No you didn't have to be in the club to study Scripture. It was just extremely difficult because literacy was like what....10%, if that? And Bibles were fantastically expensive because they had to be copied longhand...with zero mistakes. I have Christopher de Hamel's book "A History of Illuminated Manuscripts" next to me....somewhere he crunched the numbers and figured out that the Bible in the Middle Ages cost about as much as a House. The Church taught Scripture by reading it from the pulpit, preaching it, and painting it on the walls of churches.
And you're dead wrong about the "reformers" kept off the historical record. Julian the Apostate was *despised* by the Church. We know what he thought and believed. We know quite a bit about Arius, Nestorius, and other early heretics. The Church had knock-down drag-out fights over these issues and kept records of who said yea and who said nay at the Ecumenical Councils.
Then you have a record of dissent.... can’t have it both ways Again the issue is not what was written when The issue is that the Catholic Church is rife with heretical and apostate teachings
And Rome did what to increase that?
With the wealth of Rome they could have had copies of the Bible produced for their members. They chose not to.
It was only recently that Roman Catholics were encouraged to read the Scriptures for themselves as indicated below.
Once the printing press was invented, the most commonly printed book was the Bible, but this still did not make Bible-reading a Catholic’s common practice. Up until the mid-twentieth Century, the custom of reading the Bible and interpreting it for oneself was a hallmark of the Protestant churches springing up in Europe after the Reformation. Protestants rejected the authority of the Pope and of the Church and showed it by saying people could read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Catholics meanwhile were discouraged from reading Scripture.
Identifying the reading and interpreting of the Bible as “Protestant” even affected the study of Scripture. 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.
Scripture awareness grew after the Second Vatican Council. Mass was celebrated in the vernacular and so the Scripture readings at Mass were read entirely in English. Adult faith formation programs began to develop, and the most common program run at a parish focused on Scripture study. The Charismatic movement and the rise of prayer groups exposed Catholics to Scripture even more. All of this contributed to Catholics becoming more familiar with the Bible and more interested in reading the Scriptures and praying with them.
http://www.usccb.org/bible/understanding-the-bible/study-materials/articles/changes-in-catholic-attitudes-toward-bible-readings.cfm