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One hears a lot about the Catholic Church's old "index" of books good Catholics were not supposed to read. My great-aunt Mary, otherwise a committed Catholic, used to claim that she grew up choosing her reading material from the Index.
She must have been lying. Have you ever seen the Index? If you kept strictly to its precepts, you would miss out on very little good general reading, and very little controversy. The 1948 version is online here. Note there are no decent modern novels banned; not even Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud are banned. Neither is Martin Luther. The books banned are, sensibly and uncontroversially, books that by their nature and content might be supposed to be expressions of Catholic doctrine, but are not. Hence books by Blaise Pascal and Saint Faustina are banned. Nobody would make that mistake about Marx, Freud, or a modern novel.
But that means the books banned are mostly, for the casual reader, extremely dry; probably of interest only to theologians.
She must have been lying. Have you ever seen the Index? If you kept strictly to its precepts, you would miss out on very little good general reading, and very little controversy. The 1948 version is online here. Note there are no decent modern novels banned; not even Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud are banned. Neither is Martin Luther. The books banned are, sensibly and uncontroversially, books that by their nature and content might be supposed to be expressions of Catholic doctrine, but are not. Hence books by Blaise Pascal and Saint Faustina are banned. Nobody would make that mistake about Marx, Freud, or a modern novel.
But that means the books banned are mostly, for the casual reader, extremely dry; probably of interest only to theologians.
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