Published On:Monday, February 08, 2010

WE HAD a call last week from a young person, who was in a state of bemused shock. Did we know that a few weeks ago a California school had pulled a dictionary from its fourth and fifth grade classrooms after a parent "complained about a child stumbling across a definition for 'oral sex'"?

No we did not know, but we agreed that it was madness, that we were living in a confused world, a depraved world, and near a country in which many of its citizens seriously consider Alaskan-born Sarah Palin -- a master of delivering catchy one-liners from public platforms, but little else -- as a future president.

As we babbled on, words from Ecclesiastes quickly brought us to our senses. We recalled that "there is no new thing under the sun." This set us thinking.

Almost any book that is worth reading -- including the Bible -- has been under the censor's hammer or on some group's banned list for one reason or another -- religion, sex, or just not being politically correct for the times in which the authors wrote.

As a university student we recall our annoyance at the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum -- the "Index" for short-- which banned almost every book on our required reading list for our English Literature course. For Catholics to read or possess any book on that list could mean excommunication. The priest always had to apply for exemption from the ban for Catholic students in the class. And so we read the books -- but only those for which we had exemption.

We recall going through an Alexandre Dumas faze in our reading with a particular itch to read the "Hunchback of Notre Dame." However, the "Hunchback" with Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables", and Dumas "Count of Monte Cristo", were all on the Index.

In 1966 someone in Rome came to their senses and the Index of Forbidden Books and all excommunications relating to it were abolished.

We were even more annoyed after reading the Dumas and Victor Hugo books to discover that they were like child's Pabulum when compared to the racy international scandals crossing our desk as a newspaper editor.

We still bristle with indignant anger recalling the Inquisition and the 1633 trial before it of Galileo Galilee, a brilliant Florentine physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher, who ended his days under house arrest for claiming that the Earth revolved around the sun -- supporting the Corpernican theory.

Today Stephen Hawking, the famous British theoretical physicist, says that "Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science."

Yet in the 17th century he was forced by the Inquisition to recant a scientific truth and was sentenced to jail for the rest of his life. In deference to his age he was kept under house arrest.

But that one narrow-minded, ignorant act shut down Italy's forward movement in science, leaving it to Northern Europe to take up the gauntlet and move on.

And then in 1497 -- five years after Columbus discovered our part of the world -- there was the "Bonfire of the Vanities" when a madcap Italian priest -- Girolamo Savonarola - decided to wipe out immorality by burning books, paintings, musical, instruments and all frivolous trivia. He hated the Renaissance and preached against the moral corruption of those times. It is said that he personally threw a painting by Sandro Botticelli on the heap, which went up in flames in the public square in Florence.

Eventually the town got tired of the mad zealot.

He was excommunicated, and himself burned at the stake in the same place that he had held the "Bonfire of the Vanities."

As for the dictionary that started this discussion, there were enough California parents who protested the ban that a compromise was arrived at.

The controversial Merriam-Webster dictionary was returned to the classroom with an alternative McGraw-Hill student dictionary also available.

A letter will now be sent to the parents asking them to sign a form if they do not want their child to use the Merriam-Webster.

Although "there is no new thing under the sun," it can probably be said that man has taken a small step forward in the past 513 years -- at least we no longer have a bonfire of books in the public square, nor do we burn people at the stake.

However, we still debate the banning of books.