Here it comes

I can already hear the dirty-eared subliterates crowing about this. The Vatican has opened up the archives of the Index of Forbidden Books, and there are a few surprises. Watch the Fundamentalist end of the blogosphere for triumphant reportage that Uncle Tom's Cabin was almost included (See, Romanists are pro-slavery!) and Mein Kampf wasn't (The pope really was in league with Hitler!).

Merely the existence of the Index is upsetting to American Protestants, who nevertheless maintain their own informal Index. (Raise your hand if you've ever actually read, let alone viewed, The Last Temptation of Christ. How about Brokeback Mountain?). But when the Catholic Church reviews the morality of books or other media on an organized basis, it's censorship. In fact, that's the origin of the word "censor." So how long do you think it'll take before anti-Catholic inbreds (the kind who obsessively replace "Catholic" with "Romanist") start parading Papist perfidy over this? I'm watching the search engines to see who's first.

What those guys almost certainly won't take into account is that the censors were actual people, given the job of determining which books were contrary to Christian faith and morals. They weren't empowered to speak ex cathedra; they were merely asked for an educated opinion, which they gave. If they made some choices that today we think were wrong, so what? They didn't have the benefit of hindsight, and the Church is not so monolithic that even Catholics will all agree with them. And I'm prepared to bet that the vast majority of the books on the Index would be offensive to Protestants today as well, and that 99 percent of Protestants have never read a book on the list. (Unless it was a specifically Protestant theological work, of course. In which case you can hardly expect to find a nihil obstat on it anyway.)

H/T to Fr. Tucker. If there's an Index of Required Blogs, Fr. Tucker belongs on it.