How Cardinal Newman escaped the Index
SIR – Of course David Mills (“We shouldn’t be ashamed of the Index”, June 17) is right. Today’s media, the internet apart, exercise a censorship of political heresy as rigid as the Index ever did; the more rigid because the censorship is unspoken. It was not unreasonable in the 16th century to protect the unwary faithful from the sudden flood of heretical books. Although St Peter Canisius, appalled by the ferocious Paul IV Index (it even outlawed maths textbooks if the author was a heretic), laboured successfully to moderate Trent’s version. But it was Canisius’s own Catechism that actually halted the spread of heresy in Germany – the same power of literacy used positively, to educate, strengthen and equip the faithful in the faith.
