CHAPTER 1
Thou Shalt Not Read
When movie director Ron Howard requested permission in 2008 to shoot scenes for Angels & Demons, the latest movie thriller by Dan Brown, that takes place in the Vatican and Rome ’s churches, Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, head of the Vatican ’s Prefecture for Economic Affairs, banned use of any Church property in Rome. He said that the author of The Da Vinci Code had “turned the gospels upside down to poison the faith.”
Calling the best-selling novel’s premise that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had a child “an offense against God,” Da Paolis asserted, “It would be unacceptable to transform churches into film sets so that his blasphemous novels can be made into films in the name of business.” He added that Brown’s work “wounds common religious feelings.”
“Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the Diocese of Rome, said, ‘Normally we read the script but this time it was not necessary. The name Dan Brown was enough.’”
When the movie version of The Da Vinci Code was released, a top Vatican official urged all Roman Catholics to boycott it. Calling the book “stridently anti-Christian,” Archbishop Angelo Amato, a close aide to Pope Benedict XVI, said it was “‘full of calumnies, offenses and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the church… If such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust, they would have justly provoked a world uprising… Instead, if they were directed against the Catholic Church and Christians, they remained unpunished.”
As the second-ranking official in the Vatican ’s doctrinal office, Amato urged a boycott similar to the one in 1988 against The Last Temptation of Christ, directed by Martin Scorsese. When The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, Catholic leaders and some other Christians were outspoken against it. In the weeks before the film was released, Opus Dei, the lay Catholic group whose members were portrayed as villains in the story, sponsored forums and other public events to refute the book’s premise and dispute its suggestions that the group is shadowy and secretive.
Banning Howard from filming Angels & Demons in any of Rome’s churches and at the Vatican and the earlier protests against Brown’s book and its film version were echoes of a time when the Vatican exercised unquestionable power to control dissemination of knowledge in books that was made possible by means of printing presses using moveable type. Invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1454, the press revolutionized the world of religion by making the Bible widely available, and introducing printed books to the world.
This proliferation of published material resulted in an effort by the Vatican to dictate what Catholics could read. It did so by establishing the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (The Index of Prohibited Books). “Active from 1559 until 1966, the [Index] listed books that Catholics should neither own nor read under pain of excommunication.
“During the Index’s long life,” noted an article in America, the National Catholic Weekly, “the public was told about the latest bans, but not the reasons for them. Behind closed doors, though, the Vatican officials held long and sometimes heated debates about the books of the day.” After more than a decade of studying the Index, a diocesan priest and history professor at Münster University in Germany, the Reverend Hubert Wolf stated, “Nowhere else in the world did an institution try to control the medium of modern times, the book, for over 400 years.”
The archives covering Church debates about thousands of books offer a unique insight into centuries of Vatican thinking on theology, philosophy, history, politics, science, and world literature. Stored in a basement of what was once known as the Holy Office, now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the files were closed to outside researchers for centuries. Building the archives started in earnest with the Inquisition in 1542 to combat the Protestant Reformation that began with Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority. After he nailed his “95 theses” to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1515, they were printed in Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Basel and distributed widely. The Holy Office was soon overwhelmed by the combination of the printing press and prolific Protestant authors who employed it to foster a publishing explosion as influential in its time as the Internet is today. The Vatican established a separate office, the Congregation of the Index, to deal just with books in 1571.
“The first Index,…published in 1559, banned all books by Luther, John Calvin and other Protestant reformers. Since translating the Holy Bible into vernacular language was a Protestant specialty, all Bibles but the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate were banned. The Talmud and the Koran were also taboo.” The Index also listed “books that should be purged of passages that were in conflict with Church teaching. Classical writers-including Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Homer, Euclid, Hippocrates, Thucydides and others-were put on the expurgatio list because they reflected pagan beliefs. Books translated by Protestants had to be filtered for offending passages. In some cases, a book only had to be printed in a ‘Protestant’ city to earn a place on the list of objectionable works…”
The Index Congregation met three or four times a year in Rome. Two “consultors” were named for each book being surveyed. Their findings were discussed at a meeting of cardinals in the congregation. The congregation’s decision was then brought to the pope for approval. This produced a vast accumulation of files, written in Latin or Italian and divided into the Diarii, which recorded the congregation’s sessions, and the Protocolli, with all kinds of other papers. The Inquisition congregation met weekly but handled only 2 or 3 percent of the censorship cases, usually theology books.
“Over the centuries, the Index managed to condemn a large number of writings that eventually became classics of European culture. Banned philosophy books included works by Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Pascal, Kant and Mill. Among the novelists listed were Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Zola, D’Annunzio and Moravia. Books by the novelists Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift were blacklisted. The censors’ zeal varied over the years and lost steam as the 20th century wore on. One of their last targets was [Jean Paul] Sartre, whose complete works were banned as early as 1948.”
Suppression of “forbidden books” began with a conference on the contents of the Holy Bible for Christians in A.D. 393 at which the church elders compiled the Old Testament and the “approved” gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John; the book of Revelations; letters of Peter and Paul; and the Acts of the Apostles. With all other texts banned, the Church began sixteen centuries of forbidding possession and reading of disapproved books and accumulation of a Vatican library of literature that was forbidden to Catholics. “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.”
The Index “listed books which Catholics were not to read. They included non-Catholic editions of the Bible, books attacking Catholic dogma, those defending ‘heresy or schism,’ and those which ‘discuss, describe or teach impure or obscene matters,’ such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” However, “any Catholic with a ‘good reason’ for reading a banned book could get permission from his bishop. Many U.S. bishops give temporary blanket permissions to students to read books necessary for their studies.” Although the Vatican no longer issues an Index, the Church continues to condemn books, along with films, that are either contrary to Christian doctrine or offensive to the Church and morally wrong.