Quite amazing when you consider for how many centuries Catholics were actively discouraged from reading the Bible. (you’re not smart enough, you need the clergy to interpret it for you, etc.)
Well . . . it is true that Catholicism pre-existed the printing press while Protestantism didn't. However . . . Judaism also pre-existed the printing press (by much more) and nevertheless it was a mitzvah for every male Israelite not only to study Torah, but to write a Torah scroll.
First full disclosure: I am an Orthodox Christian, and thus do not credit the claim of those in communion with the Pope of Rome to catholicity. I will thus, following the Fathers at the time of the Latin schism from the Church refer to them as Latins, rather than Catholics. Also as an Orthodox Christian, I regard the Latins as holding a variety of heretical beliefs, notably an erroneous view of the procession of the Holy Spirit, a defective conception of grace highlighted by their notion of purgatory, and an erroneous view of the structure of the Church.
Now that you know where I am coming from: I am tired of hearing the calumny against the Latins that they discouraged the reading of Scripture. The Latins preserved literacy and familiarity with the Scriptures when literacy collapsed in Western Europe as a result of the suppression of trade in papyrus due to the Muslim conquest of Egypt and the predations of Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean. Visigothic Spain and Merovingian France were literate societies just as much as the Roman Empire was (both before and after the retirement of the last Western Augustus to a villa near Naples in 476). Until papermaking was imported from Asia, the vast cost of having a complete copy of the Bible on parchment prevented general circulation of the Scriptures, not any policy of the Latin church to confine their availability to the clergy.
It is true, and unfortunate, that until the 1960’s the Latin church retained Latin as its liturgical language, rather than using a “language understanded of the people” as we Orthodox generally have (the differences between koine and demotic Greek or Church Slavonic and Russian are about analogous to the difference between Chaucer’s English and modern English — you can make it out with a bit of work, but it’s not like learning a new language). However, the Latins encouraged the learning of Latin, and not just by clerics, by running schools where Latin was among the subjects taught from the days when it was still a living language down to the present.
I recently attended a Bible study related to Advent offered by my parish and was really impressed at how many people showed up, packing the room, and were very much knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the nativity narratives we discussed. The priest was more than gung-ho, too. It would be great if Protestants and Catholics alike simply decided to aspire to draw closer every day to Christ and cut back on the impulse to sneer, especially during a season of preparation like Advent.
Why don't you post something that constitutes official church teaching (rather than hearsay or innuendo) -- from any era -- to back up this charge?
Martin Luther, toward the end of his life, admitted that people knew the Scriptures better under the Popes than they did after Catholicism was removed from the scene.