The mother of all banned book lists

WRITING DEVELOPED about 3500 B.C. and soon after people started banning it. 

Index during the reign of
Pope Benedict XIV in 1758.

We're still banning it, trying to hide it, delete it, flame the writers and cancel them from the public square. The thing that's different now is you don't need a chisel as you did a few millennia ago. In the 21st Century, it only takes the swipe of a screen to eradicate a controversial, dangerous, or offensive idea.

Banning books can be controversial, dangerous or offensive to a lot of people (and we're among them). But reasonable arguments can be  made for suppressing some literature. Throughout history writing has been banned in the name of protecting unformed minds from confusing information, like religious heresy or pornography or historic racism.

Let's take a moment to examine banning and note that it doesn't mean burning. The American Library Assn. maintains a list of titles that are most often under attack at America's schools and libraries. According to the ALA website,

The list includes books challenged for a variety of reasons: LGBTQIA+ content, sexual references, religious viewpoints, content that addresses racism and police brutality, and profanity. 

It's sometimes the case that opposing groups will have opposite grievance against the same book. In other words, the reasons for outrage are as varied as we are as Americans. While some people would happily go for book burning, reasonable people, fortunately, still champion free expression. ALA annually celebrates the First Amendment and the right to read with Banned Books Week in September. (Take a look at Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books: 2010-2019 to see what was highlighted last year.) Almost all are still available in libraries and online. 

Mount students of an earlier era (up to 1966, to be exact) were aware of something known simply as the Index, a list of books proscribed by the Catholic Church for being heretical, immoral, published without a bishop's imprimatur, or insulting to the faith. The Index was shorthand for Index Librorum Prohibitorum, List of Prohibited Books, and it existed for centuries – the mother of all lists of banned books. 

The Index, promulgated after the Council of Trent (1545-1563), was intended to steer faithful Catholics away from the explosion of "heretical" Protestant publishing made possible by the invention of the printing press in 1450. The motivation wasn't primarily to punish the publishers but to protect those Catholics who weren't intellectually prepared to interpret what they were reading (if they could read). The rationale was utterly paternalistic and comparable to civil authorities protecting the populace, as Jesuit theologian Joseph Hilgers, S.J., wrote in 1908 on book censorship in the Catholic Church:

Natural law empowers the father to keep away from his child bad and corrupt companions; the highest public authorities are bound to protect by stern measures, if necessary, their communities from epidemics and infectious maladies; state and police rightly allow the selling of poison and the like only under strict supervision.  

The content of the Index evolved over the centuries; Galileo, Copernicus and Victor Hugo were on it but eventually fell off. René Descartes, Blaise Pascal and most of the philosophers of the Enlightenment landed on it early and stayed, as did later writers Jean-Paul Sartre André Gide. The final entry was feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir in 1958. 

And although it didn't call for burning books, some very old editions of the Index were illustrated with engravings of a that very thing.

An old edition depicts the burning
of sorcery books in Acts 19:19.

Many if not most of the important books on the Index – including those pesky Enlightenment philosophers – were on the shelves of the Mount libraries or could be obtained by inter-library loan. The only clue a student would have had that the book was problematic was a tiny rubber-stamped "Index" on the book's entry in the card catalog. Church rules required students to have the written permission of a faculty member to check out the book, but in practice Mount faculty trusted their students to have the critical reasoning to understand a work in the context of accepted Catholic pedagogy. The intent was not to ban a book, but to make sure the reader was intellectually equipped to get the most from it.

The Index came to a sudden end on June 14, 1966. Pope Paul VI issued a motu proprio, a unilateral decree by the Roman Pontiff that can't be overturned by any governing body. It was a few months after the close of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which seemed to change nearly everything about the Catholic Church, from fish on Fridays to liturgies in English. The Index seemed archaic. While still directing bishops to be mindful of what their flocks were reading and watching, the Pope wrote, "The Church trusts in the mature conscience of the faithful." (For the final iteration of the Index, see the list of authors and works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.)  

