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You have said much that is interesting, and warrants a reply. I will start here:

“You can’t tell me the Borgias were inerrant.”

No, they were not inerrant. They erred very much, in many ways, so much so that Dante describes several Borgia Popes boiling in Hell in his “Inferno”. They were pigs and everyone knew it. But yes, astonishingly, I WILL tell you that every one of the Borgia Popes was indeed and in fact infallible as to doctrines of faith and morals of the Catholic Church. This was perhaps in the breach: the Borgia Popes were interested in money and political power, art and women, and not a bit interested in theology. And so none of them bothered to take the Seat of Peter and pronounce, ex cathedra, to the entire Church, expressly on a matter concerning the doctrines of faith and morals. Had any one of them done so, given their utter moral turpitude, it cannot be doubted that what they would have pronounced would have been abominable. But that’s just the point: none of them did. None of them did because the Holy Spirit is in fact upon the Church, and though Church men have erred mightily, and sinned terribly, God never let it happen that a Pope mounted the See of Peter to pronounce ex cathedra on a matter of faith and morals anything that was morally questionable, or heterodox, or contrary to the ancient teachings of the Church. In theory is COULD happen, because men have limbs and mouths, so a Pope could, in theory, put on the full miter and vestments, take up the crozier, mount the See of Peter, hearken the Church to listen to him as he pronounced on a matter of morality concerning the Church, and then proclaimed an orgy. Nothing physical prevents the Pope from doing it. But in 2000 years and 265 Popes, with the passage of thousands of wars and governments and passions and billions of people through the Church, no Pope ever HAS taken the See of Peter and pronounced an infallible doctrine that has ever been reversed or rejected or censured as heretical. Not one time. Recall, too, that the first twenty or so Popes were all tortured to death by the Romans. Even under the extreme conditions of fatal bodily torture, not one of them ever pronounced a fallible doctrine.
The reason is that Jesus was serious about the Power of the Keys he gave to Peter, to bind and loose on earth and in heaven, and the solemn vow that he gave that the Holy Spirit would ever be with the Church. Some Popes have been horrid men - you mentioned the Borgias - but God never let them open their pieholes to pronounce an evil doctrine under the conditions of infallibility. That’s what infallible means. It does not mean that Popes cannot be human beasts. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be murderers. Some were. It DOES meant that God - the Holy Spirit that dwells in the Church - will not permit any Pope, however bad, to ever mount the See of Peter and formally lead Christendom into moral error. How do we know? First, there’s the Bible and the Keys and Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit. And then is 2000 years of Popes, 265 in all, many of them villains, and not one of them has ever done it. They all know they have the power, and wouldn’t that really solve the problems within the Church for someone like a Borgia Pope, to simply start pronouncing infallible doctrines to destroy all enemies? Yes, it would have solved their problems. So, why didn’t even they take the See of Peter and DO IT? They had no compunction for their soul when they killed men or slept with their whores in the Vatican, so why not just sweep away all opponents and proscribe them by pronouncing infallible doctrines to destroy them? No earthly reason. They didn’t do it, logical though it would have been, not because they didn’t DARE - they DARED everything - but because God would not let them do it. That’s really it. That’s all. The Borgia Popes were infallible on faith and moral doctrines, like any other Pope. None of them ever pronounced an infallible doctrine. That in itself is mute testimony to the power and protection of the Holy Spirit over the Church and the See of Peter. Would it not be the easiest thing in the world for Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict, both of whom oppose birth control, and both of whom are firmly committed to the all-male celibate clergy, to take the See of Peter and pronounce these doctrines infallible, thereby ending all debate within Catholicism for all time? Yes, it would be easy. But neither one of them does it. Not because any human person is stopping them, but because these are disciplinary doctrines only - they CAN’T be infallible. Even if the Pope went crazy he could not do it: God would not LET him do it. God has never let his 264 predecessors do it, even to save their own lives.

