All Good Books Are Catholic Books: Print Culture, Censorship, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America (Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America) by Cadegan Una M

Author:Cadegan, Una M. [Cadegan, Una M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780801468971
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2013-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Censorship in Practice

Although prescriptive evidence for censorship’s functioning abounds, evidence demonstrating how prescriptions functioned in the lives of readers and writers is fragmentary and largely unrepresentative. Especially from the standpoint of the cultural historian, this question may not even be the most fruitful one to ask—it is worth pausing to examine assumptions about what compliance or lack thereof might actually indicate. Would 100 percent compliance with the Church’s law regulating reading and publication be good news or bad news? Either perspective could yield a dreary morality tale devoid of historical insight.

U.S. Catholic censorship in the early and mid-twentieth century reflected the features of the literary and ecclesiastical culture that produced it. In practice it structured relationships among those involved in literary production and other intellectual activity in such a way as to bridge the gulfs it had helped to create. In having to make something so inescapably premodern compatible with modernity—at least in the de facto sense that people living in the modern era sought to find a way to function within the system—Catholics bridged a gap that was supposedly unbridgeable. It might have been a makeshift, temporary and somewhat shaky bridge, but it functioned well enough to get some key minds across to a spot where they could take up the work waiting for them on the other side.

The relationships structured by censorship in practice were hierarchical, but the dynamic of authority and obedience, dominance and subordination, was not their sole nor even their most salient characteristic. Because, it can be argued, the relationship between hierarchy and faithful within Roman Catholic polity is by definition never not hierarchical, what is important is how hierarchy manifests itself and what results from its form and stance in a given situation. In practice, censorship regulation in the United States was highly decentralized, allowing for a flourishing rhetoric of individual responsibility and communal solidarity that helped to bridge the gap between Counter-Reformation church discipline and modern American understandings of the mature ethical self.

Decentralized hierarchy seems oxymoronic, but it is a distinctive feature of Roman Catholic polity. Within the defined limits of canon law, a bishop’s authority in his diocese is paramount. He is accountable not through a chain of command of archbishops and cardinals and nuncios and curial secretaries, but directly and only to the pope. As a result, the structures for Church censorship in the United States seem to have varied considerably over time and place. For example, the requirement, specified in Pascendi dominici gregis and incorporated into the 1917 Code of Canon Law, that every diocese appoint an official censor seems to have been variably implemented. Whereas “one authority has suggested that there should be at least six censors in every diocese, so that no author would be able to determine the identity of the one chosen to examine and approve his manuscript,”19 evidence from the Catholic Directory suggests that outside the very largest dioceses there were seldom more than two censors officially appointed. A number of dioceses list no censors for at least some of the years investigated.

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