- I can’t recall what Scripture passage speaks about not restricting diet at certain times, but I suspect that’s simply Protestant apologists reading something out of context or the like. I also can’t find the one on each church being its own governing authority. I highly doubt it’s worded like that, or I would have noticed it one of the several times I’ve read the Bible.
That’s because you’ve apparently never read 1 Timothy, or Acts for that matter.
- I have always been encouraged to read the Bible, as are most Catholics today. There are a number of historical reasons why this was not always the case:
a. Most people couldn’t read.
That has nothing to do with forbidding people to read the Bible. They wouldn’t even allow people who could read to read it to people that couldn’t read in a language they could understand.
b. Most copies of the Bible were in Latin, and people couldn’t read Latin anyway.
That was the problem.
c. Various translations into the vernacular were banned, but this was because they were bad translations, not because people were only allowed to read the Bible in Latin.
I find it kind of disturbing that you can’t just acknowledge that the Catholic Church of the Middle and Dark Ages was incredibly tyrannical. This last point reeks of “Well, it was banned for people’s own good.” Not to mention that it’s widely accepted by pretty much all historians that the Vulgate was a very inaccurate translation.