All good books are Catholic books : print culture, censorship, and modernity in twentieth-century America / Una M. Cadegan.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1987.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction : the cultural work of Catholic literature -- U.S. Catholic literary aesthetics -- Modernisms literary and theological -- Declining oppositions -- The history and function of Catholic censorship, as told to the twentieth century -- Censorship in the land of "thinking on one's own" -- Art and freedom in the era of "the church of your choice" -- Reclaiming the modernists, reclaiming the modern -- Peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness -- Epilogue : the abrogation of the index.

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. This book 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 the author 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 the author's argument, particularly as their careers and the reception of their work demonstrate shifts in the relationship between Catholicism and literary culture. This book trains its 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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