“Rome Versus The Bible. After the Church had fallen from its apostolic purity of life and doctrine, it found that, where the Bible was read by the common people, they lost faith in the Church and opposed her worship as a species of idolatry. This was particularly true of the Waldenses, who had retained the Bible in their native language hundreds of years before the Reformation, and had copied and spread its pages over Catholic Christendom, wherever their missionaries traveled. It was natural, therefore, that the Roman Church, instead of supplying the common people with the Scriptures in their native tongue, should oppose this.
“Cardinal Merry del Val says that on account of the activity of the Waldenses, and later of the Protestants, in spreading the Scriptures in the native language of the people, ‘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.’