Translating the personal pronoun in Hebrew that says *he* as *she* is a deliberate mistranslation.
I find it inconceivable that anyone could seriously think that the translators simply made a *mistake*, especially since the same mistranslation occurred in both the German Bible that Luther read and the English Douay-Rheims Bible.
If that were the case, the translators would have demonstrated such a level of incompetence in translation that the whole version should be ditched.
It cannot be anything BUT a deliberate mistranslation that doesn’t even deserve the label of *error* or *mistake* and is a far cry from not being sure of the meaning of a word which might have only a slight impact on the meaning of a verse.
Some are predestined to believe the worst about others.
First, there is no single “Catholic Bible” recognized since 1750 that contains the error you speak of . The “Catholic Bible” you are referring to is the Douay-Rheims Bible that was translated from the Latin Vulgate and published in 1611 by English Catholics living in exile in Douay, France. It was soon recognized to contain numerous errors and was replaced with the Challoner-Rheims version in 1750.
The error in Genesis 3:15 that you are so convinced are the result of a grand conspiracy concern who will crush the serpent's head and who the serpent is trying to strike. The Douay-Rheims uses feminine pronouns -- she and her -- implying that the woman is the person being spoken of in this part of the verse. All subsequent Catholic translations, in use since use masculine pronouns -- he and his.
Most scholars believe the reason for the error is traceable to the manuscript used by the Douay-Rheims translators. Subsequent translations follow what the original Hebrew of the passage says. The Douay-Rheims, however, is following a manuscript variant found in many early Fathers and some editions of the Vulgate (but not the original; Jerome followed the Hebrew text in his edition of the Vulgate). It is believed the error originated as a copyist error when a scribe failed to take note that the subject of the verse had shifted from the woman to the seed of the woman.
INDEED.