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

4. The History and Function of Catholic Censorship, as Told to the Twentieth Century

85 Nothing could be clearer about U.S. Catholic literary culture in the years after the Great War than its interdependence with theology and philosophy in defining and evaluating literature. The resulting literary aesthetic drew multiple aspects of Catholic thought and experience into a powerful and flexible imaginative framework that operated in an extensive network of literary institutions. These institutions in turn functioned in the context of a church polity and a tradition of ecclesiastical law that encompassed literary activity within its jurisdiction. People involved in Catholic literary work were imagined by church authority not as solitary artists or disinterested scholars but as believers with a high calling and a grave obligation to the truth, and those obligations were spelled out formally in canon law. In the literary and artistic climate of the early to midtwentieth century, these legal specifications and the dilemma they posed for Catholics involved in literary and print culture could serve as Exhibit A in a trial by which Catholics were found to be, as John McGreevy put it, “heretics from what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called ‘the democratic faith,’ one in which ‘theology and ritual . . . hierarchy and demonology’ would step aside for ‘intellectual freedom and unrestricted inquiry.’”1 The philosophical framework underlying Catholic literary culture might have been assimilable within Schlesinger’s dichotomy had its proponents derived it independently and espoused it voluntarily as a response to its Chapter 4 The History and Function of Catholic Censorship, as Told to the Twentieth Century 86 CHAPTER 4 intellectual appeal. But key elements of Catholic views of literature were given, not invented; prescribed, not voluntary; they were legislated. For four centuries Catholic relationships to print culture had been codified in canon law (the official law of the church). Compiled primarily as a response to the spread of the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, these laws concerning reading and publication originated in the impulse to suppress one of the phenomena most deeply associated with the definition of the modern . As a result, their existence into the twentieth century posed a significant dilemma for Catholics confident that their views of literature could speak effectively to the modern situation. The most potent symbol of this dilemma was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the Index of Forbidden Books, a list compiled and published by the Vatican, begun in 1564, remaining in effect until 1966, consisting of books that Catholics could read only with permission. The Index and the system that undergirded it were, in the eyes of critics, irreformably part of the premodern. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to write about the Index as anything other than an anachronism. Established in the heat of Counter-Reformation anxiety about the spread of Protestantism by means of the newly invented printing press, in the middle of the twentieth century it stood, at best, as an anomaly—evidence either that the Counter-Reformation, Tridentine church was desperately out of step with the intellectual culture of the modern West or that it was toothless and on its way out.2 Either way, its reason for being ran so clearly counter to the main intellectual currents of the century that anything other than an edifyingly teleological account of its demise seems almost impossible (and perhaps undesirable). But twentieth-century Catholic intellectuals had to render such an account ; that is, they had to develop a coherent rationale by which they could observe apparently incompatible commitments. If they believed that Catholic literary work presumed a dense web of accountability, mutual obligation , and community, then simply ignoring or rejecting the Index and the system of laws it represented was not a viable option. If at the same time they wanted to be clearly and firmly part of American culture—and especially of American intellectual life—they needed terms in which to understand their obligations that would explain to both themselves and their compatriots how it was possible to respect the spirit of inquiry around which American intellectual life in the twentieth century centered. As Catholic critics writing about literary modernism rewrote the story of modernity to maintain a continuous Catholic presence on the stage, Catholic critics and teachers explaining the Index of Forbidden Books to their students and compatriots had to construct an account of the emergence of THE HISTORY AND FUNCTION OF CATHOLIC CENSORSHIP 87 intellectual and philosophical modernity in which Catholic tradition retained its centrality. This task was necessary...