Now about Catholics and the Bible. You might be generally correct and in particular not-so-correct. In the days of Bloody Mary, owning a Bible in the vernacular (Tyndale, maybe) could get you crisped pretty good.
Now that is going a bit far in the interests of biblical grammatical accuracy, don't you think? Later on, the Catholics turned thumbs down on the King James Bible, and King James was plenty Catholic. Until lately, IMHO, the Catholic Church didn't exactly go out of its way to encourage individual Bible reading. Just my impression.
It seems that the plan was that rather than poring over the Good Book for himself, by going to church every Sunday, a Catholic gets the whole Bible read to him. Where I think the American Roman Catholics have fallen down on the job is by going to a more "Protestant" type of service in English. They jumped into a "Low Church" experience without ever considering what the Anglicans had to offer in their liturgy.
King James I was a bitter enemy of Catholicism.
He was the one who Guy Fawkes tried to blow up along with most of Parliament. He finished what Henry Tudor started - the creation of a church carved out of most of the Catholic Church in England.
He also commissioned the KJV of the Bible; there are numerous websites dedicated to the tabulation of the errors, and some that attempt to explain the reasons behind deliberate error.
It was the bishops of the Catholic Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit that sorted out and decided the canon of Sacred Scripture. They contain the entire canonical text identified by Pope Damasus and the Synod of Rome (382) and the local Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), contained in St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate translation (420), and decreed infallibly by the Ecumenical Council of Trent (1570). This canonical text contains the same 27 NT Testament books which Protestant versions contain, but 46 Old Testament books, instead of 39. These 7 books, and parts of 2 others, are called Deuterocanonical by Catholics (2nd canon) and Apocrypha (false writings) by Protestants, who dropped them at the time of the Reformation. The Deuterocanonical texts are Tobias (Tobit), Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Wisdom, First and Second Maccabees and parts of Esther and Daniel. Some Protestant Bibles include the "Apocrypha" as pious reading.
IMHO, the Catholic Church didn't exactly go out of its way to encourage individual Bible reading. Just my impression.
The Catholic Church has never disuaded anyone from reading the Bible. In fact, Catholics hear more Scripture at their Sunday Mass than protestants do at their services. Here is how Dr. Scott Hahn, a former protestant minister, describes his first visit to a Catholic Mass.
"There I stood, a man incognito, a Protestant minister in plainclothes, slipping into the back of a Catholic chapel in Milwaukee to witness my first Mass. Curiosity had driven me there, and I still didn't feel sure that it was healthy curiosity. Studying the writings of the earliest Christians, I'd found countless references to "the liturgy," "the Eucharist," "the sacrifice." For those first Christians, the Bible - the book I loved above all - was incomprehensible apart from the event that today's Catholics called "the Mass."
"I wanted to understand the early Christians; yet I'd had no experience of Liturgy. So I persuaded myself to go and see, as a sort of academic exercise, but vowing all along that I would neither kneel nor take part in idolatry."
I took my seat in the shadows, in a pew at the very back of that basement chapel. Before me were a goodly number of worshipers, men and women of all ages. Their genuflections impressed me, as did their apparent concentration in prayer. Then a bell rang, and they all stood as the priest emerged from a door beside the altar.
Unsure of myself, I remained seated. For years, as an evangelical Calvinist, I'd been trained to believe that the Mass was the ultimate sacrilege a human could commit. The Mass, I had been taught, was a ritual that purported to "resacrifice Jesus Christ." So I would remain an observer. I would stay seated, with my Bible open beside me.
As the Mass moved on, however, something hit me. My Bible wasn't just beside me. It was before me - in the words of the Mass! One line was from Isaiah, another from Psalms, another from Paul. The experience was overwhelming. I wanted to stop everything and shout, "Hey, can I explain what's happening from Scripture? This is great!" Still, I maintained my observer status. I remained on the sidelines until I heard the priest pronounce the words of consecration: "This is My body . . . This is the cup of My blood."
Then I felt all my doubt drain away. As I saw the priest raise that white host, I felt a prayer surge from my heart in a whisper: "My Lord and my God. That's really you!"
I was what you might call a basket case from that point. I couldn't imagine a greater excitement than what those words had worked upon me. Yet the experience was intensified just a moment later, when I heard the congregation recite: "Lamb of God . . . Lamb of God . . . Lamb of God," and the priest respond, "This is the Lamb of God . . ." as he raised the host. In less than a minute, the phrase "Lamb of God" had rung out four times. From long years of studying the Bible, I immediately knew where I was. I was in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is called the Lamb no less than twenty-eight times in twenty-two chapters. I was at the marriage feast that John describes at the end of that very last book of the Bible. I was before the throne of heaven, where Jesus is hailed forever as the Lamb. I wasn't ready for this, though - I was at Mass!
Huh? He was married to a Catholic, but that was as Catholic as he got.