Word: indexable
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...necessarily good enough for sonny. The center has approved of Robinson Crusoe ("in its original form"), Uncle Remus ("when read aloud"), and Tom Sawyer ("despite its Negro stereotypes"). But for some of the other classics, it holds no brief at all. By last week it had placed on its Index: ¶ Black Beauty-"Poorly written . . . Black Beauty is more a mid-Victorian spinster than a horse...
Heresy or Obscenity. Ever since St. Paul's new converts at Ephesus burned their old magic books,* the church has waged war against books that might damage the faith or morals of its communicants. Pope Pius IV issued the first Index in 1564. A Congregation of the Index was established at the Vatican seven years later, with the sole job of judging what books were dangerous enough to be forbidden...
...latest edition of the Index (1948) lists 4,126 titles-all of them books banned since 1600. Many of the names it includes must have popped up on Father Burke's old University of Illinois reading lists. Among them: Voltaire, Kant, Montesquieu, Descartes, Spinoza, Anatole France, Emile Zola, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Hugo Grotius, Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Maeterlinck...
...important part of the Index is not the listed titles, but the fine Latin print in the introduction, citing the twelve classes of books which Catholics are not to read. They include: non-Catholic editions of the Bible, books attacking Catholic dogma, books defending "heresy or schism," books which "discuss, describe or teach impure or obscene matters." A volume fulfilling any of these specifications, whether it was published before or after 1600, is as fully banned as if it were mentioned by name. Many books, therefore, that to Catholics obviously fit one of these classifications are not even mentioned...
...Vatican has long conceded that the popular printing press can outrun any censor's pencil. Since 1900 the church has banned only 255 books, most of them theological works. (Best-known contemporaries on the Index: Philosopher Benedetto Croce, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.) Responsibility has been shifted to local bishops and, in the last analysis, to the individual to decide whether a particular book can injure the reader's faith. Explains a Vatican book censor: "People have different spiritual allergies...