The Haydock and Challoner revisions are great, but the ORIGINAL Douay Rheims Bible which preceded them is in a class by itself.
It is hard to come by, but someone was selling the original 3-vol set last week in a thread called “Thinning Out My Library.”
It contains a publisher’s introduction listing all the differences compared to the Challoner and Haydock revisions which came hundreds of years later.
The original contains annotated margin notes and end notes, and they are particularly brutal against the Protestant heresies (which this Bible was intended to combat).
The only drawback is that to the modern reader, the old English spellings and alphabet take a bit of getting used to, and the typeset can be light in places, but it is the prototype and original DEFINITIVE Douay Rheims Bible, and all other versions are later modifications of it (some say better, some say worse).
I suppose I should have mentioned that this is the only authentic Douay Rheims Bible (every other Bible calling itself the Douay Rheims is but an approximation of it).
Per the Catholic Encyclopedia:
"Although the Bibles in use at the present day by the Catholics of England and Ireland are popularly styled the Douay Version, they are most improperly so called; they are founded, with more or less alteration, on a series of revisions undertaken by Bishop Challoner in 1749-52 . . .
The changes introduced by him were so considerable that, according to Cardinal Newman, they almost amounted to a new translation. So, also, Cardinal Wiseman wrote, 'To call it any longer the Douay or Rheimish Version is an abuse of terms. It has been altered and modified until scarcely any verse remains as it was originally published.' In nearly every case Challoner's changes took the form of approximating to the Authorized Version [King James]. . ."
See the full CE article to explain more, which is brief, but very interesting:
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05140a.htm
Topic: Douay-Rheims Onlyism? (Read 2093 times)