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The Pontiffs and the Councils were obliged on more than one occasion to control and sometimes even forbid the use of the Bible in the vernacular. . . .
Those who would put the Scriptures indiscriminately into the hands of the people are the believers always in private interpretation—a fallacy both absurd in itself and pregnant with disastrous consequences. These counterfeit champions of the inspired book hold the Bible to be the sole source of Divine Revelation and cover with abuse and trite sarcasm the Catholic and Roman Church. Foreword, Index of Prohibited Books, revised and published by order of Pope Pius XI, Vatican Polyglot Press, 1930, x-xi, quoted in Facts of Faith, 10-11.
Rome was awake to the inevitable result of allowing the common people to read the Bible, and the vicar of Croydon declared in a speech at St. Paul’s Cross, London:
We must destroy the printing press, or it will destroy us. Quoted in E.R.Palmer, The Printing Press and the Gospel, 24, quoted in ibid., 14
The papal machinery was therefore set in motion for the destruction of the Bible. There now began a remarkable contest between the Romish Church and the Bible—between the printers and the popes. . . . quoted in ibid., 15 To the Bible the popes at once declared a deathless hostility. To read the Scriptures was in their eyes the grossest of crimes. . . . The Inquisition was invested with new terrors, and was forced upon France and Holland by papal armies. The Jesuits were everywhere distinguished by their hatred for the Bible. In the Netherlands they led the persecutions of Alva and Philip II; they rejoiced with a dreadful joy when Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent, the fairest cities of the workingmen, were reduced to pauperism and ruin by the Spanish arms; for the Bible had perished with its defenders. . . . quoted in ibid., 15
To burn Bibles was the favorite employment of zealous Catholics. Wherever they were found the heretical volumes were destroyed by active Inquisitors, and thousands of Bibles and Testaments perished in every part of France. Lawrence, op. cit. 254-257, quoted in ibid., 15