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The article should make clear there was no index of prohibited books for the Catholic Church. There were indices. There was a list in Spain, one in the Netherlands, one in Rome, etc. The section "Censorship and enforcement" points out that the index dealt with here only applied to the Papal States. That should be in the led otherwise it creates the impression of a church wide list of prohibited books that applied to all Catholics everywhere and that it was enforced everywhere at all times.
This sentence also needs citation: "the blacklisting of some Protestant scholars even when writing on subjects a modern reader would consider outside the realm of dogma meant that, unless they obtained a dispensation, obedient Catholic thinkers were denied access to works including." Just because a text was on the index didn't mean it wasn't readily available.
Safinski (talk) 00:52, 1 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
And of course, an "obedient Catholic thinker" would be the first one to apply for and be granted an exemption, in order to know what the non-Catholic in question wrote, and treat it in a Catholic manner, including agreeing where he is right - as the scholastics did. The Index wasn't aimed at "obedient Catholic thinkers". It was aimed at the - frankly: still existing - large group of men with a, shall we say, less than complete education who harbour the prejudice that what they read is true, after all, it can be read in black and white, and perhaps especially if the Church doesn't like it, because it feels exciting to walk the forbidden path. Later perhaps to be added: those who wanted a peaceful, morally acceptable entertainment after a hard day's work (though we should not overestimate how much people read before the advent of electric light) and, as believing Church-going well-of-course-we-believe-what-the-Church-teaches-and-do-what-she-says Catholics but not professional theologians, did not want to unsettle their Catholic consciences in their few hours of leisure.--131.159.76.45 (talk) 15:04, 29 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That’s interestingly similar to the system formerly used in the Soviet Union. The censorship was fierce, but suitably tame and loyal party members were allowed access to forbidden Western publications and other banned works for purposes of study and indoctrination. Some state libraries had a special secret storage section called spetskhran for these publications. Probably all repressive regimes run similar two-tier systems, keeping the masses in ignorance but allowing loyalists privileges. METRANGOLO1 (talk) 10:00, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
