The Church certainly did try their best, didn't they? Fortunately, along came the Protestant revolution which put the scriptures in the hands of the people.
Amen, Harley. The Holy Spirit will not be denied.
Welcome back! 8~)
Not really. You are spreading a myth which has no historical or factual backing. It was Gutenberg's invention of the printing press that made it possible to make numerous copies of books without having to make them by manually copying them.
And even when that was made possible, how many people did the Protestants make literate? You may be surprised that the illiteracy rates in Protestant societies were no different than elsewhere and that it was not until well into the second half of the 20th century that (rudimentary) literacy became the norm.
In Protestant England, for example, as late as 1841, up to 33% of men and 44% of women were illiterate (they had to "sign" with a "mark"). This is 300 years after the Protestant Reformation.
As is, even the majority of those those who are considered "literate" only have ground-level literacy skills (newspapers, etc.), and as many as one third of the people in America have difficulty reading period.
How are then people going to "understand" the word of God? Never mind the fact that they have no cultural historical background to fall back on in order to more fully comprehend what is read either.
In fact, it seems we are reversing the trend, as the literacy rates appear to be declining.
There is a significant difference between being able to pronounce letters into words and cognitive and analytical literacy, or just being able to sing his or her name (i.e. knowing what one is actually reading).
The National center for education Statistics reports that among college graduates literacy actually declined between 1992 and 2003,and that less then 1/3 of college graduates were at the highest proficiency level (2003), including less than half of those with advanced degrees!
It's an interesting split. In the east the Scriptures were in Greek and could be read, but they had to deal with submitting to their muslim masters. In the west, that was Christian, the Scriptures were in latin and only read by those fluent in latin.