[Peace-discuss] Book-banning in Tennessee

[Szoke, Ron]

Anent the recent furor over book-banning in the schools of McMinn County TN  

A note on a centuries-old institutional practice of forbidding or suppressing books claimed to contain doctrinal or moral errors : the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.  It is held that they contain material that may mislead or confuse simple congregants.   

See Redmond A. Burke, C.S.V., Ph.D. (Director of Libraries, De Paul University; , _What Is the Index?_ (Milwaukee:  Bruce Publishing Co., 1952, 129 pages).  

On back of title page:  Nihil obstat, Imprimi potest, Nihil obstat [again], Imprimatur Samuel Cardinal Stritch, March 17, 1952.  [ Certifies that the book is considered free of doctrinal or moral error by the prelacy & thus eligible to be published. ]  
		
>  Appendix B: “Various Forbidden Authors and Titles” (pp. 87-105).  

A few of the better-known authors of the publications mentioned:  
A. France, T. Hobbes, D. Hume, B. Croce, H. Grotius, M. Maeterlinck, P. Proudhon, J.-P. Sartre, F.M. Voltaire, E. Zola, J. Addison, H. Heine, B. de Mandeville, M. Montaigne, J.-J. Rousseau, G. Flaubert, V. Hugo, Stendhal, etc.  

Notes 
1.  It is mentioned that Catholics can apply to the hierarchy for permission to read specified books if they have an acceptable reason for doing so.   

2.  McMinn County, in Appalachian eastern Tennessee, is in the original snake-handling area of fundamentalist & evangelical Protestantism.