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

Epilogue: The Abrogation of the Index

192 Epilogue The Abrogation of the Index There may seem to be a great distance between the abstractions of modernist oppositions—iconoclasm and orthodoxy , individual and community, innovation and repetition, openness and closure—and the ecclesial bureaucracy of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. But the same remapping of the territory of artistic modernism and other components of intellectual modernity that enabled Catholic writers and critics to reconcile what had seemed antagonistic polarities reconfigured this quintessentially Counter-Reformation institution as well. The Index and the system of thought it stood for continued to loom large in the public image of American Catholicism past the twentieth century ’s midpoint. (In his key 1960 campaign speech to the Houston ministers’ association, John F. Kennedy included censorship in his list of issues on which as president he would not be influenced by the Vatican.) But it would be difficult to exaggerate the fervor and ferment of the years between 1959 and 1965, and beyond into the 1970s, within U.S. Catholicism. The 1959 election to the papacy of the aged John XXIII, famously intended by his brother cardinals to be a seat-warmer for a few years until more likely contenders could emerge, brought about the most unintended consequences seen within the walls of the Vatican for centuries. Shortly after his election he called an ecumenical council, which came to be known as Vatican II. Convening in 1962 and closing three years later, in the pontificate of Paul VI EPILOGUE 193 (John XXIII died on June 3, 1963), the Council channeled and accelerated the most widespread rethinking of key theological and ecclesiological issues since the early modern era. In the years leading up to the Council, 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. Whereas public discussion tended to pit “the Vatican” against whatever author was under suspicion, we see the density and delicacy of relationships in the case of Graham Greene, when The Power and the Glory was referred for investigation—not on first publication, but when it was being translated into German for a Swiss publisher. The work was never officially condemned (though Greene was reprimanded by his bishop and asked to aim at literature’s nobler purposes in the future), but the noncondemnation involved the French and German publishers, the English archbishop of Westminster , the secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, the Vatican pro-Secretary of State for ordinary affairs (not coincidentally, Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI), and at least three highly varied consultor ’s reports.1 The consultors’ reports varied in their assessment of the worth of what Greene was trying to do, but they had in common a sense that the world was watching, that the audience for the decision was not just the Catholic faithful but those for whom a judgment on Greene reflected the Vatican’s very capacity to cope with contemporary art’s engagement with the world. His most sympathetic consultor, Msgr. Giuseppe De Luca, put the situation bluntly: “In the case of Graham Greene, his harsh and acerbic art touches the hearts of the least receptive and reminds them, however gloomy they be, of the awe-inspiring presence of God and the poisonous bite of sin. He addresses those who are most distant and hostile—those whom we will never reach.”2 Greene himself was uncharacteristically restrained in his manner in his public statements and also, apparently, in his dealings with Vatican personnel (it likely helped to have a future pope on his side). Similarly, Flannery O’Connor, who described her own intended audience as “the people who think God is dead,” as late as 1957–58 was asking Father James McCown for permission to read Gide and Sartre as part of a reading group organized by a local Episcopal priest.3 One way of telling the story of twentieth-century U.S. Catholic intellectual history would be to demonstrate the extent to which condemned ideas were within a very few decades thoroughly vindicated and wholeheartedly embraced. Some of these examples, such as the so-called “raid” on the French Dominicans, eventually reached the level of Rome (of Vatican 194 EPILOGUE condemnation); others remained at the lower level of “silencing” by religious superiors or local bishops.4 Although in hindsight the consistent pattern of...