The general rule is: “All men are forbidden to read books that are contrary to faith in God, good moral conduct, and Christian virtue”—a rule so sweeping that it can be interpreted as banning a large proportion of all modem works on science, medicine, and morals.
In practice this rule means that no Catholic is allowed to read knowingly and without special permission any book attacking any fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church. “The Church is not afraid of truth,” says Father John C. Heenan in his Priest and Penitent, “but She is very much afraid that a clever presentation of falsehood will deceive even the elect.” The Church teaches that literature is “immoral” if it is opposed to Catholic standards, and that “no one has a ‘right’ to publish such literature any more than one has a right to poison wells or sell tainted food. When a book has been denounced by official authorities it is a grave sin for a Catholic knowingly to buy, sell, borrow, own, read, or lend it to any other person. The penalties apply to booksellers, publishers, readers, and reviewers unless they secure special permission to handle contraband goods.
The justification for censorship: just as we are not free to take as food for our bodies matter that will disease, deprave, and destroy them, so too for our minds—far more precious—we may not take ideas that similarly vitiate the very functions for which the mind was made.
Catholic cardinals are not isolated and they are rarely spontaneous. The censorship system of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is neither a spasmodic nor an intermittent phenomenon. It is a highly organized system of cultural and moral controls that applies not only to books, plays, magazines, and motion pictures, but to persons and places.
Catholics believe that the Church has the right to restrict the activities of those who would lead their people away from their allegiance to the Catholic Church . . . they possess the right to prevent propaganda against the Church. This is merely a logical conclusion from the basic Catholic tenet that the Son of God established one religion and commanded all men to accept it under pain of eternal damnation.
Not only are individual writings blocked through censorship but this censorship biases national perceptions of the past, governmental policy, and the national images of the Church in order to present the Church in the best possible light.
How is it possible to think that the Vatican can be capable of any wrongdoing or in any way harm America? All we see is goodness! There is virtually no negative press whatsoever. The dangers that lie in the continuation of this arrangement are stunning. The very security of the United States is threatened by this arrangement whereby the Church ultimately hopes to gain control of our democracy through sheer numbers.
It is unquestionable that the position of the Catholic hierarchy throughout the history of the Church has always had as its goal achievement of power through numbers. This position has been common to most institutions in history, especially those that have survived for any length of time. As has been pointed out, much of the system of “morals” maintained by the Church is devoted to this end.
However, in the United States, the hierarchy has almost completely lost its control over communicants with regard to matters of reproduction. The Vatican has even been divisive within the American Catholic Church—American Catholics are ignoring the wishes of the hierarchy and have adopted desired family sizes identical to non-Catholic Americans. They are using the same contraceptive methods with the same frequency and are resorting to abortion at the same rate. The result is that American Catholics are not out-breeding American non-Catholics.
In no other area of human activity is the Church’s use of the “divide and conquer” technique more apparent than in the population growth control field.
There is nothing distinctive about the “American” Catholic Church. It is, first and foremost and always, Catholic. American democracy has not made it democratic. It does not stand for the causes of freedom of the press, speech, or worship (for Protestants) any more than do the Catholic Churches in Latin countries. Regarding freedom of speech, from The New Scholasticism, published by Catholic University of America, “Free speech is not free to injure faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, temperance, truth, or any other virtue protecting the welfare of the individual or society.” Of course, only the Church can judge what “injures” and what “protects” the welfare of the individual or society.
Regarding the principle of separation of church and state, Pius IX, in his Syllabus, condemned the principle of separation of church and state as one of the “principal errors of our time.” In no nation does the Church honor this principle; the hierarchy feels that no nation has the right to impose this principle since it has a “divine right” to direct nations in matters of faith and morals (and “morals” in some way touches on all human activities).