History Memes

I also grew up Roman Catholic, but Catholic Bibles are really a thing. The reason Catholics don't read the Bible is probably to do with timing. In the Second Vatican Council, one of the changes they made was this:

Dei verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation emphasized the study of scripture as "the soul of theology".

But see, the final release of Dei verbum was released in 1965. Everybody was used to not reading the Bible, so they only started teaching children a more Bible-oriented education after that, and it was sort of slow to roll out. But you see, those children were reaching adulthood in the late 80s and 90s, when people stopped going to church as much, and not too long after that, all of the sex abuse scandals really became a hot issue.

Twenty years isn't really enough time to change generational norms. I would expect something like this to change over 2 or 3 generations, so 40 to 60 years, but the decline in attendance and in people seeking the priesthood has sort of reduced the Vatican's control over specifics like this. And I think that's why we still don't see Catholics reading the bible.