What Changed?

Published on by D. G. Hart

In 1965, Calvin, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, and Montaigne were all on the list of books banned by Rome’s Sacred Congregation of the Index (until 1917 when it became the Holy Office). Then in 1966 that list went away. Calvin was no more a problem for Roman Catholic souls than Hobbes. What happened?

Did Calvin change his views? Did Hobbes? Stupid questions. Both being dead, they could have hardly changed their texts. So that leaves the agent of change to be the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. If the church changed so that Calvin was once banned and went to being acceptable, does that mean that the magisterium erred in banning Calvin, Hobbes, Hume and Montaigne (for starters)? But of course, Rome cannot err.

So what is an inquiring mind to do? Don’t read Jason and the Callers (who have lots of ‘splainin’ to do even if it is above their pay grade), but do check out this piece for some background:

The idea of censoring heretical writings dates back to the early centuries of the church but was not formalized as a papal power until Pope Leo X did so in 1515, during the Fifth Lateran Council. Two years later, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Within weeks, they were printed in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel and distributed widely.

The first Index, as one might expect, published in 1559, banned all books by Luther, Calvin and other Protestant reformers. Since translating the Bible into vernacular tongues was a Protestant specialty, all Bibles but the Latin Vulgate were banned. The Talmud and the Koran were also taboo. But the Index didn’t stop there. It also drew up lists of books that should be purged of passages that conflicted with church teaching. Classical writersincluding Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Homer, Euclid, Hippocrates, Thucydides and otherswere put on the expurgatio list because they reflected pagan beliefs. Books translated by Protestants had to be filtered for offending passages. In some cases, a book only had to be printed in a Protestant city to earn a place on the list of objectionable works. The Index originally planned to produce purged editions of about 300 books. They only managed to do about 50, Wolf said.

After this confusing start, the Vatican decided to aim just at books denounced to it as dangerous. The Index Congregation met three or four times a year in Rome. Two consultors were named for each book being surveyed, and their findings were discussed at a meeting of the cardinals in the congregation. The congregation’s decision was then brought to the pope for approval. This produced a vast accumulation of files, written in Latin or Italian and divided into the Diarii, which recorded the congregation’s sessions, and the Protocolli, with all sorts of other papers. The Inquisition congregation met weekly but handled only 2 or 3 percent of the censorship cases, usually theology books.

Over the centuries, the Index managed to condemn a large number of writings that eventually became classics of European culture. Banned philosophy books included works by Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Pascal, Kant and Mill. Among the novelists listed were Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Zola, D’Annunzio and Moravia. Books by Defoe and Swift were blacklisted, as were Casanova’s memoirs. The censors’ zeal varied over the years and lost steam as the 20th century wore on. One of their last targets was Sartre, whose complete works were banned as early as 1948.

Wolf and his researchers are also writing up short biographies of the consultors to reveal the intellectual influences at play. They were all priests; and in many cases their education, travel and language skills have been recorded. The Jesuits and Dominicans dominated their ranks, and each order tried to make sure it was not outnumbered by the other. Certain patterns emerge, Wolf said: The Dominicans tended to take their men from a certain province in Italy. The Jesuits have their world-wide system, and they tended to move people around.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Perhaps the biggest surprise in the archives is the large number of books that secretly passed muster. Authors were not informed that their works were being reviewed or invited to defend them. Until now, we only knew which books were banned, Wolf told me. Nobody knew about the books that passed the review.

The treatment of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) revealed the censors’ narrow cultural focus. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not reviewed as long as it was only available in English. You see, English was a barbarian language; only Protestants spoke it and they were lost for the faith anyway, Wolf recounted with a laugh. But as soon as it appeared in a proper Catholic’ language Italian, French or Spanish it became dangerous. An Italian translation turned up in the Papal States and was denounced to the Index because Stowe was a Quaker and thus presumably spreading the Protestant poison, as the denunciatory letter put it.

18 thoughts on “What Changed?”

  1. Rome has to be able to live, DGH. Indexing banned books is a bunker mentality and if it isn’t quitted those prescribing it and those following along will turn into a cabal of inbred babblers. CD-Host gave a pretty good synopsis of RC on the ground. Most of us need to live with other people, without condemnation or rancor.

    I think Calvin was the smartest of the reformers, he was ruthlessly consistent and his mission was to prepare those he called out of Rome to be the true people of God. So Voegelin says, anyway about his doctrine of predestination: corporate, not individual.

    He was in the words of a RC historian “immensely intelligent.”

    His temptations and defects of character were all of the mind. He lived a life that was admirable. Not money or property or food were temptations and he suffered serious physical ailments Tom Wolfe lists him along with Jesus and Freud as a world changer.

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  2. Dgh, There is an unfortunate failure of HTML to properly render some embedded dashes in the quoted text.

    This leaves us wondering whether “Spanishit” is a new vulgarity.

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  3. MLD,

    You must be Catholic- always looking for the inherent qualities of the individuals involved in the story but not seeing the overall picture of how God’s providential plans work themselves out in history. It is not the individuals that God uses that are that important. What is important is knowing the Christ who is the true controller of history and the redemptive plan of the Father who is glorifying His Son as the plot unfolds. You give way too much credit to the sinners- Freud and Calvin cannot be compared with Jesus.

