“You’ve got two wrong presumptions:
On the contrary, aren’t you just making assumptions in the hopes of getting us to believe that anyone could read Latin who could read at all? And therefore, anyone who was literate could read the scripture freely? Actually education in those days consisted of lessons in English grammar, taught in such a way to prepare them for later lessons in Latin. But, not everyone who could read English also read Latin. And even then, everyone spoke and understood English, so why could it not be read to them?
Of course, the illogical thing about these assumptions of yours is that, if no one could read them even in English in the first place, why prohibit the Bible? Isn’t it because the church decided it was too dangerous to allow the vernacular to the common people, since they, according to the judgment of the church, were too stupid to understand it rightly?
“Every Catholic church, however, as a matter of canon law, had a public bible that anyone could peruse.”
But certainly not STUDY, unless you were willing to go through the hoops of the Roman Catholic Church. Now, were these Bibles in English, or were they in Latin?
You’re using all your false presumptions to argue for your false presumptions.
1. The bible was not prohibited. Wycliffe’s translation was prohibited because it was false.
2. Yes, English grammar was taught first... as a spoken language. You can read any medieval English text and quickly disabuse yourself of the notion that anyone taught anyone English grammar or spelling, because there was no standardization of either to be taught!
3. Inasmuch as people read Latin, of course the church bibles were in Latin. But there were plenty of glosses.
4. The Catholic church did as much as it could to get the bible into as many hands as they could. If a bible cost six figures to print today, do you think you could walk off with a church’s bible without so much as asking permission? A bible took a full year’s labor of a highly trained monk to create. Yet the Catholic church ran churches, libraries, seminaries, universities, etc., to help facilitate sharing of resources. It published breviaries consisting of the gospels, OT liturgical readings, psalms, and epistles. It constructed church windows and statues as mnemonic devices, and trained countless catechists how to interpret and spread that knowledge of iconography.
You of course have proof of this ridiculous statement.
Look at the founding fathers how many of them were literate in the classical languages, compared with the majority of the population at that time.