Like the ideas they represent, troublesome books will always be with us, and we should be glad. They are essential to our humanity. What does change over the decades, or millennia, is what triggers us. For example, the images of people and animals in 1st Century mosaics were chiseled away by Muslim iconoclasts for whom any depiction of nature was a heresy. Two centuries before them Christian iconoclasts destroyed murals and statues of saints and biblical characters for the same reason. 

Today, images and texts in decades-old children's books and films are suddenly being challenged by newer iconoclasts and may be suppressed by some libraries fearful of offending patrons. (This is not without controversy.) Meanwhile, books on controversial topics are disappearing from the web pages of Amazon and its subsidiary Audible. Our question at MSMU is, are 21st Century students equipped to handle problematic books? 

We're on the side of Pope Paul, our revered CSJ faculty of yesteryear, our faculty of today, and our unstoppable students. For some, it will always be a dangerous idea, that notion "mature conscience." But like uncomfortable ideas, it's essential to our humanity.

Mystery man in white

The mysterious pope statue on the 5th Floor of the
Humanities Building at Chalon.

WE CONSIDER IT PART OF OUR solemn duty as archivist to seek out and reveal historic mysteries about our almost 90-year-old Mount. (Yes, we do have the best job on either campus.)

There are plenty of mysteries to go around, so for today's Throwback Thursday, we'll uncover a mysterious person who factors strongly in Mount history and the history of our founding Sisters.

We don't get up to the 5th Floor of the Humanities Building very often, where Music, Religious Studies and History have classrooms and offices.  On the couple of occasions we've been there, though, we've wondered about that life-size marble bust at the north end of the hall. Given the tassels and finery wrought in cold, white marble he's obviously a pope -- but which one, of the 260-plus men who have sat in the Chair of St. Peter?

The little plaque on the pedestal is all but unreadable, but with a little squinting and some digital photography, we are able to reveal our mystery man: Pope Pius IX,  No. 255 on the papal roster.

How did we end up with a bust of Pius IX? Was he a random choice?

Bl. Pius IX holy card.

Pius IX enjoyed one of the longest papacies in history, reigning from 1846 to 1878. On his watch, the Papal States ceased to exist as Italy became a sovereign country,  and it was Pius IX who opened the First Vatican Council, setting the stage for broad reforms almost a hundred years later at Vatican II.

But his true significance to the Mount was his relationship to the Sisters of St. Joseph. In May, 1877, Pope Pius IX gave final approval to the constitution of the fast-growing Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, establishing our founding order as a congregation of "pontifical right" and unifying various communities across the United States under a motherhouse in Carondelet, Missouri, now St. Louis. The rest is history, and the L.A. Province of the CSJs went on to found the Mount in 1925.

Okay, so we've established the connection. How did the Mount end up with a carved chunk of fine Italian marble?  Enter a famous Hollywood composer.

Film star Irene Dunne, left, with benefactor Jimmy
McHugh, Sister Rebecca Doan, CSJ, president,
and  Mrs. Rhiad Gholi of the gala committee.

Jimmy McHugh wrote more than 500 songs for some of the big vocal stars of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, including Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald. Along with film star Irene Dunne, McHugh was also honorary chairman of a big gala held by the Mount in 1964 to raise money for the new Humanities Building and other rebuilding projects in the wake of the 1961 Bel Air Fire.

The (nearly unreadable) plaque on the statue reads "Gift of Jimmy McHugh." According to the February 1, 1962, edition of the View, McHugh made the gift on January 17 of that year in ceremonies held in the library at Chalon.  When the Humanities Building was completed in 1965, the statue was moved to its current privileged position on a specially built plinth integrated into the stone composite flooring of the 5th Floor.