“The written Bible is one of the very instruments that keeps us grounded in fact. It is written and any changes that occur can be traced.”

So far, so good. We need to be grounded in fact.

“Before Martin Luther, no one but clerics had access to the Bible.”

Now see, this is where we need to go back to the facts. It’s not true. Think of the Gutenburg Bible, the first printed book, by the inventors of moveable type. What did they make and sell on that printing press? Bibles. And to whom did they sell them? Anybody who wanted to purchase them. And to whom did they sell them, and where, and when? In Catholic Germany, to Catholics, a century before Martin Luther. If Catholics had not generally had personal access to the Bible during the thousand years preceding Luther, it was not because the Church jealously hid it. It was because it was medieval Europe, only about 20% of the population could read at all, and there was no printing press. All Bibles and all other books were laboriously copied by hand, by monks in monsteries and ecritoriums. Note, please, that unlike today, the “clergy” were not some tiny fraction of the public. Young unemployed men, and unmarriageable women or poverty-stricken women, etc., tended to become Christian brothers or sisters, laboring in the monastery fields or workhouses, producing things for sale and use. The Church was an employer of many, and taught many to read. The nobility were always literate, but so were “clergy”, and basically anybody who could read was considered “clergy” and had some role in the Church. Reading and writing were NOT restricted or jealously guarded by the Church - quite the opposite! The problem is that Europe then was poorer than the poorest parts of Africa today, and more full of disease and fighting to boot. There was no great margin in society for expensive books. Most people could not read anyway. And yet, everyone knew the Bible, much of it by heart.

This is the second part of the history that is really lost. If you start attending Catholic Mass every Sunday, as Catholics must, from birth onward, by the time you are 66 years old you will have heard nearly the entire Bible read to you out loud, in related pieces, and explained in a related homilym a whopping 22 times over the course of your life. The Lectionary of the Church, by which the Bible is read to the Congregation, is on a three-year cycle. Virtually the entire New Testament (things like the complete genealogy of Jesus are abridged) and probably 80% of the Old Testament, is read to every Catholic, and explained to every Catholic, every three years. Moreover, the psalms are sung in the Mass, and the hymns of the mass make reference.

Remember those statues and stained glass windows and icons all over the walls in a Catholic Church - the ones that silly people who don’t think say are “Graven Images” and Idols? Take a good look at them. What you will see there are depictions of key scenes of the Bible. Every Catholic Church has the 12 stations of the cross - a visual depiction of Jesus’ Passion and Death. Just thinking about my own Church, when you sit in the congregation and look at the altar, there is great stained glass wall behind it. My little daughter says “Daddy, look at the sheep!” all the time. And yes, there IS a sheep up there or rather, a lamb, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. And if you look more closely, you will see a red stream pouring from the chest of the lamb. It is beautiful on the glass mural, but you realize that this is the heart’s blood of the lamb, pouring out in all directions: the blood of the sacrificial lamb. And then if you look around the Church, you will see in the windows other scenes which, if you know your Bible, you will recognize instantly: Jesus healing the paralytic, Jesus healing the sick, Paul on the Road to Damascus. And if you look you realize that from the top of the stained glass panel down there is are red lines coming and touching each person, and you realize that the whole set of stained glass is connected to the window with the lamb, that these are the rivulets of blood of the lamb coming down from above and touching each character. When you sit up in the apse behind the altar, in the choir where I sit, the back end of the Church too has a stained glass window. In this one there is a man dressed in white, and he holds open a book, on which is written the words “Dear Lover of God” Now, of course, if your a Catholic in your forties and went to Mass faithfully, you’ve heard the Bible read to you about 15 times, and you’ve heard “My dear Theophilus...” 15 times, every time the Lectionary cycle gets to Saint Luke. And you’ve heard the Priest 15 times translate “Theophilus” as “lover of God” and weave that into his homily at least 15 times. So of course you know that “Dear Lover of God” is “Dear Theophilus”, and you figure that this must be a depiction of St. Luke...and that makes sense, considering that this is St. Lukes parish church.

