text: I suggest that you look at the Popular Teaching of the Church during the time of the time of the Reformation.  The Catholic Church certainly DID NOT teach what you seem to think that it did.  If that was so---Martin Luther would not have much of a case.  How can Catholics "misinterpret" what the Church teaches UNLESS the hierarchy/clergy teaches them MISINTERPRETATION.  Catholics did not believe in personal interpretation of the Bible---so they can't be accused of doing that.  Nor were many Catholics educated enough to make any such teaching.  The Church itself didn't teach correctly.  That was why the Council of Trent, supposedly, was called into being.
  
  And that is why the decrees were made in the late 20th and into the 21st Centuries.  If  the Catholic Church  already had a history of  DOING this---these decrees wouldn't have made much sense.