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IX SUPPRESSION OF BOOKS NO legal policy of the Papacy is more characteristically reactionary and pernicious than its system of censorship and prohibition of books and periodicals. From the time when the Emperor Constantine gave the hierarchy power to enforce its doctrines by the sanctions of penal law the policy of forcible suppression began to be ruthlessly applied to writings disapproved by dominant ecclesiastical authority. When the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 condemned the views and literary works of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, the Emperor, who presided in great pomp over the council, yielded imperial sanction to the banishment of the condemned priest and the destruction of his books. When the downfall of the Western Empire in the fifth century and the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches in the eleventh century enabled the Pope to assume ecclesiastical supremacy in the West, censorship and prohibition were applied with still more rigor and severity. Abelard, Wyclif' and John Huss are conspicuous as exalted and heroic Christian saints who were personally condemned and their writings burned by papal authority. Dante, the great Florentine epic poet, admittedly one of the most gifted literary geniuses of all time, was subjected to like fate, though the hierarchy of Rome in 1922 at the six-hundreth anniversary of his birth extolled him as a consistent and exemplary Roman Catholic. On July 15, 1520, Pope Leo X directed against Luther his famous bull Exsurge Domime (Rise, Lord), wherein the great reformer was denounced as a "wild beast" and he and his books were ordered to be burned as John Hus, Jerome of Prague and Savonarola had been. But the dawn of light was already breaking on the benighted world and the work of Luther was not so easily crushed by arbitrary power as that of the previous reformers. Consequently the Council of Trent was assembled in the final effort to annihilate the reformatory movement or at least to mitigate its force and consequences. That council near the close of its protracted sessions restated with intensified vigor the law for suppressing reformatory writings which could not be refuted. The legislation so enacted is known in the literature of canon law as Index Tridentinus (the Index of Trent). That index condemned all works of non-Roman Catholics,
all books except the ancient classics deemed by the hierarchy to be immoral
and all Latin translations of the New Testament made by non-Roman Catholics;
limited privilege was given for reading the Bible in the vernacular by
special hierarchical permission in each case; the rule of Leo X was reaffirmed
forbidding publication of books without previous censorship and approval
of the hierarchy; and adequate penalties were prescribed for violation
of the index. The Tridentine Index remained virtually unchanged for
more than three centuries till abrogated by Leo XIII in his Pontifical
statute known as Officiorum Munerum of January 25, 1897. That
statute appears in the Great Encyclical Letters of Leo XIII at
pages 407 and following. It stood as the papal law of prohibition and
censorship till the Codex Juris Canonici came into force in 1918
by the statute of Benedict XV known as Providentissima. The invention of printing in the fifteenth century so increased the production of books as to quicken the papal incentive for suppression as voiced in the Council of Trent and in the statutes of Leo XIII and in Title 23 of the new Codex Juris Canonici. The papal law of suppression operates in two distinct forms. It authorizes examination of a book before publication with a view to deciding whether or not it may be published. This is technically called Cansura praevia. Or it may condemn a book already published. Such prohibition is called Censure repressive. The former procedure is censorship in the strict sense, while the latter is prohibition. Censorship as enforced by the hierarchy does not permit any Roman Catholic publisher to place a book on the market until it has been subjected to the local Ordinary, inspected by his censor of books and its publication authorized by his Imprimatur duly subscribed by him. Of course both censorship and prohibition by a local Ordinary are subject to review on appeal to Rome. On such appeal they come before the Congregation of the Holy Office, of which the Pope is himself prefect. Prohibition is necessarily more comprehensive in scope than censorship. The latter applies primarily to authors and publishers, while the former is binding on the whole membership of the Church of Rome. Innocent VIII, Alexander VI and Leo X enacted laws requiring all printers as well as authors to submit all books to the hierarchy for censorship before daring to print them—Commentary on Canon Law. Augustine, Volume, 6, page 430. Canon 1384 of the Codex Juris Canonici extends the whole law of prohibition and censorship to daily papers, periodicals and other publications in general. So does the hierarchy endeavor by its statute law to exclude from Roman Catholics every kind of literature that could possibly tend to liberalize their intelligence or free them from the mental slavery that has so benighted all papal lands. That policy made it impossible for the hierarchy, when challenged, to meet the writer in exhaustive public debate in writing. Canon 1385 of the Codex reads in part as follows:
Canon 1391 says:
Under the chapter on Prohibition of Books, canon 1398 provides:
Canon 1399, in its first clause, reads thus:
The succeeding twelve clauses of that canon prohibit in
detail all books and publications treating of moral or religious questions
if written or published by non-Roman Catholics or by priests or members
of the Church of Rome without hierarchical approval. With shackles so heavy does the papal law enslave the Roman Catholic mind and exclude it from contact with the progressive scholarship of the modern world. No wonder that illiteracy is all but universal in papal lands and their people make no substantial contributions to science and invention and industrial progress. |