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  4. The New Catholic Encyclopedia (v. 7, pp. 343-435) is quite interesting with respect to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. It notes that though Cardinal Ottaviani (prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith) declared in 1966 that there would be no further editions of the Index, “this does not mean, however that whatever had been contained on the Index is now automatically permitted reading for all Catholics,” and lists conditions under which books may still be prohibited, noting especially, “no one is exempted from the prohibition of the natural law that forbids one to read books that place him in proximate spiritual danger. The Church still claims the authority to prohibit a book when it constitutes a general danger to the faith or morals of Catholics.”

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  9. You are likely right that Müller would never attempt such. The RCC claims an authority that it customarily refrains from exercising, given the likelihood of such being denounced or ignored.

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  10. “Over the centuries, the Index managed to condemn a large number of writings that eventually became classics of European culture. Banned philosophy books included works by Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Pascal, Kant and Mill. Among the novelists listed were Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Zola, D’Annunzio and Moravia. Books by Defoe and Swift were blacklisted, as were Casanova’s memoirs. The censors’ zeal varied over the years and lost steam as the 20th century wore on. One of their last targets was Sartre, whose complete works were banned as early as 1948.”

    Highly embarrassing.

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  11. Alan said:

    The RCC claims an authority that it customarily refrains from exercising, given the likelihood of such being denounced or ignored.

    Which makes the fact that the CTCers embrace it all the more incredible. The Magisterium fiddles and the church burns, but they don’t care as long as there is a Magisterium somewhere.

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  12. In 1965, Calvin, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, and Montaigne were all on the list of books banned by Rome’s Sacred Congregation of the Index (until 1917 when it became the Holy Office).

    Yeah, but in 1995, your own church put Dr. Terry Gray on trial for evolution.

    http://www.asa3.org/gray/evolution_trial/

    That’s some serious Galileo [stuff]. I don’t discredit your church or faith on this particular stupidity, but Elder Hart, but you just lobbed one on your own glass house, dude,

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  13. vd, t, try to follow the arguments here oh he-who-knows-2k wise one.

    CTC says Roman Catholicism is conservative.

    CTC ignores that Roman Catholicism changed at Vat 2 and lost most of its dogmatic and exclusive mojo.

    OPCers know they are conservative and that people who fall outside the norms of doctrine and life get excluded.

    CTCers don’t know that.

    VD,T doesn’t understand the difference between the OPC and Roman Catholicism.

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  14. Wow, great point TVD.

    Perhaps DGH could point us to the OPC list of prohibited works written by those who have been excommunicated, or whose positions have been weighed and judged to be outside the bounds of its confession?

    Oh, right, the OPC doesn’t ban books or teachers. Slight difference.

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  16. How a Muslim sees the change:

    As we all know, the Muslim world is not going through the best of times. Rather, it is going through the worst of times. The underdevelopment of Muslim countries, in almost all areas of life, is made much worse by the zealots who kill or oppress people in the name of Islam. They threaten not just Christians or Westerners, but many of us as well.

    Yet the world should understand why these zealots exist. The secular mind often has a hard time in grasping the nature of the challenge, therefore often concluding, “religion is the problem.” Yet the very history of your own institution, the Holy See, is a correction to such simplistic views. There have been times when the Catholic Church, a bit like the militant Islamists of today, launched holy wars on “infidels” and punished “heretics” in brutal ways. But the same Catholic Church today opens soup kitchens for the poor and provides healthcare for children. The very history of your faith, in other words, proves that religion can be a force for both good and evil.

    Therefore, the big question for Islam today is how we will defeat, or transform, the Muslim zealots, and re-establish Islam as power for peace, liberty and compassion. At this point, the experience of your faith, and the evolution of its doctrine, can be an eye-opener for my fellow Muslims. What was achieved in the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s was commendable, as your admirable efforts to extend the church’s sympathy to formerly excluded groups such as gays and atheists. It will be crucial for Muslims (and perhaps even more conservative Christians) to understand that you take these liberal steps not to deviate from the divine path, but, quite the contrary, to extend that path to places it has never reached.

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  17. Thanks for reminding us that greatness lies not in extravagance, but rather humility. “The last shall be the first,” after all, as a wise Nazarene that we both love once said, “and the first shall be the last.”

    Thx. Glad I have Feedly, so that I can find the comments past the latest 10.

    Have a nice Lord’s day.

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  18. Something has changed:

    Third, Dawson absolutely despised the vigorous employment and enforcement of censorship in the twentieth-century Catholic Church. Most who held and wielded powers of censorship were, in Dawson’s view, ignorant and power-hungry. They understood nothing but received dogma and considered imagination a dangerous faculty at best, a tool of the devil at its worst. Dawson and his best friend, E.I. Watkin, often lamented with each other over the failure of the Church to allow the flourishing of new ideas. While the Church had the duty to maintain orthodoxy, it also had the equal duty to figure out a way to allow for dissent and questioning. The failure of the Catholic Church to support real debate and discussion would lead, in one direction, toward fundamentalism and stagnation. The other path taken by the Church–suppression–was equally troubling. If questioning of the Church by its own was stamped out, and criticisms became whispered rather than announced, a moment of explosion was likely; what would follow, Dawson feared, was something chaotic, revolutionary, and uncontrollable.

    By the 1940s, Dawson and Watkin simply refused to submit any of their work to the censor. Their publisher, Frank Sheed, backed them, and all three men maintained their independence from this aspect of the Church.

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