The reality is that up until about 150 years ago, and only in the west, the vast majority of people could not read the bible if they wanted to.
And also, the printed press was introduced in Europe in the late XV Century. For the previous 12 or 13 centuries, the only way to duplicate the Sacred Scripture was to copy it by hand (without even mentioning that it took 3 or 4 centuries for the Bible to be brought together as we know it).
Without the heroic efforts of monks throughout the centuries, we would not even have the Bible today - they were the Lord’s instrument in preserving the written part of the Deposit of Faith. . Beautifully illuminated copies of the Scriptures, wrought by the monks, were in the charge of the clergy, and through them the Word of God was carefully preached to the people.
It is quite interesting that one of the first testimonies on the Gutemberg Bible (first printed Bible) comes from a future Pope (Pius II) who wrote to a cardinal:
All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true. I have not seen complete Bibles but only a number of quires of various books of the Bible. The script was very neat and legible, not at all difficult to follow—your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses.
Clearly the hierarchy of the Church did not have a negative view of what was happening.
And even then, the first versions of the Gutemberg Bible were quite expensive!
In general, up to the present day, Holy Church, mindful of even the Lord’s particular recommendations to His chosen apostles and their own writings and actions on these matters, teaches that the private reading of the Bible with reliance solely upon one’s own powers of comprehension is no sure way to arrive at the truth taught by Christ. And experience bears out her teaching.
She condemns the principle that Bibles should be distributed indiscriminately to people on the understanding that they will be able to attain the truth without the guidance of the Church, and by their own unaided efforts. The wildest absurdities have resulted from the theory of private interpretation of Scripture. There seem to be thousands of conflicting plans of salvation, all revealed by the one Christ. Thus St. Peter says that “no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation” and that in Scripture there are certain things “hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
The Church did not condemn the doctrine that it is good to read Scripture, but rather the theory that it is necessary to do so in order to attain Christian knowledge. Christ’s method was to establish a teaching Church, it being necessary to be taught by that Church. He did not order the Apostles to multiply and scatter copies of the Scriptures. If the reading of Scripture were necessary to salvation, what of the immense number of Christians through all the centuries prior to the invention of printing, when it was impossible to transcribe by hand sufficient copies for the multitudes? Could Christ make the possibility of His religion dependent upon the invention of the printing machine?
Unfortunately this is one of those “hard teachings” that most of our Christian brothers cannot listen to, simply because the issue is
not the Bible, but
the authority of the Church. If they were to learn the history of the Church and of Scripture, read the Church Fathers, and acknowledge the facts, then it would be obvious to them that ever since the Early Church things have been done the way the Catholic Church does them today - through the authority of the successors of the apostles that brought the Gospel to the ends of the world even for centuries before there was a Bible. This leads the disciple of Christ to a significant turning point: do I prefer to blindly trust the men that founded my church, and Luther that developed the concepts of sola fide and sola scriptura, or do I prefer to follow the truth, even if this means a radical change? Many Christian brothers who entered the Church through this narrow gate will witness that is is not an easy thing, but that it was worthy.