The statue is the work of a neoclassical Italian sculptor, Pietro Tenerani, 1789-1869, who typically carved in the pure white marble of his native Carrara. Religious subjects and famous people of the day make up the body of his works, which are held by museums all over the world. The Mount's statue, executed in 1848 near the beginning of Pius IX's pontificate, is one of several Tenerani did of this influential pope. The statue was blessed by Pius IX himself.

How many Mount students have
planted a kiss on these marble
lips in the last 50 years?

Pius XI's cause for sainthood opened in 1907, and he was beatified in 2000 by Pope John Paul II. But then again, is anything sacred where college students are concerned? If you look closely at the statue's lips, they're slightly stained a light brown, as is the nose.

We can imagine two or three generations of Mount students kissing Bl. Pius IX on the lips or tweaking his nose, perhaps for good luck before a recital or exam. That strikes us as an excellent tradition and one worthy of a historic women's university.

This coming February 7 will be Blessed Pius IX's feast day and the 137th anniversary of his death in 1878. So let's give him a kiss, or a pat on the head, or just say "thanks" for watching over for the Mount for the last 50 years.

This just in

Our new artifact.

CLEARING OUT SOME CLOSETS in the Doheny Mansion basement, we came across a sort of papal reliquary, complete with a skullcap once worn by Pope Pius XI.

While he occupied the Chair of St. Peter (1922-1939), Pius XI would have been well aware of an oilman and his wife in Los Angeles, Edward L. and Estelle Doheny. Throughout their lives, the Dohenys were important donors to the Catholic Church both in Los Angeles and in Rome.

Pius XI in white zuchetto.

There's no provenance with the cap, which is part of a framed, handwritten apostolic blessing for the Dohenys, but it's safe to assume it was presented to them in gratitude for their generosity.

The cap is known as a zuchetto, meaning "little pumpkin" in Italian, the top half of which it slightly resembles. The papal version is made of white moiré, or watered silk, and lined with velvety white kid leather. Unlike a Jewish yarmulke, zuchettos have no religious significance and probably originated to keep clerics' heads warm in drafty churches and palaces.

There's more to archives than paper. Our zuchetto will enjoy pride of place alongside our 1938 MSMC gown and mortarboard, the 1867 U.S. flag, a 1950 MSMC nurse's uniform, Estelle Doheny's delicately embroidered bed coverlets, a lace tablecloth from Le Puy, Rosie's blob of cement, Sister Louise Bernstein's 1951 ASB gavel, an MSMC beer mug...

A famous face

International Meeting on Catholic Higher Education, April 1989 (?). 
L'Osservatore Romano photo.

PREPARING A FEW FILES FOR DIGITIZATION, we came across this otherwise dull photograph showing a lot of very bored-looking cardinals, priests and others listening to something or someone.

The future Pope B16.

We knew we'd find Sister Magdalen Coughlin, CSJ, president of the Mount 1976-89, because this print was in a box of her papers. But before I could pick her out in the fourth row (tweed jacket and big glasses), there was this other familiar face in the the crowd -- front row, third from left.

His name nowadays is His Holiness Benedict XVI, pontifex maximus -- Pope Benedict, or B16 to the rest of us. In this photo from the late 1980s he was Cardinal Josef Ratzinger. He seems to be paying pretty close attention.

This box contains Sister's notes and documents from her participation (and leadership) in high-level meetings in Rome during the 1980s about the nature of Catholic higher education. A new Digital Humanities class in the M.A. program next year will undertake to study and transcribe some of the documents along with Sister's handwritten notes from various meetings.

It's an exciting project with some "big" church names. The outcome -- two years after Sister's untimely death at age 64 in 1994 -- was Ex Corde Ecclesiae, a so-called apostolic constitution promulgated by Benedict's immediate predecessor, John Paul II, to "define and refine" Catholicism in higher education. Ex Corde is a bit of important history, and we know that the Mount's own president had a significant role. We'll find out more in the semesters ahead.