Banning The Bible

[ICTHUS]

Why did the Roman Catholic Church ban the Bible, placing it on the "Index Libororum Prohibitorum" for awhile?

[Pio Nono]

JMJ
8/4 - St. John Vianney

ICHTUS,

In order to be straight with you, the extremely ambiguous character of your question bothers me, but I will attempt to give you an answer.

You say that the Catholic Church banned "the Bible" - let's take a closer look. In an article by David Cloud (a very Protestant author) entitled [i]The KJV and the Latin Vulgate[/i], it is asserted that Rome banned the distribution of the Bible to God's faithful.

But let's take a closer look at the title of the article itself - it's talking about the King James Bible. Catholics have always known (and recently, Protestants have admitted) that the KJV is an extremely flawed translation of Holy Writ. We only have to look at the introduction to the NKJV to get that admittance. Also, the KJV of the Bible is missing seven books of Holy Scripture. That, along with the poor translation, can be a danger to faith - and [i]that[/i] is what Holy Mother Church wants to avoid at all costs. As a result, the KJV (and other poor translations of the Bible into the vernacular) were placed on the Index.

The Bible itself was never placed on the Index - take a history lesson.

G.K. Chesterton's quote on fundamentalism has been posted in the Phorum before, but it's worth revisiting:

"The problem with fundamentalists is that they are not fundamental - they settle for a translation of a translation, handed down to them from a tradition by a tradition."

Yours,
Pio Nono