When most people think of Bible-Christians, they usually mean those in the Protestant denominations. They "own" the Bible, right? And the Church really does not want us to read the bible, right again? Well, wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Bible was written for the Catholics, and interpreted infallibly only by the teaching authority vested by Jesus in the Catholic Church.

"It was declared by the Vatican Council (Sess. III, c. ii) that the sacred and canonical character of Scripture would not be sufficiently explained by saying that the books were composed by human diligence and then approved by the Church, or that they contained revelation without error. They are sacred and canonical "because, having been written by inspiration of the Holy Ghost, that have God for their author, and as such have been handed down to the Church." The inerrancy of the Bible follows as a consequence of this Divine authorship. Wherever the sacred writer makes a statement as his own, that statement is the word of God and infallibly true, whatever be the subject-matter of the statement.

It will be seen, therefore, that though the inspiration of any writer and the sacred character of his work be antecedent to its recognition by the Church yet we are dependent upon the Church for our knowledge of the existence of this inspiration. She is the appointed witness and guardian of revelation. From her alone we know what books belong to the Bible. At the Council of Trent she enumerated the books which must be considered "as sacred and canonical." FRANCIS E. GIGOT, The Catholic Encyclopedia.

And yet the Bible is perceived as a "Protestant" book. The reason for that is because the Bible was claimed by the Protestants as their sole rule of faith during the Reformation, rejecting the authority of the Catholic Church.

It also became "known" to non-Catholics that Catholics rejected the Bible and that the Church did not encourage reading the Bible. In fact even from the early church, popes, councils, priests and scholars have encouraged Bible reading.

Another reason why non-Catholics, or even Catholics who do not know history, had the wrong perception that the Church did not encourage the lay people to read the Bible was the story that at the early Church the Bibles were chained down. Now, let me ask you. Have you seen the phone directory at phone booths? Why are secured? To prevent the books from "walking away," right? You have to remember that in the early Church there were no mass printing presses. Every letter in the old books, including the Bible was painstakingly copied by monks in monasteries by hand, in all their glorious illumination – a task that sometimes takes years to complete. There was little wonder then why the Bibles were chained down.