Please help! Unanswerable dilemma!

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Fair enough, but I guess to me it just seems very necessary to always consider the other side. Otherwise, you could worry about bias amidst what you’re hearing.

At least that’s what got me started on my journey to rcia.
 
Thank you for responding! I think I understand your point, my question was just about a more nuanced situation:

Say a Catholic living back when there was the ban, began to question their faith. But the faith doesn’t allow them to read books from other points of view. Even if the Catholic faith is 100% true and can be trusted, within that person’s conscience they are not sure. Shouldn’t they be able to read attacks against the faith, for the sake of making a fair comparison, in order to rest their conscience?

Perhaps I just need to let this go. In the original thread, I thought poster said that–under the ban–reading non-Catholic books was ex-communicable, and such punishment was reserved to the Pope to lift. This does sound very extreme though, so maybe it wasn’t the case…
 
That’s definitely a great comparison! And @TheLittleLady , you’re right that not reading heretical things is usually good. I totally understand the virtue in having a list of books to stay away from. However, I don’t understand the punishment related to reading them–especially when people need to examine both sides to ease their conscience from their point of view.

I feel such punishment would have put honest people in a dilemma; if a Catholic began doubting their faith, even if the Church was 100% true and can be trusted, within that person’s conscience they wouldn’t be sure if it was. Therefore I feel they would have had to read attacks against the faith, for the sake of a fair comparison, in order to grant peace to their conscience. Does that make sense?

I’m especially concerned because the original poster said reading such banned books was punished by excommunication, and it was reserved to the Pope to lift. This does seem awfully extreme though, so maybe it wasn’t the case…and some people have said it wasn’t, but I don’t know how to determine which is true.
 
Also, I’ll have to look over the article you shared as well. Thanks again!
 
Hope7 said:
However, I don’t understand the punishment related to reading them–especially when people need to examine both sides to ease their conscience from their point of view.
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No, you don’t need to read outside the faith to ease your conscience. That’s like saying you have to dally with other women to understand your wife or your marriage needs you to “explore” every criticism of your marriage that comes from heaven-knows-where in order to have a healthy marriage. No, no, no. Putting that kind of “requirement” on forming your conscience is a fool’s errand, not a need.

Having said that, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was not a good idea. I am not arguing in its favor, particularly in light of how books actually got banned. I’m only saying it really isn’t a necessity of conscience to read books outside the faith. No one has to be afraid that they’re going to held culpable for failing to form their consciences correctly when they aren’t allowed access to books deemed harmful to their spiritual progress. (That culpability goes on the head of the censor.)
 
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I get your point, I really do. My only hang-up is if I hadn’t felt I had to read books outside of my tradition to ease my conscience, I wouldn’t have been on this journey to Catholicism.

Perhaps I just need to let this issue rest a while. I still don’t understand what a person stuck in that dilemma–where they’d supposedly be under threat of excommunication if they read outside the faith, but also bound to a curiosity of what issues outsiders may have–could have done. To them, maybe there were damning skeletons in the closet that Catholics always covered up? My point is that to their perspective, they really didn’t know.

This also leads to other questions like, how were Catholics supposed to evangelize if they couldn’t gain understanding of the other side, or honestly read their works as to have a fair discussion? Or why, if someone really needed to read a book, a singular priest could prohibit them it seems?

Anyways, I don’t know if i’ll find a satisfactory answer. It really does bother me that there would have been such a dilemma though.
 
Nobody is in that position. You may as well worry about what life was like when women couldn’t survive without getting married or certain people were forbidden from getting an education or only landowners could vote, etc.

People who hold authority sometimes don’t use it in wise ways. There is nothing in all of Holy Scripture that says otherwise. Life is full of enough real problems that someone has now to spend a lot of time worrying about problems people don’t have now, even though they once did.

Do we have assurance that everyone in the Church with authority will always use it in the best possible way? No. We have to trust that we’ll be taken care of by God without that guarantee, that we’ll be able to be made holy without it. That is all that really matters.
 
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If it helps, my seminary had several banned books in its library back when the Index was still in force. There were certain exceptions for academic purposes (I don’t know if the bishop needed to give a dispensation or if there was a general rule about it), so the Church didn’t completely try to shut down any dialogue or understanding of the other side.

The Church’s concern was that people who hadn’t taken the time to seriously investigate their own faith were reading books that could lead them away from the Truth. It was a question of many people not usually being well-educated enough for their faith to withstand the attacks against it that these books were making. The Church decided that it was better to prohibit the reading of these books altogether than to risk thousands of people not giving the Church a fair chance. Unfortunately, I think it probably back-fired a bit.

Keep in mind that for most of the Index’s existence, most of Europe was Catholic and virtually all of it was Christian. I suspect the general attitude was that if someone was doubting their Catholic faith, they were either doing so willfully (you can see a lot of pride in the writings of those who were questioning the Church at the time), or the solution was just to learn more about why the Faith is true.
 
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