Banned (Catholic) Books Week

Banned Book Week was last week. Did you miss it? 

For anyone who took it seriously, let me just say this: Banned Book Week is a complete fraud.

The books highlighted during Banned Book Week are the opposite of banned. If you look at any list of so-called banned books, you'll see titles that have been continuously promoted world-wide and most have sold millions of copies. They're not banned. They're everywhere. 

And given the cultural climate, you already know what kinds of books these are. Most are books that in any other era would have been correctly classified as obscenity. Worse, many of them are books specifically designed to introduce young children to deviant sex acts. 

The promotion of these so-called banned books is said to be a freedom of expression issue. It is, therefore, the ultimate irony that many of the libraries, bookstores, schools and cultural entities promoting Banned Book Week on social media last week summarily shut down their comments section. Why? Because many of people commenting have gotten wise to the fraud. They rightly point out that parents demanding that books promoted to their children be age-appropriate are not calling for book bans. But this reaction to Banned Book Week is, apparently, banned.

Let's look at some numbers, shall we? Let's see how the supposedly banned books are doing as compared to, say, popular Catholic books for the same age-range which are theoretically not banned. Catholics are, by the way, the largest religious group in the US in terms of sheer numbers, so one would think that books for and by Catholics would be well-represented in our libraries.

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First, let's compare two books for children. On the one side, we'll start with Angel in the Waters by Regina Doman. This is a beautiful little book about an unborn baby and his guardian angel first published by Sophia Institute Press in 2004. The book follows the baby during his development in the womb until after his birth, and is engagingly illustrated by Ben Hatke. With a very pro-life message, Angel in the Waters has sold well over 100,000 copies since release and may be found in the collections of almost every big family. 

Checking WorldCat, which is a catalog of books in public and academic libraries, we can see that Angel in the Waters may be found in 96 libraries. Not bad, right? 

Now, let's look at another book for children: I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings. This is a book for children published in 2014 about one of the culture's pathologies-du-jour: transgenderism. Of course, it is heralded as a banned book. It has, in fact, been banned so successfully that WorldCat shows this book in 1,726 libraries — That's 18 times as many libraries as Angel in the Waters.

Get a copy here.

Moving on to the young adult category, we'll start with Angels in Iron by Nicholas Prata. An intense historical novel for teens and young adults chronicling the Great Siege of Malta of 1565, Angels in Iron is Arx Publishing's bestseller, with over 10,000 copies sold. Since publication in 2005, it has received rave reviews in Catholic media which has lauded the novel as an exciting adventure that should be read by all Catholic youth. The book been included in several bookseller and homeschool curriculum provider catalogs. 

Despite the book's enduring popularity among the nation's largest religious group, Angels in Iron has found its way into only 33 libraries nationwide.

Let's compare this to the #1 "banned" book—Gender Queer by Mia Kobabe. Published in 2019 for the teen/young adult market, this book is a memoir in graphic (and I do mean graphic) novel form about a poor confused soul who uses made-up pronouns. The book's promo text boasts that it includes explorations of "bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction." You'll be surprised (or not) to find out that this profound work of literary genius, though "banned", is available in 2,259 libraries, or 68 times as many as Angels in Iron.

Finally, let's compare two books for teen and young adult readers that have been published for a long time. 

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On the one hand, we have The Joyful Beggar, one of the best-known works by prolific novelist Louis de Wohl. Originally published in 1958, The Joyful Beggar tells the parallel stories of Francesco Bernadone—the man who would become Saint Francis of Assisi—and the fictional knight errant, Roger of Vandria. This brilliant historical novel would be turned into a motion picture in 1961 and the edition by Ignatius Press remains popular with Catholic audiences to this day. I reviewed it a few years back—it's a personal favorite. It's the kind of book that should be required reading in every Catholic school. The Joyful Beggar is found in 309 libraries according to WorldCat.

Let's compare this with The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison which is #6 on the "banned" book list compiled by the "Unite Against Banned Books" website. If one reads the summary of this novel, originally published in 1970, it sounds like a fairly typical exploration of racism in America. What few of the summaries reveal is that the book contains ugly and graphic depictions of sex, including a horrifying scene where a very young girl is raped. This book showed up in my house when I was a kid, and I read it as a teen, having no idea of what was in it. To this day, I wish I hadn't. And yet, amazingly, this book is regularly assigned as required reading for high school students. The Bluest Eye is found in 6,015 libraries or 19 times as many as The Joyful Beggar. 

So in case it's not abundantly clear at this point, none of the books on the banned books lists are actually banned. In fact, a strong case could be made that books with sexually explicit content—especially deviant sexual content aimed at children, teens, and young adults—are favored in libraries and are generally ubiquitous.

At the same time, excellent works of literature which promote themes of heroism, saintliness, the sacredness of human life, moral courage, and the glorification of Almighty God are much more rarely found. Dare I say that such books are largely banned from our nation's libraries?

I leave it for the reader to ponder how this situation has come to pass, what effect it is having on children and young people, and what should be done about it.