The final edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1940) is a drab little volume smaller than the average paperback. Bound in soft gray cardboard, its 510 flimsy pages—plus front matter and appendices—record the Church’s last campaign against objectionable words. Nearly 60 years after its suppression, its very title still rouses a quiver of curiosity from Catholic and non-Catholic alike, for censorship itself has become suspect.
But few people have examined a copy themselves to see what it condemned and according to what principles. A brief look at the Index will help put it in historical perspective.
The Church’s teaching office obliges her to guard the words expressing that function. From the beginning, decrees and corrections circulated both orally and by letter, as Acts and the Epistles of St. Paul demonstrate. The written word, being permanent, required special attention. Thus, through the acts of popes, councils, and individual bishops, the Church determined which writings belonged in the canon of Sacred Scripture, condemned the works of heretics, denounced magical texts, and warned against immorality in pagan literature.
The last category aroused special controversy, but St. Jerome justified the study of pagan works as taking pre-Christian treasures for Christian use. He called this “plundering the Egyptians” by analogy to Exodus 12:35-36. Otherwise, the literary heritage of Greece and Rome might have perished like the library of the Serapeum temple instigated by the Patriarch of Alexandria in 391.
After the Council of Nicea (325) condemned the heresy of Arius, Constantine ordered Arian books burned and made their concealment a capital crime. This policy reversed his predecessor Diocletian’s campaign against Christian writings and became a model for combating future heresies. Likewise, the Church began compiling her own lists of forbidden books. The first official one was issued in 405 by Pope Innocent I, who had examined the material personally. A more extensive decree by Pope Gelasius followed in 495. This has been called the “first Index,” although that term was not applied to the document.
Censure was not limited to contemporary cases. Origen, the great theologian and confessor of the Faith (d.254), was condemned by the highest Church authorities in the fifth and sixth centuries. Even the Emperor Justinian concurred in 543. Condemnations and excommunications continued through Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Notable disputes swirled around Berengar of Tours, Peter Abelard, John Wycliffe, and Jan Hus, to name but a few. Heretical works—and sometimes heretics—were burned in public, often with State support. Even the Jewish Talmud fed the censors’ bonfires. Such ancient and medieval controversies are gone from the 1945 Index—with one curious exception: De divisione naturae by John Scotus Erigena (d. 877), a Carolingian scholar accused of pantheism.
But by the middle of the fifteenth century, the printing press disrupted the Church’s system of control. In 1469, Pope Innocent VIII decreed that all books must be approved by local Church authorities before publication. His order must have been ignored, as Leo X repeated it in 1515, right on the eve of the Reformation.
Once the Reformation erupted, book censorship became even more critical, especially since printers often had Protestant sympathies. Reformers used the new media brilliantly; Catholics did not. So, in 1546, after it finally assembled, the Council of Trent reiterated the old rule requiring prior approval for religious publications. The Council Fathers failed apparently to notice that broadsheets and cartoons were even better vectors of Evangelical ideas than books.
Pope Paul IV ordered the Papal Inquisition to prepare a list of condemned books in 1557. After a false start, this was issued two years later as the first official Index. A revised version, including ten norms for censorship, was issued in 1564. This is known as the Tridentine Index, which was put under the Sacred Congregation of the Index in 1571. Further revisions with new regulations appeared in 1596 and 1664.
A much revised and improved Index was promulgated in 1757 by Benedict XIV. This scholarly pope also devised useful principles for recognizing sanctity. Buffeted by the storms of modernity, the First Vatican Council requested a complete overhaul of the Index. Eventually, Pope Leo XIII provided fresh norms (1897) and an updated forbidden book list, the Index Leonianus (1900). His censorship rules passed into the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Codex Iuris Canonici (Code of Canon Law). In the same year, the Congregation of the Index was folded into the Congregation of the Holy Office (formerly the Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition).
