Also, I realised I forgot to try and answer the actual question, namely, "Is there a good reason to use this particular translation other than the fact that it was translated from Latin (and is therefore supposedly better)?"
The short answer from my perspective, and my perspective alone, is to hazard in effect that a vast cultural if not psychological taint has crept into Western culture which renders most books published in the last fifty years or so at best suspect of being focused on anything but the self. That would include translations of older texts. I therefore distrust modern translations of the Bible because our current generation, just as with the Baby Boomers behind it, has such an unquenchable belief in the self over everything else I doubt it can even unconsciously resist putting its own mark unneeded and possibly errantly on the Bible.
I could launch into what's just about a standard three paragraphs about institutional narcissism in the West, across all its institutions, commencing right around the point where the Baby Boomers first came of age in the sixties. I could also talk about how the Vatican of the first half of the twentieth century became enraptured with modernism and -- I have a hunch -- also needed to rapidly throw away and distance itself from its past as a strong secular power on the Italian peninsula in the face of the Italian unification.
But I won't. All I will say is this, and it at best is a caution, just a thought to bear in mind for anyone reading a modern translation, or updating, or contextualisation of the Bible:
Just because we came along a few hundred years after the men who considered the Bible does not, a priori, mean that we have anything meaningful to add to their observations.
Quite the opposite: children frequently screw up what they do, mainly because their parents have decades more experience than them and often know far better what works and what doesn't. More than any other time in history, our culture is ruled by the passions and clinging to youth. To childhood.
Let me take an analogy: 2 + 2 = 4.
One morning you realise 2 x 2 = 4 as well.
But here's the thing. Just because you turned the cross in that equation 45 degrees to the right because it looked nicer to your eye that way, it does not mean you actually added anything meaningful to the equation. You have not been given a special insight from God or anyone. Indeed you've arguably added nothing, you have engaged in curiositas.
Worse still is if by so altering the equation and concluding you did no harm by doing so, you make other people think that they can substitute, say, a minus sign in there and it still comes out as four, because they deem it looks better that way.
Or worse still that you got that insight that 2 x 2 = 4 from a man who for centuries resolutely argued that 2 + 2 could never equal 4, and that the equation was wrong, spiteful, and was in hell up to its hips in faeces, for meaningful advice on what the equation meant. You can claim you go to him seeking context and wisdom for your reading of Euclid, but you do not know the man's motives in assisting you and you likely never will. Indeed the man's motives at best will be to convince you more to his point of view than accede to yours.
All of that being said:
I am guilty of being overly legalistic in my faith as well. I have fallen into the same trap as the Pharisees from time to time, straining out the essence of the law in favour of the wording. In this respect, the best answer is always to trust in God, pray constantly for guidance, and respond to both the teaching you receive and your conscience when sitting in God's presence. I am not qualified beyond that to tell you whether one Bible is safe or not. I remain with the Douay-Rheims out of my own wariness. Even Tanquerey's book The Spiritual Life, written a good 75 years before Vatican II, at the end of the 19th century, points out very early on in the piece that all the precepts and practices we receive from the saints, the Scriptures, and traditions come to us from given points in time for given readers, and thus must be considered systematically. In this matter, again, trust in God and pray for guidance about which Bible to read; or indeed ask your priest why this Bible and no other.
