Index Librorum Prohibitorum
Today, we can wander down to the newsagents on our way to work, or take a leisurely walk on our days off to pick up a paper or even buy a book. Which we now take for granted. My post is for the freedom of speech, and or the freedom of the written word we have in our country, Cymru/Wales. But does not cover Ukraine on its 2016 ban on Russian books, nor China nor certain states in the US of A, such as Florida. Which has banned book in schools. In doing so, its GOP Governor has turned the clock back more than five centuries, to mimicking the 16th-century Papacy. Of course there have been others that banned books, the Nazis during WWII, Ireland banned books from 1929-67, etc. USA is big on censorship, of Literature suppressed on religious grounds. Books such as the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, or on witchcraft, books such as Harry Potter, were suppressed by the American religious fraternity, between 2002-2004, according to the American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10. Retrieved 28/06/2020.
Yet, if it was left to the Papacy (including the likes of the forementioned religious anti-knowledge Institutions above) and the Office of the Curia (not Catholic-bashing, this is factual) who supposedly supervised the morality and education of Western Europe at the time. We would have no literature outside any religious text. No fictional, non-fictional or reference books, no newspapers, magazines or any pamphlet of any kind, unless it was approved by the powers that be within the hierarchy of the church. If the church had succeeded, it would have been a return to the Stone-Age for humanity.
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Until the printing press, the church had carte blanche on what was written. From about 1525 in Catholic Netherlands, the church started to censor books and other material coming off printing presses in all Catholic countries of Europe, which was most nations at the time. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) was a list of the publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Sacred Congregation of the Index (a former Dicastery of the Roman Curia), and Catholics were forbidden to read them without permission. In 1559, Pope Paul IV (1555-59) promulgated the Index of prohibited books. Probably it is one of the times we could thank Protestant nations that took no notice of the prohibition of books. The age of knowledge was upon us, and from the lowly peasant to the wealthy nobility, reading was here for all but barred to those in Catholic enclaves and nations. Even reading the Bible in your mother tongue was outlawed. Not forgetting that the Vatican did not cease with the forbidden index until 1966, however, many historians state that the index is alive and well even to this day under Canon Law! http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ENG0017/_P2P.HTM Retrieved 28/06/2020.
Some noteworthy authors whose works were on the Index include Daniel Defoe, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baruch Spinoza, Desiderius Erasmus, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Thomas Browne, John Milton. John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius. Are just a few of the authors that the Papacy saw as enemies of the church.
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Just imagine if a German Monk had not nailed his 95 Theses to a church door or an Italian Humanist had not condemned the Donation of Constantine as a fake; or a Breton Abbot had not recognized the Book of Popes as a forgery? Today, if we could read (a big if), everything readable from Bible to documentation would be in one universal language that of Latin and not your mother tongue! God forbid if you spoke out about the church, if you were not hung at your local village, town or city gallows, you would end your days chained to the oars of a galley! I kid you not!
We have to thank Emmanuel II of Italy (1861-78) who freed more than 3 million from serfdom whose lives, and their forebears, had not changed in over 1,100 years. Except for this clerical dominance, only 15% lived in towns of a thousand or more. Rome had only 150,000 inhabitants, and Bologna (the second largest) less than half that many. https://www.ohio.edu/chastain/ip/papalsta.htm#:~:text=Except%20for%20this%20clerical%20dominance,less%20than%20half%20that%20many. Retrieved 28/06/2020.
What do you say on the censorship of books in schools, book stores, etc., or anything on the discussion?
This is an up-dated of paper from 2020, which was inspired by the likes of the Gov. of Florida, Ron DeSantis, and the American Church Institutions that are trying to reduce man’s knowledge to that of the Stone-Age! The Catcher in the Rye is a classic coming-of-age novel by J.D. Salinger, published in 1951, it is down as number 19, with Harry Potter series at number 1, on the American intellectual freedom of books suppressed.
Jero Jones
Article URL : https://breakingnewsandreligion.online/discuss/