Maybe it's the people you knew??? I've read more bizarre things here that you people insist Catholics either do or don't do that I have never heard of. The funniest one is that we "don't" or are told not to read the Bible. Because y'all just know that somehow.
Laugh all you want. Your church isn't in denial about that fact.
From the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
"Changes in Catholic Attitudes Toward Bible Readings" By Msgr. Daniel Kutys
Until the twentieth Century, it was only Protestants who actively embraced Scripture study. That changed after 1943 when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. This not only allowed Catholics to study Scripture, it encouraged them to do so. And with Catholics studying Scripture and teaching other Catholics about what they were studying, familiarity with Scripture grew.
Just wow. Now Catholics are *allowed* to read the Bible. Before they weren't.
From the Coming Home Network International
How Not to Become a Catholic, Part Four – Reflections on Conversion by James Tonkowich
Ask almost anyone over the age of sixty who was raised Catholic and you will hear how priests discouraged reading the Bible. “It’s too complicated. You will only get things wrong,” seems to have been the common priestly warning. It seems that many if not most Catholic families didn’t even have a copy of the Scriptures in the home.
At one time, the Catholic church actually forbade its members to even OWN a Bible.
COUNCIL OF TOULOUSE - 1229 A.D Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books.
Source: Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, Edited with an introduction by Edward Peters, Scolar Press, London, copyright 1980 by Edward Peters, ISBN 0-85967-621-8, pp. 194-195, citing S. R. Maitland, Facts and Documents [illustrative of the history, doctrine and rites, of the ancient Albigenses & Waldenses], London, Rivington, 1832, pp. 192-194.
The Council of Tarragona of 1234, in its second canon:
“No one may possess the books of the Old and New Testaments in the Romance language, and if anyone possesses them he must turn them over to the local bishop within eight days after promulgation of this decree, so that they may be burned lest, be he a cleric or a layman, he be suspected until he is cleared of all suspicion.” (-D. Lortsch, Historie de la Bible en France, 1910, p.14.)
Now, about that derision you are displaying.......