Well, that is impressive...especially the 12 year Bible pin from Sunday School. I suppose that means, however, that because you esteem academics so highly you will defer to my degree in Theology and 20 year teaching history.
Too bad your extensive historical reading did not include pope Clement XI's Constitution Unigenitus which denounced Bible reading. And, if you actually had read the Bible (carefully, and without the Romanist propaganda machine guiding you) you would find that there is no support in there for the sacerdotalism, the genuflecting, the seven sacraments, the papalism, the candles, the icons, the canonization of men/women, the absolution of sin by men, the Mariolatry, or any of the other 6000 aberrant doctrines and traditions.
Newman was not a believer in salvation by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ alone, any more than the other "religious" men who held to a self-generated righteousness. Thus, he is likely screaming in the lost pit of darkness as we post. The Gospel has escaped Rome and apparently always will.
Why the hatred dripping from every pore? I try to be friendly and even a little jocular in exchanges with you (you don't seriously think that I prize my Sunday School pin and bars more than my advanced degree?). But you always respond with this venomous condemnation - ravings against Catholic practices, Cardinal Newman in hell, etc.
I have never felt it necessary, advisable, or even charitable to wander over to whatever threads you and your compatriots use to discuss your beliefs and thunder condemnation and destruction. I also have not felt it necessary to lie and distort the teachings of your church.
To snatch away from the hands of Christians the New Testament, or to hold it closed against them by taking away from them the means of understanding it, is to close for them the mouth of Christ.
To forbid Christians to read Sacred Scripture, especially the Gospels, is to forbid the use of light to the sons of light, and to cause them to suffer a kind of excommunication."
- Clement XI, Unigenitus
As usual, I fear you are either egregiously misinformed, or . . .
Natheless, as they said in the old days, it is hard lines to require that everyone read the Bible to be saved, given the large numbers of illiterate in times past and even today. I'm pretty sure that's what the Holy Father was condemning, not the reading of Scripture per se.
and of course, if you have to go back to 1713 to find a stick to beat Catholics with . . .