All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America

5. Censorship in the Land of “Thinking on One’s Own”

104 Despite the various attempts at revising and modernizing the mechanisms and legal framework of censorship, by the time the 1917 Code of Canon Law was promulgated, even to many contemporaries censorship was an anachronism. Nevertheless, readers, writers, and other participants in the print culture of U.S. Catholicism were officially bound by it, and needed ways of navigating it within the cultural, intellectual , and commercial context of the United States. The system of Roman Catholic censorship had to be translated and rationalized for internal and external audiences, a project undertaken by a wide variety of participants in Catholic print culture. These translations and rationales not only deal with the complexities of print culture, but extend into popular media more generally and beyond that into discussions about the place of Catholicism in twentieth-century American life. To continue to function in the twentieth-century United States, the Index had to be translated in a variety of senses. The Latin that still constituted the language of official church documentation needed to be translated into English (at the same time that certain English-based neologisms were being added to Latin in order to talk about things that it did not have words for). The legal terminology of canon law (the legal code and system by which Roman Catholicism regulated itself as a polity) needed to be translated into straightforward obligations applicable to the lives of ordinary Chapter 5 Censorship in the Land of “Thinking on One’s Own” CENSORSHIP IN THE LAND OF “THINKING ON ONE’S OWN” 105 believers as readers and writers. And most broadly, the presumptions about human relationships and obligations underlying canon law’s ecclesiastical language and its philosophical and theological reasoning needed to be translated culturally into a language, a set of ideas, and a repertoire of rhetorical strategies that were defensibly modern and defensibly American. The Work of Translation This translation and transmission happened in part in the classroom. John Bonn includes in his lecture notes entitled “The Moral Effect of Literature” these fairly technical specifications about the obligations imposed by the Index on ordinary readers: “The Index forbids the reading of books not condemned by the natural law, only without permission and for valid reason . Such permission may be obtained from a confessor with faculties. If one confessor refuses another may be approached.”1 Immediately qualifying the Index’s prohibitory function with the assurance that anyone who had a valid reason to read a book on it was a standard feature of these explanations , emphasizing the compatibility of the existence of the Index with legitimate scholarly work. While students may have been likely to learn of the existence and purpose of the Index as part of undergraduate education, it seems to have had an effect on the work and consciousness primarily of those who went on to pursue graduate work. The classroom was far from the only site within which the Index was presented and explained to Catholic readers. Translating the Index literally and figuratively for an American audience produced a distinct subgenre in U.S. Catholic print culture. The four most widely cited book-length works were Francis Betten’s The Roman Index of Forbidden Books Briefly Explained (originally published in 1909, revised and republished until at least 1940), Joseph Maria Pernicone’s Ecclesiastical Prohibition of Books (a 1932 canon law thesis at the Catholic University of America), Redmond A. Burke’s What Is the Index? (originally a 1948 thesis in library science at the University of Chicago, published as a book in 1952 and currently held by 536 libraries, according to WorldCat), and The CatholicViewpoint on Censorship by Harold C. Gardiner, SJ (reviewed in the NewYork Times Book Review in 1958). In addition, the entries in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia on “Censorship of Books” and “Index of Prohibited Books” are important out of proportion to a typical reference work entry, partly because of the prominence of the Encyclopedia and partly because of their author. Joseph Hilgers, a German Jesuit who participated in the revision of censorship legislation under 106 CHAPTER 5 Leo XIII, was the author of Der Index derVerbotenen Bucher, the most extensive and most recent account of the Index available during the time under study here.2 The book-length work was never translated into English, but Hilger’s Catholic Encyclopedia entries made at least the broad outlines of his scholarship and his narrative of...