Religion: Catholic Censorship

When Redmond Burke was a student at the University of Illinois, he had some spiritual troubles over his required reading. As a Roman Catholic, he knew that he was forbidden, under pain of sin, to read books listed in the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the index of forbidden books. But like most Catholics (and non-Catholics) he had only a dim notion of how the church’s book censorship operated and what, exactly, it forbade.

Burke, at 37, is now a priest and the librarian of Chicago’s De Paul University. As a professional librarian, he has had a fine chance to look into his old problem. In a book published last week, What Is the Index? (Bruce; $2.75), he has written a short and brisk guide to the church’s position on reading.

Heresy or Obscenity. Ever since St. Paul’s new converts at Ephesus burned their old magic books,* the church has waged war against books that might damage the faith or morals of its communicants. Pope Pius IV issued the first Index in 1564. A Congregation of the Index was established at the Vatican seven years later, with the sole job of judging what books were dangerous enough to be forbidden.

The latest edition of the Index (1948) lists 4,126 titles—all of them books banned since 1600. Many of the names it includes must have popped up on Father Burke’s old University of Illinois reading lists. Among them: Voltaire, Kant, Montesquieu, Descartes, Spinoza, Anatole France, Emile Zola, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius, Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Maeterlinck.

The important part of the Index is not the listed titles, but the fine Latin print in the introduction, citing the twelve classes of books which Catholics are not to read. They include: non-Catholic editions of the Bible, books attacking Catholic dogma, books defending “heresy or schism,” books which “discuss, describe or teach impure or obscene matters.” A volume fulfilling any of these specifications, whether it was published before or after 1600, is as fully banned as if it were mentioned by name. Many books, therefore, that to Catholics obviously fit one of these classifications are not even mentioned in the Index, e.g., John Calvin’s Institutes, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

Spiritual Allergies. The actual working of the church’s book censorship is not so inflexible as it sounds. Any Catholic with a “good reason” for reading a banned book can easily get permission from his bishop. Many U.S. bishops give temporary blanket permissions to students in their dioceses to read books necessary for their studies.

The Vatican has long conceded that the popular printing press can outrun any censor’s pencil. Since 1900 the church has banned only 255 books, most of them theological works. (Best-known contemporaries on the Index: Philosopher Benedetto Croce, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.) Responsibility has been shifted to local bishops and, in the last analysis, to the individual to decide whether a particular book can injure the reader’s faith. Explains a Vatican book censor: “People have different spiritual allergies.”

* Acts 19:19.