The relevant canons of this now superseded Code are in Book IV, Chapter XXIII, Canons 1395-1405: “Concerning the prior censorship of books and their prohibition.” Here, the Church asserts her right to censor works on Scripture, theology, philosophy, canon law, ethics, devotions, ascetics, mysticism, and piety as well as holy images. Clerics and religious need permission to publish anywhere. Each diocese is to have a censor to check local publications, although condemnations by the Holy See apply everywhere. Without permission from appropriate authorities, forbidden books and periodicals may not be published, read, kept, sold, translated, or communicated in any other manner. Those who defy the rules are to be excommunicated. Books might be judged pre-emptively or after a formal complaint. After examination by two or three qualified investigators, the Congregation reached a collective verdict, with a final decision reserved to the pope. If necessary, permission to read forbidden works could be granted on request. Otherwise, librarians kept such materials under lock and key.
Besides non-Catholic editions of Holy Scripture, works are automatically condemned if they advocate any of the following: heretical or schismatic ideas; matters offensive to religion or morals, unapproved private revelations or devotions; attacks on Church doctrine or institutions; magic or the occult; duels, suicide, divorce, or membership in secret societies; pornography; unauthorized liturgical texts, indulgences, and images. (Writings from classical antiquity were spared censure, although only expurgated editions could be taught to the young.) Furthermore, regardless of a book’s status on the Index, it is to be shunned by those who find it spiritually harmful. The vast majority of objectionable books fell into one of these categories.
Although Pope Leo XIII’s special list of roughly 4000 condemned works was reissued periodically until 1948, it was seldom necessary to add new titles after 1900. The last book listed (26 Jun, 1961) in the final edition of the Index was La vie de Jésus by Jean Steinmann, a French priest and Biblical exegete who had created a limited. human Jesus “that the Evangelists would not recognize.” Steinmann was also forbidden to publish anything else on biblical topics.
During the twentieth century, the tsunami of new publications—not to mention new media—made a fixed catalog of condemnation impractical. (That spate of words is still increasing: between 500,000 and one million books were published in America in 2024, many privately.) Furthermore, censorship itself was no longer acceptable. Even secular authorities were relaxing their prohibitions. (For example, see the publishing histories of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.) So the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council pushed for the abolition of the Index. It was abolished under Pope Paul VI in 1966.
But that did not automatically sanitize works formerly prohibited. The principle of avoiding material harmful to Christian faith and morals remains in full force. The Church still retains her right to condemn pernicious works both locally and universally. This is still done on a case-by-case basis—for instance, the warning issued against Teilhard de Chardin or the rehabilitation of Dominican theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu.
At the time of its suppression, the Index was a veritable museum of forgotten ecclesiastical disputes. The book list is shorter than it looks because some items are listed twice, by author and then by title, many beginning with Epistola/e, Examen, Histoire, Lettre/s, or Traité. Condemnations are graded: all (opera omnia), some (omnes fabulae amatoriae, “all love-stories”), donec corrigienda, “until corrected”), or limited to specific titles. Some of the entries are so obscure it would require additional research to determine what was at issue. Pseudonymous writers and names rendered in Latin complicate matters further. (For example, “Franciscus Baco” is Francis Bacon.) The principal languages are Latin and French, then German and Italian, with very little in Spanish or English and a few rarities in Hebrew or Arabic. Nearly all the authors are male, with heretical mystic Madame Guyon and feminist Simone de Beauvoir being the only historically famous women.
With the exception of John Scotus Erigena, previously noted, no ancient or medieval writings are listed. Since Renaissance and Reformation authors such as Machiavelli and Luther had already been condemned and those condemnations were still in force, the 1948 Index does not list them nor writings by Kepler and Galileo, which were removed in 1835. The earliest item in the final edition of the Index appears to be the complete works of heretic Giordano Bruno, who was censured and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition in 1600. Another early target (1606) was a political treatise Basilikon Doron (The King’s Gift) by King James I of England, who was in no danger of burning. Three of his religious tracts were condemned later.
Catholic religious subjects, of course, dominate the Index: defective texts and catechisms, objectionable lives of the saints, dubious devotions, and false mysticism. Three of the last have contemporary relevance: Mélanie Calvat’s longer version of The Secret of LaSalette (1879/1923), the Divine Will revelations of Luigia Piccaretta, and The Poem of the Man-God by Maria Valtorta, which was the penultimate work condemned (1959). Valtorta’s supporters have tried to explain this away as the work of a “modernist clique in the Holy Office” despite it being headed by the staunchly orthodox Cardinal Ottaviani. Sizable clusters of titles connected to Gallicanism, Jansenism, Quietism, and Modernism enlarge the proportion of French authors on the Index.
