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> The Catholic and Orthodox churches have _always_ striven to make the Scriptures available to the people in languages they could understand.

The first effort of the Catholic Church to translate the bible happened during the papacy of Pope Pius XII, which began in _1939_. They didn't encourage it before that, but it took the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to decide that Bible translators would not be prosecuted. The first sanctioned English translation happened in 1582, a full 1500 years and some more after Christianity was founded, in the backdrop of the Thirty Years War.

Also remind me, which languages are these religions' respective services conducted in?



> The first effort of the Catholic Church to translate the bible happened during the papacy of Pope Pius XII

I struggle to see how this is anything but a direct lie. Even ignoring that the Church's translation of the Vulgate itself (from the original Greek and Hebrew) took place in the 4th century, the first _Catholic French_ translation was published in 1550, and there was never a question of whether to persecute the authors. You might say, but that was because of the Reformation -- then consider the Alfonsine Bible, composed in 1280 under the supervision a Catholic King and the master of a Catholic holy order. Well before then there were partial translations too: the Wessex Gospels were translated in 990, and to quote Victoria Thompson "although the Church reserved Latin for the most sacred liturgical moments almost every other religious text was available in English by the eleventh century".

So the longest period you can get where the Church was not actively translating texts was c. 400 - c. 900, a period you probably know as the "Dark Ages" specifically thanks to the fact that literary sources of all kinds were scarce, in no small part because the resources to compose large texts simply weren't there. Especially when you consider that those who could read and write generally knew how to read and write Latin -- vernacular literacy only became important later, with the increase in the number of e.g. merchants and scribes -- such translations held little value during that period.




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