I will grant that the intentions of the Catholic Church was to stop heresy. That it tried to do so by suppressing vernacular translations is both a symptom of the times (medieval folks believed in control by the state), and a symptom of what the Catholic Church feared would happen if folks read scripture for themselves. And the latter is, I think it obvious, NOT a high note of Catholic history.
Then why did the Catholic church support countless vernacular translations before the Reformation? Even the translators' foreward to the KJV makes note of that fact.
For example, Wikipedia notes:
In total, there were at least eighteen complete German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters by the time Luther first published his own New Testament translation
It's true that the possession of vernacular Bibles was looked at with suspicion in England during this time period (although many people had vernacular "primers" containing excerpts of and commentaries on Scripture), largely because it was viewed as a sign of latent Protestant sympathies.
Yeah.
You know that one of our arguments for the, what, validity of the Catholic Church is that we’re such a bunch of bozos that the only way we survived was with God’s help.
The bozos part is indisputable. I’m at the stage of life where I repeat stuff, but this bears repeating: One of my favorite stories about Pope John XXIII is that somebody asked him how many people work in the Vatican.
“About half of them,” he replied.