Article 20

Books or booklets of prayers, devotion, or religious, moral, ascetical, mystical doctrine and instruction, and others of this sort, although they seem to conduce to fostering the piety of the Christian people, let no one publish apart from the license of legitimate authority; otherwise let them be held prohibited.

What books, booklets are

91. 1. Observe that books or booklets are touched, but not sheets or writings, whether separate or inserted in periodicals, for example, to announce certain pious ceremonies. Thus also Pennacchi, n. 58.

Which are comprehended by the prohibition

2. Moreover, there is question of those works, as is established from the examples brought forward and from the words "although they seem to conduce to fostering the piety of the Christian people, etc.," whose end is immediately practical (not the mere exposition of doctrine) and is referred to religious or moral instruction: therefore Euchologia; catechisms strictly such, or understood more broadly, that is, those booklets which now not rarely are destined in place of a catechism, or together with a catechism, for forming the morals of boys (catéchismes de morale); ascetical books; books which propose meditations; but not books which contain sermons already given, if they are directed to another immediate end than that of forming piety, for example, a literary end, or for the use of other preachers.

Competent power

3. Apart from the license of legitimate authority. This legitimate authority, as will be more established from the rules concerning previous Censure, is regularly the Ordinary of the place where the work is published.

Concerning Euchologia which render Epistles and Gospels in the vernacular language. What if the Order of Mass is translated?

That Ordinary can also permit Euchologia which, as usage bears, contain versions both of the epistles and gospels of the year, and of the Order of Mass, the canon itself not excluded. The former is established from custom; the latter is drawn indirectly from a response of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, which declared that books of this sort "and their versions are reserved to the authority of Bishops."¹

Sanction of prohibition

4. Otherwise let them be held prohibited. Here, on account of the dangers of deceptions and hallucinations, a peculiar sanction is added, by which books or booklets are prohibited unless they have been approved by authority of legitimate censure.

Concerning books which lack an "Imprimatur."

What, therefore, if you meet with a book which before the Constitution of Leo XIII was once written to foster piety, but bears no "Imprimatur"?

As we said above, a sanction of this sort does not govern past acts, unless before the Constitution of Leo XIII a similar one existed.

But already before the said Constitution, books of piety were forbidden to be published without approval.

Yet that law was not urged with the same severity in every place, so that in several places it could have been softened by a certain benign usage. Thus, therefore, we shall say: If the book seems truly to have been published with a good intention, or is known as pious and useful, the defect of approval can by presumption be ascribed to a certain more benign custom,² so that it can be read with impunity. Commonly this will have to be judged so concerning good books of Belgium and France. On the contrary, in regions where errors and heresies were carried about under the appearance of piety, as in parts of Germany, a work of this sort which lacks positive approval is rather to be held as suspect and forbidden.

¹ August 4, 1877. Cf. Collectan. Prop. Fid., n. 1890. Nor can there be brought against this the brief Ad aures nostras of Alexander VII, January 12, 1661; for there he reprobates an entire Missal rendered in French, and in that form, as it seems, which would be adapted to liturgical use; nor the decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites in the Lingon case, June 6, 1851, which is no longer found in the Collection of Rites.

² Even today it can happen that in a certain diocese a usage obtains which differs from the law. Then the same thing must be said.