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It was created in 1559 by the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church (later the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). The index was regularly updated until the 1948 edition, with materials being added by either the Congregation or the Pope. The list was not simply a reactive work; the authors were encouraged to defend their works, they could re-publish with elisions if they wished to avoid a ban, and pre-publication censorship was encouraged.
The 32nd edition, published in 1948, contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, political incorrectness, and so on. Notable novelists on the list were Laurence Sterne, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, Honoré de Balzac, Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the Dutch sexologist Theodor Hendrik van de Velde, author of the sex manual The Perfect Marriage .
Some of the Index's actions were of a definite political content: in 1926, the Action Française magazine, espousing far-right French causes, was put in the Index.
The Index's effects were felt throughout much of the Catholic world. For many years in areas as diverse as Quebec and PolandThe Republic of Poland a country in Central Europe, lies between Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Russia (in the form of the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave) t it was very difficult to find copies of indexed works, especially outside of major cities. The index as an official list was relaxed in 1966Events January January 1 In a coup, Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa ousts president David Dacko and takes over the Central African Republic. January 2 Strike of public transportation workers in New York City ends January 13 January 3 First Acid Test at the Fil under Pope Paul VIPaul VI Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini ( September 26, 1897 August 6, 1978), served as Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 1963 to 1978. He presided over the Catholic Church during most of the Second Vatican Council and played a central following the end of the Second Vatican CouncilThe Second Vatican Council or Vatican II was an Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church opened under Pope John XXIII in 1962 and closed under Pope Paul VI in 1965. It is not accepted by all who call themselves Catholics. Some attribute to it a les and largely due to practical considerations. It remains a sin for Catholics to read books which are injurous to faith and/or morals.