This is an interesting little bit of trivia from yesterday, June 14th:
On this day in 1966 – The Vatican announced the abolition of the index librorum prohibitum (index of prohibited books), which was originally instituted in 1557.
I had no idea the Vatican kept a list of banned books (although I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised). I am surprised, however, that I haven’t read many of them; you know how I feel about Banned Books, after all. Of course, there are a whole lot of titles from the 1600’s in Latin and Italian, so that may explain some of it. You can look at a partial list here. They are sorted by author, not by year, which can make it difficult to find anything recent. (The latin titles don’t help much.)
According to Wikipedia, books on the list are primarily science and philosophy. Many important authors, read today in universities around the world, are included, such as Voltaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rene Descartes, Galileo, John Milton and Francis Bacon. Imagine getting a Catholic school education that didn’t include some of these authors!
Now, there is one author not on the list above that I assumed would be a shoo-in for this list. And yet, his works were never included. Who am I referring to? Guess you’ll have to look in the Comments and find out!