Editing Index Librorum Prohibitorum (section)

===Holy Office (1917–1966)===
{{see also|Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith}}

While individual books continued to be forbidden, the last edition of the Index to be published appeared in 1948. This 20th edition<ref name=EB>{{cite web|url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Index-Librorum-Prohibitorum|title=Index Librorum Prohibitorum &#124; Roman Catholicism|website=Encyclopedia Britannica}}</ref> contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: [[heresy]], moral deficiency, [[Human sexuality|sexual]] explicitness, and so on. That some [[atheist]]s, such as [[Schopenhauer]] and [[Nietzsche]], were not included was due to the general ([[Council of Trent|Tridentine]]) rule that [[heretical]] works (i.e., works that contradict Catholic dogma) are ''[[ipso facto]]'' forbidden. Some important works are absent simply because nobody bothered to denounce them.<ref>"The works appearing on the Index are only those that ecclesiastical authority was asked to act upon" ([https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/285220/Index-Librorum-Prohibitorum Encyclopædia Britannica: Index Librorum Prohibitorum).]</ref> Many actions of the congregations were of a definite [[political]] content.<ref>"The entanglement of Church and state power in many cases led to overtly political titles being placed on the Index, titles which had little to do with immorality or attacks on the Catholic faith. For example, a history of Bohemia, the Rervm Bohemica Antiqvi Scriptores Aliqvot{{nbsp}}[...] by Marqvardi Freheri (published in 1602), was placed on the Index not for attacking the Church, but rather because it advocated the independence of Bohemia from the (Catholic) Austro-Hungarian Empire. Likewise, The Prince by Machiavelli was placed in the Index in 1559 after it was blamed for widespread political corruption in France (Curry, 1999, p. 5)" ([http://www.unc.edu/~dusto/dusto_prague_paper.pdf David Dusto, ''Index Librorum Prohibitorum: The History, Philosophy, and Impact of the Index of Prohibited Books'').] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121020043824/http://www.unc.edu/~dusto/dusto_prague_paper.pdf |date=20 October 2012}}</ref>

Among the denounced works of the period was the Nazi philosopher [[Alfred Rosenberg]]'s ''[[Myth of the Twentieth Century]]'' for scorning and rejecting "all dogmas of the Catholic Church, and the fundamentals of the Christian religion".<ref name="Richard Bonney pp. 122">Richard Bonney; ''Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: the Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936–1939''; International Academic Publishers; Bern; 2009 {{ISBN|978-3-03911-904-2}}; p. 122</ref> Markedly absent from the Index was Adolf Hitler's book {{lang|de|[[Mein Kampf]]}}. After gaining access to the [[Vatican Secret Archives|Vatican Apostolic Archive]] church historian [[Hubert Wolf]] discovered that {{lang|de|Mein Kampf}} had been studied for three years but the Holy Office decided that it should not go on the Index because the author was a head of state.<ref name="AmericMag">Tom Heneghan "Secrets Behind The Forbidden Books" [[America Magazine]] Feb 7, 2005 [https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/517/article/secrets-behind-forbidden-books]</ref> The Holy Office justified that decision by referring to chapter 13 of [[Paul the Apostle]]'s [[Epistle to the Romans]] regarding state authority coming from God.<ref name= AmericMag /> However, somewhat later, the Vatican criticized {{lang|de|Mein Kampf}} in the encyclical {{lang|la|[[Mit Brennender Sorge]]}} (March 1937) about the challenges of the church in Nazi Germany.<ref name= AmericMag />