Chapter VIII (3)

The Jesuit historian, while admitting that the condemnation of the Catholic Church has fallen upon certain works of unquestioned scholarly value, insists that the Protestant censorship of authors and books of similar standing has been, to say the least, no less severe. He maintains, further, that the Catholic policy and methods have been more consistent, more discriminating, more intelligent, and more moral in purpose and in effect than those of the Protestants. He emphasises the importance of distinguishing between the circles of readers for which different books are fitted, either to do service or to work injury. He writes: “The works of Grotius, Gibbon, and Guicciardini have a deserved repute with the scholars. We may admit, that scholars can derive from such works valuable instruction, but this does not make them suitable for the reading of the untrained or the half trained. The Church undertakes always to maintain this distinction.”

The Father sums up his arraignment of the censorship of the State by a bitter reference to the methods pursued by the Protestant Government of Prussia with its Catholic subjects in Poland. What answer can an instructor make in a school in Posen when a child asks why he is forbidden to read the Polish Catechism? The instructor can only say that the modern State is all powerful, and that in the execution of its self-imposed task of crushing out nationality, it is willing to take the responsibility not only for the interpretation of science, but for the shaping of belief.[87]

“Whence,” says Hilgers, “do the civil authorities secure the right to compel Catholic children to accept instruction from heretical books; and to prohibit the use in Catholic families, outside even of the walls of the official institutions, the use of Catholic books and documents? Here is a censorship tyranny with which in the history of Rome there is nothing to be compared.”