You are confusing understanding and interpreting. The church claims to have the best link to God to interpret and understand and explain Scripture. Certainly, people outside the RCC will dispute that point–and I will not try to defend that perspective of the church. However, that is a far cry from claiming that people are not allowed to read the bible or take inspiration from it.
And if they truly had a problem with people knowing how many priests and bishops disagreed with particular decisions, they would not allow publications such as the Catholic Encyclopedia to document most of the controversies, laying out the positions taken by the various participants. The RCC has invoked censorship, to its shame, on several occasions, The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a particularly foolish attempt, but those attempts have been enlarged in the popular imagination of its detractors to a level of banning that the church never attempted or achieved.
The first sentence is in error and the second sentence needs to be clarified.
“The Bible” has never been put on the Index. There have been several specific translations of the Bible that have been put on the Index because they specifically translated some verses in a way to bolster arguments against the RCC’s position on some topics or because they carried commentary that was openly hostile to the RCC. I do not approve of the Index and I find that sort of censorship both stupid and wrong. However, there has never been a time when the Church prohibited Catholics from reading “The Bible,” only from reading specific, hostile translations.
The RCC did decide that the Latin Vulgate was its official version which was to be used for translation and interpretation (a point from which it has, fortunately, backed away), but it did not condemn the existence of the Greek books or the Textus Receptus.
The RCC actually encouraged the study of Scripture at the Council of Trent.
Note: I am not defending all the actions of the RCC. This specific discussion began with the claim that the RCC had attempted to suppress copies of the original Scriptures (or its Textus Receptus version). In fact, the references, as I speculated earlier, have (when accurate) been references to translations and interpretations. However, badly the RCC acted in those situations, that is not the same as the claim to which I first responded.
Duke, the Constitutions of Oxford did not forbid translation into the vernacular: it prohibited any translation that had not been approved by episcopal review. This is offensive to our spirit of free inquitry (mine as well as anyone else’s), but it is not the same as claiming that all translations were prohibited.
(I also find it amusing when discussing the Reformation, to see the amount of book burning and people burning carried out by the opponents of Rome ignored as if they never happened. The RCC, as the larger and more deeply entrenched organization, carried out more persecutions than those who opposed it, but the opponents were quite capable of demanding their own orthodoxy once they were free of Rome’s.)