Forbidden Our Father?

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Hello! I can’t find my question already asked, so I wanted to know if anyone knows, or could point me in the right direction.
I heard an assertion yesterday that roughly during the time of the protestant reformation, it was not only illegal to translate the bible into english (I have found information regarding this information, or mis-information) but that it was completely illegal to even pray in english, especially the Our Father. Now this person is protestant, and kept citing Tynsdale information as one of the greatest things ever. But i can’t find anything even remotely supporting their arguement, or an occasion that could have been twisted into it.
Does anyone know? I am not a great apologist, and it’s not really prudent for me to go up and argue with said woman (she’s a speaker at something I am attending) but I would like to have the information just in case the occasion ever arises again.

Thanks!
 
Praying in English wasn’t illegal per se. English Bible translations were essentially illegal after Wycliffe’s translation was condemned. The problem during the 15th century was that everything was printed in Latin and all the liturgies and liturgical books and Bible translations were printed in Latin. So, even if you were a relatively educated person, you would need to hunt down English translations for a lot of this stuff. Bible translations in English were difficult to come by because English translations needed episcopal approval, which was not forthcoming. If you were a lay person and wanted to read about the life of Christ, you couldn’t read the Bible (unless you already knew Latin). You’d have to read books loosely based on Scripture, such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus.

Another issue was that the average parish priest was barely literate in the Latin language, but clerical ignorance is another topic.
 
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The history of Bible translation from Latin to the vernacular is more complicated. There are times in history where vernacular translations proved controversial and were unapproved by the Church . I do believe new English translations were banned in England for a time starting in the fifteenth century.

It’s a wonderful thing that we have the Bible in the vernacular nowadays. In the fifteenth century, not that it makes the Church’s decision right per se, keep in mind that many people were appearing teaching false doctrines, most of the population was illiterate and uneducated, and they wouldn’t have had the background Patristics and historical context that the Bible should be read in. Even nowadays, most people don’t have the broader context of even just the Bible (let alone Apostolic tradition) and like to take individual Bible verses out of a broader context. The Church still considers itself to have the authority of interpreting and teaching the Bible, though it can be spiritually beneficial for the laity to read so long as we read it through the heart and mind of the Church. While bans in the vernacular may have been bad decisions in the long run, it was not done maliciously.

Not that it fixes things, but the Douay-Rheims English version of the Bible was an approved, Catholic, sixteenth and seventeenth century translation of the Bible. The New Testament was published in English in 1582 and the full bible was published in 1610. The King James Version (albeit a Church of England Bible) was published in 1611.

Also keep in mind that Bible translating into the vernacular required a lot of resources and a lot of time to do so carefully. Translating from one language to another is not always a one-to-one match. A word in French may have a range of meaning it wouldn’t have in English, even if it’s the most literal word translation, and sometimes it’s difficult to simply capture the meaning of a single Latin word with a single English word, or vice versa.

I’m sure there’s someone more familiar with the historical specifics than I am. I am not sure your acquaintance would be open to context or nuance, but this may certainly be a case where the Church could have approached the situation differently.
 
I’d never heard of this before.

However, based on how the answers give reasons as to why it would’ve been troublesome to translate, I’d say yes. It probably was illegal to translate the Bible into English.
 
After the Albigensian crusade vernacular translations were suppressed due to the risk of people misusing scripture and leading souls away from God and the Church.
 
ltwin said:
15th century was that everything was printed in Latin and all the liturgies and liturgical books and Bible translations were printed in Latin.
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This simply isn’t true. There were translations of the Bible or parts of the Bible into many vernacular languages all throughout history. The 15t century is no exception.
 
In England in 1409, Archbishop Thomas Arundel issued a set of constitutions placing restrictions on preaching, and banning translations of the Bible that did not have episcopal approval, which were essentially all of them. Though it should be pointed out the the Wycliffe Bible (though written by heretical Lollards) was itself just a translation of the Latin Vulgate, so many bishops just looked the other way.
 
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1ke said:
This simply isn’t true. There were translations of the Bible or parts of the Bible into many vernacular languages all throughout history. The 15t century is no exception.
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Yes, but in England, which is what the OP was talking about, there was a suppression of all English Bible translations because the Church hierarchy overreacted to Lollardy, as Peter Marshall explains:
The audacity of Wyclif’s early followers in translating the bible, and then seeking to distribute it with provocative appended commentary, led to a peculiar state of affairs: the banning of all translations of scripture without explicit episcopal authorization. By contrast, vernacular translations of scripture were fairly freely available before the Reformation in France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. In theory at least, English book owners wishing to read the life of Christ had to make do with vernacular texts loosely based on the gospel narratives, such as Nicholas Love’s hugely popular Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus.60
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Marshall, Peter. Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Kindle Locations 2960-2965). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
 
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so what the heck were those clerics saying during the homily?