The Index identifies false theologies, philosophies, and political theories—especially involving Church-State relations. Among the major thinkers condemned are Grotius, Lipsius, Descartes, Pascal, Bayle, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Lessing, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, Kant, Saint-Simon, Comte, and Mill. Even political tracts by poets John Milton and Adam Mickiewicz did not escape notice. Some figures one would expect to see are missing, including Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. (The Darwin condemned is Erasmus, grandfather of the more famous Charles.) Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg is there, but not Hitler; Swedenborg, but not Joseph Smith. Integrist Charles Maurras and his periodical L’Action Francais are both forbidden.
History, particularly religious history, was a continuing concern. That was obviously merited in the case of anti-Catholic historians Gibbon and Michelet—or Renan, who was also racist and anti-Semitic. It is less obvious that Paul Sabatier or Louis Duchesne deserved punishment or how Henry Hallam’s Constitutional History of England offended. Directly criticizing the papacy invited censure, whether in vicious screeds calling the pope “Antichrist” or in serious works by Lord Acton or Ferdinand Gregorovius. Even travel books with negative views of the Papal States were condemned. As for anti-clerical writing on the Index, it is no surprise that the Jesuits were the order most often attacked.
The Index was especially hostile to modern French literature, reflecting Rome’s longstanding suspicion of France and her culture. There are decrees against “all tales of love” by Balzac, Dumas (senior and junior), Feydeau, Sand, Sue, and Stendhal as well as against Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Salammbo, Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and Les misérables and all the works of Zola. Every Nobel laureate who wrote in French was condemned: Bergson, Anatole France, Gide, Maeterlinck, and Sartre.
In contrast, the only forbidden English fiction is Richardson’s Pamela, an anonymous parody Anti-Pamela, and Sterne’s Yorick. No American fiction appears on the Index. Censured writers of other nationalities include Heine, D’Annunzio, Kazanzaki, Moravia, and Unamuno.
Across its four hundred year run, the Index was a well-intended but inadequate, erratic, and ultimately futile attempt to ban bad ideas. The primary responsibility of discernment now rests with the conscientious Catholic individual, guided by the Church’s basic standards.
(Note: A shorter version of this article appeared in Catholic Heritage, May-June, 1994.)
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Thank you for this overview. I recall skimming the Index in a public library in 1960 or so. On a question raised earlier at this website, what more about works “automatically condemned if they advocate […] matters offensive to religion or morals [….]” Because of Scarlet O’Hara’s and Rhett Butler’s escapades, was “Gone with the Wind” condemned (although not explicitly listed)? My earlier misunderstanding?
About Teilhard de Chardin, I recall Pope John XXIII (rather than listing his works) challenging critics to capably engage and refute Chardin’s theopoetics (?). Especially “The Phenomenon of Man,” which was cautiously delayed from publication until after Chardin’s death. Concerns were reinforced because Chardin selected Aldous Huxley to contribute the long introductory essay in that book. Not so much ambiguity there…
About capable engagement, too bad about Catholic academia’s asserted total autonomy under the 1967 Land O’ Lakes Declaration, barely one year after Pope Paul VI confined the Index to the back shelves of museum history (1966).
Yesterday, libraries and moveable type; today, PCs and electronic AI?
According to wikipedia, the Holy Office studied Mein Kampf for three years but before they could publish their decision, Hitler had come to power and their rules forbade criticizing a ruler. Mit Brenndener Sorge, however should have established the Church’s hostility to the Nazi regime.
About condemnation of the Nazis, rather than the book Mein Kampf, this view from Quora (on line):
“In 1931 [before Hitler came to power in 1933], the German Bishops excommunicated all leaders of the Nazi Party, and banned Catholic from becoming members. [Mein Kampf was published in 1925.] The ban was relaxed two years later after State law required all Civil Servants and Trade Union workers to be members of the Nazi Party, but the condemnation of Nazi ideology and the excommunication of Nazi leaders remained in force. Hitler was a Nazi leader, and therefore clearly excommunicate.”
