The Irish-born, continentally educated John Thomas Mullock (1807– 1869) was the fourth Franciscan priest to serve as Roman Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Newfoundland. His studies as a Franciscan began when he was 16 years old, and he was ordained by special dispensation at the remarkably young age of 22. The years 1823 to 1829 saw him first serve his postulancy and novitiate at St. Bonaventure’s College in Seville, followed by the continuation of his spiritual and educational formation at St. Isidore’s College in Rome. To say that Continental Europe at that time, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, was in a period of intellectual and political flux would be an understatement. In the decade of the 1820s, while Mullock was studying in Southern Europe, there were revolutions in Spain, Portugal, and Sicily, while in Greece a war being waged would achieve long-desired national independence. Democratic ideals, fuelled in large part by the writers of the Enlightenment and inspired by the results of the French Revolution, were beginning to penetrate every aspect of society, including the Church. It was apprehension over these seismic changes that, in some part at least, had prompted the Irish hierarchy to establish a local seminary at Maynooth in 1795, in order to more closely control the influences being felt by candidates for the secular priesthood. Ireland itself was hardly immune from the democratic winds blowing from the Continent. The United Irishmen, among other “radicals,” were on the cusp of achieving Catholic Emancipation, a political idea once again rooted in the writings of modern European democrats.

For the Franciscans, this period of upheaval around the turn of the nineteenth century was also keenly felt as they saw one after another of their Continental colleges shuttered by order of civil authorities, until St. Isidore’s in Rome was among the few left open. The situation was, to say the least, dispiriting. As membership in the religious community declined, so too did discipline in the colleges, as recorded by the order’s administration in the various visitation reports that survive from the end of the eighteenth century, with St. Isidore’s specifically singled out for improvement.[1] Complaints ranged from violations of the cloister, to the fact that novices were wandering about outside the colleges, to regular absence from prayers and sloppy liturgical observance.[2] While the strict course of study for Franciscan novices at the time emphasized the philosophy of Duns Scotus and the theology of St. Bonaventure, there is a general sense of laxity that otherwise permeates official communications; and although demands for a renewal of religious formation begin to be voiced at this time, such reforms would not be undertaken in earnest until the middle of the nineteenth century, long after Mullock had become resident in Newfoundland. The degree to which his priestly life and his academic life were shaped by or in reaction to these realities and the sense of malaise within the Franciscan movement at this time is an area worthy of further investigation. When, by 1856, he turned his attention to the establishment of a seminary in Newfoundland for the training of local clergy, however, it may be significant that he did not entrust that crucial task to members of his own order, who had by then been working in the colony for some 80 years.

Against this backdrop, John Thomas Mullock began collecting the books that would become one of the first publicly accessible libraries in the colony. In his letter to the House of Assembly dated December 1859, he noted that he already had a collection “of over 2500 volumes as the nucleus of the Public Library, and many of these books are rare and valuable.”[3] His student library at St. Isidore’s likely served as some inspiration to him since, despite the depredations it had seen during the French occupation at the turn of the nineteenth century, it was still highly regarded as a centre for rare books and archival materials.[4] It is through Mullock’s own working library, which survives largely intact, that we can gain some sense of the breadth and extent of the man’s intellectual curiosity. Scriptural commentaries, and the works of theology and philosophy that one would expect of a man in his position, share precious space with numerous volumes of literature, poetry, history, and works of science. Catholic intellects like St. Augustine, Jean Bolland, and Claude Fleury rub shoulders with Homer, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Samuel Johnson, and Macaulay. To his other well-earned titles it may be argued that another should be added — “collector.” The Episcopal Library of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in St. John’s, Newfoundland (a Basilica since 1955), was rightly described as “the finest room in the colony.” Lining its walls one will still find a set of elegant, purpose-built bookcases, constructed by Mullock’s father Thomas, that house the hundreds of volumes acquired by the Bishop while a student in Spain and Italy, as well as books added during his years of ministry while serving in Ireland and Newfoundland.

Among the many titles, it may surprise some visitors to discover a significant cache of contentious literature as well. About a dozen of his books formally appeared on the Roman Index of Forbidden Books and another dozen or so, while not actually named on the Index, are “controversial” and would have been condemned under its working principles. There was little latitude given by the published rules of the Roman Index. Whether real or perceived, such books were understood to be the enemies of the Church’s magisterial authority. “It is enjoined on the faithful,” preliminary Rule X reads, “that no one presume to keep or read any books contrary to these rules, or prohibited by this Index. But if anyone read or keep any books composed by heretics, or the writings of any author suspected of heresy or false doctrine, he shall instantly incur the sentence of excommunication.”[5] The argument cannot be made that Mullock was unaware of the presence of these books in his library, since in a few instances he actually records permission having been granted to him (or presumed granted) by his superiors as a young man to possess and read the texts. Similarly, he could not plead ignorance of how these books were to be handled since he would have been in receipt of a Roman circular letter dated 1864 — sent by the Vatican to every bishop in the world — that reprinted earlier papal admonitions concerning the retention and use of banned books. The circular reproduced, for example, the mandatum on controversial literature published by Pope Leo XII on 26 March 1825, as well as two further warnings previously issued on 4 March 1828 and 7 January 1836. Most importantly, however, was the actual communiqué of 24 August 1864, issued 14 years into Mullock’s episcopal administration, outlining the necessity of episcopal vigilance with regard to printed materials.[6] In this last document the Sacred Congregation of the Index specifically warned against evil books that were then flooding the world, contributing to what the Vatican perceived were the other “sad calamities of the day.”[7] They were probably referring here to the rise of French realism, especially in the novels of Victor Hugo and Stendahl, both of whom had recently been added to the Roman Index along with the works of Dumas. They were also concerned about works of political science supporting the nationalist revolutions then underway in France, Germany, and also in Italy, ultimately leading to the loss of the Papal States in 1870. It is always possible, of course, that Mullock — a bishop in a remote diocese — did not care to enforce the rules to the letter of the law: indeed, he would not have been the first colonial prelate to have so acted.