Imagination:
Priest: Jesus was a good man… Amen. Oh and by the way all of you will need to go to confession so I could report to the government who here’s a traitor ok ok. walks towards the altar Credo in unum Deum…

or

Priest: Jesus was brilliant he changed water into wine! Hey you there! points don’t sleep!

This is a joke so please fellow catholics don’t be offended but seriously what were homilies like during those days?
 
Maxwell03 said:
so what the heck were those clerics saying during the homily?
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Most priests preached few regular homilies.
The 1281 decree of archbishop of Canterbury John Pecham, De Informacione Simplicium (On the instruction of the unlearned), better known by its frank opening words Ignorantia Sacerdotum (the ignorance of priests), ordered that clergy with cure of souls should preach in English four times a year, on the Creed, the Ten Commandments, Christ’s precept to love God and neighbour, the seven works of mercy, seven deadly sins and seven sacraments. Conscientious bishops like Fox of Winchester and Nicholas West of Ely still enforced its provisions in the 1520s. It inspired the composition of helpful sermon compilations: the Quattuor Sermones, the Festial of John Mirk, the Exonoratorium Curatorum. Along with the Sermones Discipuli of the German Dominican friar Johannes Herolt, these were the books most frequently found in the wills of early sixteenth-century English clergy.

There was a difference between trotting out a pre-packaged homily from one of these volumes, or from the ever-popular collection of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend, and composing an inspirational sermon of one’s own. Most priests were not up to the latter task.
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Marshall, Peter. Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (Kindle Locations 1397-1405). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
 
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ltwin said:
Yes, but in England, which is what the OP was talking about, there was a suppression of all English Bible translations because the Church hierarchy overreacted to Lollardy, as Peter Marshall explains:
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I’m not saying there weren’t restrictions. I’m saying there were many translations (before and after) in Enlgish, including Old English well before modern English came into being. The “English” question is complicated since the Anglo-Norman dialect of French was spoken in England by the educated classes. As you are probably aware, “English” as we know it didn’t exist until the latter part of the 14th century. No one was looking for translations into “English” when “English” wasn’t really the language of the upper class of England until quite late in the game. Yet, the did exist. And translations of prayers into “English” did exist at that time also.

RE: Versions of the bible:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15367a.htm#english
 
ah now I see why we were by the prots… The clergy back then were ignorant of the bible we are very lucky today that ourr priests can read the bible and at least in my country to what I’ve heard from our Kura Paroko seminarians are taught how to read and understand and even speak in latin.
 
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Wesrock said:
I do believe new English translations were banned in England for a time starting in the fifteenth century.
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No. What was condemned was unapproved translations.

And, this wasn’t some heavy-handed attempt by ‘Big Brother’ to control people. Generally speaking, the problem was that groups that wanted to promote a heretical doctrine would want to create their own translations – which, unsurprisingly, would end up being translated in a way that supported their doctrine! That’s what the Church was attempting to prevent – the spread of inaccurate Scriptural texts and inaccurate doctrine!

In any case, the case against the effort to publish a Bible, prior to the Gutenberg Press, is a straw man argument – it was so expensive to do so, that the economics really precluded anyone from serious attempts at doing so.
on_the_hill said:
It probably was illegal to translate the Bible into English.
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JanSobieskiIII said:
After the Albigensian crusade vernacular translations were suppressed due to the risk of people misusing scripture and leading souls away from God and the Church.
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It wasn’t illegal to have a vernacular translation – it was forbidden to have an ecclesiastically unapproved version. It just so happens that these were typically in the vernacular.
ltwin said:
in England, which is what the OP was talking about, there was a suppression of all English Bible translations
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Your quotation tells a different story than you do:
The audacity of Wyclif’s early followers in translating the bible, and then seeking to distribute it with provocative appended commentary, led to a peculiar state of affairs: the banning of all translations of scripture without explicit episcopal authorization.
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It wasn’t a “suppression of all English Bible translations”, but “the banning of all translations [that did not possess] explicit episcopal authorization.” Big difference. 😉
ltwin said:
Most priests preached few regular homilies.
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From what I’ve read, that’s simply not true.
ltwin said:
clergy with cure of souls should preach in English four times a year, on the Creed, the Ten Commandments, Christ’s precept to love God and neighbour, the seven works of mercy, seven deadly sins and seven sacraments.
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Sigh. 🤦‍♂️
This doesn’t mean “clergy were commanded to only preach four times a year”, it means that they were commanded to make sure that they preached on those topics, four times a year, and do so in English!

Really, now… 😉
 
Probably something on the order of how everyone was going to Hell and if they left the Church to be Protestants they’d go to Hell 1,000,000 times faster.
 
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