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“Are you believing those anti-Catholic tracts again?”

I didn’t read or cite any anti-Catholic tracts.

Here’s some more about those killed for translating/distributing Bibles. This time from the blurb for PBS’s Battle for the Bible from their Secrets of the Dead series.

“Today, speakers of English take for granted many phrases from the King James Bible — from “let there be light” to the word “scapegoat” — that were the work of an intrepid 16th-century translator who met not with acclaim but with years of exile, and eventually lost his life.

But this translator, William Tyndale — who was burned at the stake on October 6, 1536 — was no lone renegade. Rather, he was a pivotal transitional figure, his work a step toward bringing direct experience of the Bible to a reading public.

The film BATTLE FOR THE BIBLE explores the lives and lasting influence of three major figures in the translation and propagation of the English Bible: the 14th-century theologian, politician, and reformer John Wycliffe; Tyndale; and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and advisor to the king through the period that saw the split with Rome and the creation of the Anglican Church.

The translation of the Bible into the vulgar — the language of everyday people — was a key element in the series of reforms within the Catholic Church that eventually resulted in what we know as the Protestant Reformation.

In the 14th century, the Roman Catholic Church was Western Europe’s undisputed religious authority; and its central rituals — the Mass and Communion — the only legitimate pathway to salvation. The pope and the clergy held enormous power, and secular authorities looked to the Church for legitimation. Key to the Church’s power was the fact that its rituals were conducted in Latin, a language inaccessible to the uneducated faithful. The public was completely dependent on the priesthood for access to salvation — only through mysterious rituals conducted in an unfamiliar tongue could they conduct their spiritual lives.

John Wycliffe, born around 1320, was a prominent theologian at Oxford University and a leading ecclesiastical politician in the dark period of English history following the decimation of Europe’s population by the Black Plague. He became convinced through his own scholarship that Scripture itself, rather than the Mass, should be seen as the source of Christian authority.

Wycliffe’s notion that the Bible should be translated into the common tongue for the edification of all believers was a radical innovation, and one that spawned a movement. Working outside of the Church, translators eventually produced perhaps hundreds of so-called “Wycliffe Bibles,” translated and hand-copied from the Latin. It is not clear that Wycliffe himself produced any translations into English, so they are more properly known as “Wycliffite” Bibles.

With or without Wycliffe’s active involvement, the English Bible became part of an underground movement that became known as Lollardy and continued to spread after Wycliffe’s death in 1384. It worried Church authorities enough that by 1407 the English translation was denounced as unauthorized, and translating or using translated Bibles was defined as heresy — a crime for which the punishment was death by burning. In 1415 Wycliffe himself was denounced, posthumously, as a heretic. His body was exhumed and burned in 1428. Wycliffite Bibles, even after the ban, were produced in great numbers, and the 250 or so that now remain are the largest surviving body of medieval English texts. But the time was not yet right for the Bible to exist publicly in the common tongue. “

I do not condemn current R. Catholics for this, but I do condemn the re-writing of history. Just admit the R.Catholic church had a horrible problem, but has since repented on the issue (I am assuming it has), rather than pretending it did not happen.