![]() ![]() The Vatican had sought for centuries to wield influence over various kinds of writing in 1571, at the height of the Counter-Reformation, it established the Congregation of the Index, a department responsible for censoring and even banning books (when it had some power over the author or the publication process), or at the very least for telling Catholics which books they simply shouldn't read. They provide a rare glimpse into the exercise of what was once a great power, and one of particular interest in the history of twentieth-century literature-the power of the Church to ban the books it deemed dangerous or offensive. ![]() The records of the deliberations at the Vatican over his novel The Power and the Glory, first published in 1940, have recently come to light. Greene alluded to this episode in later writings. What readers of the newspaper could not have known was that Greene himself had just been sternly reproached by Church authorities. So far as imaginative literature is concerned (according to rumor both Tolstoy and Lewis Carroll have been condemned) most Catholic laymen follow their own consciences." Greene was ostensibly responding to a letter in The Times that had drawn a comparison between the Roman Index and prosecutions for obscenity in British courts. ![]() ![]() "In common with many Catholics," Graham Greene wrote in a letter to The Times of London in June of 1954, "I have little regard for the Index in the rare cases in which it deals with imaginative writing. ![]()
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