Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, let us remember:
a) There is a context to these councils: the reappearance of the Albigensians, Bogomils and Cathar heretics.
b) These are local councils for local problems dealing with temporary issues and not universal councils proclaiming eternal and universal practices.
c) John Wycliffe was not the first person to translate the Bible into English.
d) Contrary to popular opinion, Catholics were allowed, in many places and times prior to the Reformation to own vernacular Bibles.
e) The Catholic Church did not at all encourage Catholics to be ignorant of the Bible by hiding it in Latin. This is Protestant myth and polemic.
f) The Liturgy or the Mass is filled with Scripture, not only in the readings but in the prayers and whatever was not in the Mass could be found in the daily prayers (Mattins and Vespers) offered in the morning and in the evening in the Churches.
* * *
a) The Church of Toulouse and Tarragona encountered the reappearance of a certain breed of neo-Gnostic heretic which would horrify even modern-day Protestants. Generally they tended to believe that the material universe was created by a satanic demiurge who was either equal to God or God's oldest son. Jesus was an angel with a phantom body and not a material body. They encouraged sexual abstinence and discouraged marriage and temporal, material pleasures were all deemed sinful. They denied the Trinity, tending to believe in modalism or something similar. They denied the importance of Baptism, Holy Communion and they had only one sacrament called the Consolamentum which may seem similar to modern Protestant ideas of "baptism in the Spirit" but was ritualistic which Protestants tend to reject. After this one sacrament of theirs, they were expected to become vegetarians and abstain from all sexuality and at the end of their lives they would undertake a difficult fast which was believed to cleanse the soul from the material pollution of the body and this sacrifice, rather than the sacrifice of Christ, was often considered to be what reunified the believer to Christ.
b) The bishops of Toulouse and Tarragona reacted quickly. Knowing that pious orthodox Catholic Christians tended to be the illiterate, innocent peasants who clung to the true Christian faith and knowing that this heresy was being promoted and growing widespread among the richer, literate Bible readers, they acted quickly to stamp out this heresy. These local councils are not meant to be a universal declaration to the entire Catholic Church in all dioceses, nor was it meant to be a declaration that would stand forever.
c) John Wycliffe was not the first person to translate the Bible into English. He was the first person to translate the Bible in its entirety into English. In fact, we have evidence in history that the Bible was being translated into Old English, the language of the earliest Anglo-Saxon Christians as early as the 7th century A.D. Large sections of the Bible, particularly the Gospels, were translated into English centuries before Wycliffe or the Reformation and these translations tended to exist as separate books, since, in many parts of the world, the idea that the Bible was a library composed of several books had still survived. One of our English saints, the venerable St. Bede, is famous for his interlinear Latin-English translations. He was also not alone as many monks made many similar interlinear translations.
d) Before the Reformation and afterwards, literate and richer English-speaking Catholics proudly owned English Bibles and we have some of their wills surviving to the modern day which indicate that their Bibles were to be handed down in their family throughout the generations. The Douay-Rheims is a famous post-Reformation translation that was actually finished prior to the King James Version and many of the KJV turns of phrases were straight up borrowed from the Douay-Rheims.
e) The Latin Church did not need to translate the Latin Vulgate into the vernacular languages in Romanised Europe because the Romance-speaking populations could still understand Latin and actually thought of their vernacular (what we would call Old French, Old Spanish, Old Italian, etc.) as the same as the Latin language as late as 7th century. After this period, the mystery, nobility and learnedness of the older Latin was cemented in the minds of the laity and hierarchy alike and none of the Romance-speaking populations wanted the liturgy to be in anything but the language which their fathers had used. When the Catholic populations could not understand the Latin Mass, either in non-Romance speaking regions before the 7th century, or in Romance-speaking regions afterwards, they relied on translations made by the monks or oral transmission of the biblical stories passed on from parents to children.
f) The Mass readings for Sunday in ancient times go through most of the significant chunks of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament in just one year. Coupled with the morning and evening prayer (Mattins and Vespers) which was prayed daily, much of the most important parts of the Bible is heard by the population in a whole year. After decades of praying and attending liturgy, the more pious Catholics knew Scripture in their bones. After Vatican II in the 1960s, almost the entirety of the Bible is covered in the Sunday Mass alone every three years and if we were to include weekday Masses and the Mattins and Vespers during the week, the entire Bible (as well as many commentaries written by the Fathers) is heard and proclaimed to the people every two years.
* * *
It is sad that after 500 years there is still so much anti-Catholicism among Protestants. Rather than doing research, many still seem to enjoy perpetuating the same myths. Why not simply live the faith as you understand it and share it with those who have not yet come to know Christ rather than spending time and energy slandering those who have clung to the faith throughout the centuries and have known no other God but Christ?