My point is simple: in that illiterate age, Catholics knew the Bible. They couldn’t read it (and couldn’t afford to buy a hand-copied scribal work), but they knew the Bible, because the Lectionary of the Church has been around for the ages. Catholics have always had the Scriptures read to them, and all those statues and icons and other supposedly idolatrous things? These were nothing more than medieval tv: the one spot of bright color and majesty in otherwise drab, wretched, filthy, poor, vermin-infested and threadbare peasant lives bent in hard agricultural labor - which is what most people did in the Middle Ages. And what was on this “Medieval TV”? A rich tapestry of images from the Bible. Have a knowledgeable person take you through a medieval cathedral church sometime when you are in Paris. Every little panel has some artwork or figure in it, and if you are patient and look at the artwork, you will find practically the whole story of the Bible told in colorful pictures right there in the stained glass of a large medieval Church. There was a PURPOSE to all of that art and statuary in a Catholic Church: it was to teach the Christian story in shape, color and three dimensions, to augment and remind people of the story.
Luther, and especially Calvin and his ilk, decided that all of that was idolatrous and took it all down, leaving a bare white room with pews, a pulpit, a bare cross and a book. This austerity was supposed to focus the mind on what was said in the sermons, and perhaps it did, and does. But the Catholic mind in an ornamented Catholic Church, when IT wanders, lights upon artwork that ALSO tells the story of the Bible, maybe better than hearing the droning word because in three dimensions with color.

Anyway, my point is clear: Catholics have always had access to the Bible. But in medieval times, whence Luther arose, most couldn’t READ it, or - before the printing press - come close to affording this book they could not read. And yet those Catholics knew their Bible. They had heard the whole thing read to them every 3 years. They had been lectured on it. To be confirmed, they had had to attend Sunday School and be taught from the Bible, and every piece of art and statuary in the Church depicts biblical scenes. All of that decoration in Notre Dame Cathedral, far from being an embarrassing distraction, IS exposing the Bible to people. It is the whole history of the Bible told in stone and glass, in a way that an illiterate child or an illiterate peasant, if pointed the way, can understand.

As for this: “The people hungered for a Bible, just as they do now in countries like China where is is not available.”

And they had one too: in their Church. They were all instructed from it every week. They didn’t have one in their own houses unless they were rich. It was only by about a century after the printing press, in the time of Luther, that the price of books had come down to the point that a critical mass of private Bible ownership arose.

Still, it is not true that people did not have the Bible. Remember St. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible, the standard Bible of the Latin West for centuries? Why did he translate the Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin? Simple: the Empire spoke Latin, and the desire was to have the Bible in their own language. Similarly, please remember that the New Testament in English, the Douai-Rheims version of the Catholic Bible, was translated decades before the King James Version.

And this is why, when you say this: “The publishing of Bibles was a work of God. Because now we have individual congregants with a basic knowledge of the writings of the Apostles and others.” I think you are only half right. Yes, the promulgation of the Bible was the work of God. But the Catholic Church had been promulgating Bibles for centuries, in a poor continent without the printing press. And where do you think all of those Germans who leapt to Luther’s cause had learned how to read at all? Not in the Lutheran Church schools. They didn’t exist yet. Not in public schools - they would not exist for another 450 years. In Church schools. Catholic church schools, which were the source of popular literacy that, along with the printing press, even made the Reformation possible at all. A hundred years prior, an illiterate population would have never followed Luther or Calvin. It was not Luther and Calvin who taught the followers to read: it was the Catholic Church. And everybody in Europe knew the Bible anyway. They’d been fed doses of it every week since infancy at math. Luther did not release the Bible from its chains and give it to the people. What he did was release himself and the Protestant clergy from the restraints and conservatism of the Catholic Church.

Anyway, there’s an answer for you. Now good night!