Title Page of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 1564
In the face of a proliferation of Protestant books and other writings across the European continent, the papacy created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, “the Index of Banned Books.” By outlawing the ownership and reading of works that expressed opinions counter to the teachings of the Catholic Church, sixteenth century popes like Paul IV and Pius IV, who authorized this particular version, hoped to stem the spread of Protestantism (Wiesner-Hanks, 187). Although the Index began in the sixteenth century as an anti-Protestant measure, the burgeoning “Enlightenment” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced another glut of works running afoul of Catholicism’s intellectual and spiritual guideposts. So during the Enlightenment the Index was printed again and again, each time updated with new works, like Voltaire’s Candide, which features promiscuous friars and perhaps most notably an old woman who is the illegitimate daughter of Pope Urban X (Voltaire, Ch. 11). There has never been an Urban X, and creating a fake pope served as an attempt to escape serious punishment for impugning the dignity of the papacy. Candide nevertheless made it onto the Index. The Index highlights the hostile response of papacy and Catholicism more generally to the intellectual developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when individualism, personal liberties, and a belief in the primacy of scientific reasoning were on the rise thanks to John Locke, Denis Diderot, and other giants of the Enlightenment. If the Council of Trent illustrates the Church’s openness to moderate change, the Index demonstrates the papacy’s reactionary instincts.
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