Search Results

This chapter traces the history of the Catholic regulation of books and reading and describes the censorship system in the twentieth century. It begins by focusing on the Index of Forbidden Books and its histories, along with its place in the imagination of twentieth-century Catholicism. It then considers the process by which the Index went from being an accepted element of Catholic regulation of reading and publication to its abrogation in the year following the close of the Second Vatican Council. It argues that the Index of Forbidden Books was a reflection of the larger process by which Catholic literary and intellectual culture both resisted and accommodated to modernity more generally. It also discusses the codification of the rules for the Index's procedures and functioning in the apostolic constitutions and their implementation by the Congregation of the Holy Office, then by the Congregation for the Index (from 1571 to 1917), and again by the Congregation of the Holy Office.

This chapter explores how the Roman Catholic Church's censorship system was “translated”—explained and rationalized—to the Catholic reading public and also to and by Catholic scholars, writers, and intellectuals in the twentieth century. These translations and rationales not only deal with the complexities of print culture, but also extend into popular media more generally and beyond that into discussions about the place of Catholicism in twentieth-century American life. The chapter considers how the Index of Forbidden Books was translated and transmitted in part in the classroom and how the translation created a distinct subgenre in U.S. Catholic print culture. It also explains how censorship functioned in the lives of readers and writers and concludes with a discussion of censorship's incompatibility with foundational American tenets, such as those embodied in the First Amendment.

This epilogue discusses the changed relationship between Catholicism and intellectual modernity to offer some conclusions about the importance and limits of literary culture as a means of understanding U.S. Catholic intellectual history in the twentieth century. It considers how the Index of Forbidden Books and the system of thought it stood for continued to occupy a central place in the public image of American Catholicism beyond the first half of the century. It suggests that the Index and the system of censorship it represented had continued to reflect the complexity of relationships among actors in Catholic print, literary, and intellectual culture in the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council. Finally, it cites Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited and its take on the Index in particular and Catholic literary culture in general.