From a separate source and in a footnote, Gordon Zahn reports the efforts by the Nazi regime to prevent publication in Germany of the critical encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), and the “fantastic strategems” by the German hierarchy to sometimes get around the prohibition (“German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars” (Dutton, 1969).
Two thoughts, an “autonomous “ Catholic would be an oxymoron as being in communion with Christ and His Church is not a matter of degree and we can know through both Faith and reason, that speciation occurs at the moment of conception thus every son or daughter of a human person can only be, in essence, a human person.
Surprising that Adolf’s Mein Kampf was not indexed. Reason is his rather convincing argument that Catholic charity to the less fortunate contributes to enabling the destitute to remain in their condition rather than make the effort to contribute to society. He argued charity retarded German recovery from poverty, a depressed spirit from the devastation of draconian post War reparations, post war economic collapse.
There is a measure of truth in his argument. The Apostle himself pronounced what some might deem a heartless premise, that if they [the presumed destitute] won’t work they should not eat [be fed]. St Paul referenced those capable of work. We may reference that to the migrant, the minority urban neighborhood.
As an aside, Catholic charities in the past had developed successful vocational training programs in said neighborhoods until Pres Reagan halted government funding and the program died. Reagan also had psychiatric facilities empty out their facilities of patients. When stationed in Lower Manhattan I recall seeing apparent psych patients searching garbage cans for food. I hope Trump analyzes with compassion some of the possible outcomes of Doge cutbacks.
I once read that Hitler’s infamous book was not put on the Index during WW2 because the Church had a policy of remaining neutral regarding books written by heads of state.
Then, after WW2, Hitler and the whole Nazi movement were so discredited that there was no need to put Hitler’s book on the Index.
But the core tenets of Hitler’s philosophy were condemned in 1937 in a papal encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI. Titled “Mit brennender Sorge” (With Burning Anxiety), it condemned “pantheistic confusion”, “neopaganism”, “the so-called myth of race and blood”, and the idolizing of the State.
Thanks. Their SS headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle was filled with pagan symbols and paraphernalia.
You know, I think their problems went a little beyond pagan symbols. I know that, for example, the supposed pagan roots of the Christmas tree are questionable, but the pagan roots of some things — such as the basilica — are not. Some things can really be “baptized”. There are a lot of pagan references in Dante’s Divine Comedy, but the work as a whole is definitely Christian.
I don’t think books bound by leather made from human skin can be baptized, though.
Yes. I agree. Nazism in depth as cultic ideology was fathered by Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg. He originally fostered the idea of a destined dominance of Teutonic people, wrote of an original semi arctic homeland that made for their racial purity.
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler tied Rosenberg’s vision to ancient Nordic methodology aggrandized into music and mythological libretto by Richard Wagner. Nazism was religion. Wewelsburg Castle was a place for ethnic blood worship.
An indicator was the ‘blood flag’. The flag carried by the Munich putsch slain members, the flag ceremoniously touched to banners of newly formed military units. Nazism possessed all the trappings of religious worship.
New York Times:
Books Bound in Human Skin: An Ethical Quandary at the Library
By Jennifer Schuessler and Julia Jacobs
April 19, 2024
Yes, but the encyclical was largely suppressed from the German people. See my later comment above (2:40 p.m.).
Father Peter, aee you so certain that was President Reagan and the Federal Government that emptied psychiatric patients on to the street?
I worked at a very large Catholic psychiatric hospital in New York from 1968-1997. It is my recollection that it was STATE psychiatric institutions that were warehouses for the mentally ill that were closed beginning in the 1970’s. Some of these STATE facilities housed 20,000 patients or more. I could rattle off the names of some of them even now. The STATE OF NEW YORK thought it was the humane thing to do to close down these facilities but there was no provision to provide for the housing, medical and therapeutic needs of hundreds of thousands of individuals – many of whom had spent most of their lives behind the walls of STATE psychiatric hospitals. My guess is that “humane considerations” had less to do with the decision to empty mental institutions as it was financial. The STATE was looking for ways to save money. It would have been far better to establish working farms on which these patients could live and work than dumping them onto the streets of NYC. However, there were many for whom the humane thing to have done was continue to house them in secure facilities. Many of these had been lobotomized and given electic shock treatment in the 1950’s and before such that nothing was left of their mental capactities.
