Until the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the
stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward the social, cultural,
economic, and political developments of the twentieth century was
largely antagonistic. Naturally opposed to secularization,
skeptical of capitalist markets indifferent to questions of
justice, confused and appalled by new forms of high and low
culture, and resistant to the social and economic freedom of women
in all of these ways the Catholic Church set itself up as a
thoroughly anti-modern institution. Yet, in and through the period
from World War I to Vatican II, the Church did engage with, react
to, and even accommodate various aspects of modernity. In All Good
Books Are Catholic Books, Una M. Cadegan shows how the Church s
official position on literary culture developed over this crucial
period.
The Catholic Church in the United States maintained an Index of
Prohibited Books and the National Legion of Decency (founded in
1933) lobbied Hollywood to edit or ban movies, pulp magazines, and
comic books that were morally suspect. These regulations posed an
obstacle for the self-understanding of Catholic American readers,
writers, and scholars. But as Cadegan finds, Catholics developed a
rationale by which they could both respect the laws of the Church
as it sought to protect the integrity of doctrine and also engage
the culture of artistic and commercial freedom in which they
operated as Americans. Catholic literary figures including Flannery
O Connor and Thomas Merton are important to Cadegan s argument,
particularly as their careers and the reception of their work
demonstrate shifts in the relationship between Catholicism and
literary culture. Cadegan trains her attention on American critics,
editors, and university professors and administrators who mediated
the relationship among the Church, parishioners, and the culture at
large."
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