So, any translation in English is ESSENTIALLY BASED on somebody’s traditional way of translating.
see my next post
And then I like the Douay-Rheims because I can read it online 
, and for the beauty of the language (I read a lot of early modern English texts in college so I am comfortable with the “style”).