There was a popular movement to release mental health patients in the belief they could live on their own through medication. But that assumes patient compliance . And we know how it all turned out.
Deacon Ed, if you had that close inner relationship with NY psychiatric care your opinion is credible. Although at the time I recall the media reporting Regan’s cutbacks on spending were at least a contributing factor. I did highlite financial motivation, “Pres Reagan halted government funding and the program died”.
INDEX LITURGIARUM PROHIBITORUM
Prior to the Vatican II Council, Church authorities forbade most Catholics from reading books that promote heresy, schism, or atheism.
Now, Church authorities enforce no restrictions on Catholics who want to read books that promote heresy, schism, or atheism, but they forbid most Catholics from participating in the traditional Catholic liturgy that was approved and universally celebrated until the Vatican II Council.
What explains this new situation?
How can one make sense of this?
Could it be that the longstanding traditional Mass is now viewed by Church authorities as promoting dangerous heresy or schism? But how could that be?
My responses got mismatched. This one is supposed to reply to Peter Beaulieu. The novel Gone With the Wind was never on the Index because the Holy Office took essentially no interest in English language materials. I don’t see that the contents are so offensive as to merit condemnation. Scarlett’s no Becky Sharpe, after all, and never actually commits adultery.
The film version of Gone With the Wind was rated “B” by the Legion of Decency, meaning “objectionable in part.” I suspect that was more for Rhett’s profane last line than anything in the contents. It’s ironic that movies originally rated “C” (“condemned”) by the Legion show up on the Vatican’s list of Important Films. An article on the Legion and Hollywood’s old Hays Code would be interesting but I haven’t the resources to pursue it. Thw Wikipedia article covers the essentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_Code
“The principle of avoiding material harmful to Christian faith and morals remains in full force.“ Unfortunately the majority of Catholics read (watch, listen to) whatever they want from check stand tabloids to Protestant heretics and they double down on their justifications. Reading religious books by Protestants is gravely sinful for the average Catholic and dangerous for anyone without a very strong background in theology. Yet how many Catholics read Max Lucado, T. D. Jakes, or other popular Protestant writers? And let’s not forget our so-called Catholic authors like James Martin and his ilk. Reading (listening to, watching) anything that might endanger faith and morals is a grave sin. Even if written by the man who sits on Peter’s throne.
But not things written by an anonymous man who wishes to be regarded as a priest, eh? He alone can be trusted, even though it is “for most Catholics a grave sin” to read what is written by priests who actually give their names, including the Pope. An anonymous commenter on a blog, though, he can be trusted!
Now on to the next major problem: Men casting out demons in the name of Jesus who are not of our number.
These days Catholics lack any discernment and can be easily led astray by false doctrines, and liberal/worldly approach to a written or spoken word.
The Index used to put them on guard against indecency, profanity,vulgarity, heresy, etc. It was a warning against a secular entertainment that makes sure that nothing is too sacred or inviolate to make fun of or trivialize.
The article is brief (“breezy”), and says nothing really why a lot of those authors were forbidden. Ultimately, it is a (shallow) stab at a pre-conciliar church.
I thought it was a pretty interesting article.
And I learned something by reading it.
If anyone’s interested, copies of the final version of the Index are readily available on line for $25-30. The left hand image illustrating this article is of my personal copy.
I don’t think the Index was futile, just because it is not able to take into account the large number of publications made today. The continuing censure of works by Origen, Erigena and others, and works like the long version of La Salette message published by Melanie Calvat so many decades after the event, avoids people using such materials to justify mistaken. It is often easy to recognise so much contemporary literature that opposes the Church, because it so often proclaims the fact. But there are well-known works from the past that are a perennial inducement to error if people are not made aware. A new Index listing just a few dozen influential works like that would be invaluable.
Ignatius Press should consider a publication of a new Index!
Is Anthony de Melo and his books still banned?