Time was, the Catholic Church didn't want any lay people reading the bible. Translators were hunted down and executed.
“Translators were hunted down and executed.”
Proof, please.
For most of history, the average lay person was illiterate. Kind of hard to read when you don't know how, eh?. It was the monks in monasteries that maintained the Bible in manuscripts. Each copy of the Bible took a long time to transcribe and was not very portable. After the printing press was invented, it was the heretical translations of the Bible that the Catholic Church didn't want the laity to read. The Douay-Rheims Bible is an English translation approved by the Catholic Church.