These various warnings from the Vatican openly acknowledged that Roman authorities were unable to judge every single controversial book that came off the presses in a timely enough manner to prevent the damage they might cause to the faithful in the interim. Such Roman missives, therefore, reminded local bishops like Mullock of their duty to act on behalf of the Sacred Congregation and remove from the hands of the public any books they deemed to be offensive, whether they appeared by name on the Index or not. One can infer from the publication of this 1864 letter that bishops were in fact not being as vigilant with regard to prohibited and controversial literature as they should have been, otherwise why would there have been this strong reminder? And certainly Bishop Mullock possessed several of these very books in his own library — a library that would become public, by his own design, during his lifetime.

What is missing from Mullock’s personal library is also instructive. First of all, there is no known copy of the Roman Index of Forbidden Books itself, despite the fact that 23 editions were published over the course of his almost 20-year administration of the Church there.[8] It is certainly found in other bishops’ libraries of the period — Bishop Seghers of Victoria, for example, had an 1860 edition.[9] The Franciscan authors Duns Scotus and Bonaventure do not appear, despite their importance in his own youthful curriculum. There are also none of the Reformation authors one might expect — no Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, or Bucer — in short, none of the leading lights of the Continental Reformation whose teachings still stirred trouble for nineteenth-century Catholicism. It would seem, therefore, that Mullock was not interested in dredging up the old theological debates of the past that would have had little relevance in Newfoundland. But among his books may be found Joseph Benson’s 1801 publication entitled An Apology for the People Called Methodists; Robert Southey’s Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism printed in 1847; and a 1722 French translation of William Wake’s Exposition of the Catechism of the Anglican Church, all of which were de facto forbidden reading for Catholics since they touched on religious subject matter but were printed beyond the control of Roman censors. There might not have been a large number of Lutherans or Calvinists haunting the port of St. John’s in the 1860s, but there were more than enough Methodists and Anglicans to warrant concern, so it might well have been important for the ultramontane Bishop Mullock and his confrères to know their enemies. But, in the end, what can be made of his small collection of controversial materials, and can any conclusions be drawn about how these books were used?

In order to answer these questions and get a sense of what this part of his library might mean for education in nineteenth-century Newfoundland, it is first necessary to understand something of the history of the Index librorum prohibitorum or the Roman Index of Forbidden Books, as it is more commonly known. The list of forbidden books was but a single tool in the most effective censorship campaign ever undertaken in the West, and was used by the Roman Catholic Church from the sixteenth century until the twentieth century. Pope Paul IV authorized the first Index in 1557, although local diocesan Indexes had proliferated before this date. The 1564 edition of the Roman Index confirmed that all books condemned by Rome before the year 1515 remained under the ban, but now added were the names of the “new” heretics, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their associates. [10] The Index was conveniently arranged alphabetically and hierarchically, so that one could easily recognize which condemned authors belonged to the first-class group or to the less ominous “others.” By the end of the sixteenth century, the Sacred Congregation of the Index had developed a variation on this book known as the Index librorum expurgatorum, the sole purpose of which was to assist librarians in the partial censorship of works written by otherwise orthodox authors, indicating the exact page numbers and sentences to be expunged from offending texts, usually using a black ink pen.[11] Without these required emendations a work could not have circulated in the Catholic world. The ink used to obliterate the offending passages was often highly acidic, and many surviving examples show that it could destroy even the page itself. None of the books bearing Bishop Mullock’s name, however, show any signs of censorship.

After 1908, formal application had to be made in writing to the competent diocesan authority in order to read a forbidden work, whether a vernacular Bible or a work of obscene literature, and the request would generally then be retained in the diocesan archives, explaining why it was necessary for the petitioner to read a forbidden book in the first place.[12] In Mullock’s day, the degree to which the rules concerning contentious literature were enforced varied from diocese to diocese. This flexibility was somewhat confirmed in the introduction to the 1819 Roman Index, originally issued by Pope Clement VIII in 1592:

If anyone have one or more of the condemned books which may be permitted, and for some cause desire leave to read and retain the same, outside Rome it belongs to the bishop or inquisitor to grant the permission . . . such permission is to be given freely and in writing. It is to be given only for three years, but may be renewed at the end of the triennium.[13]

No formal applications survive in Mullock’s administrative papers, indicating he may simply have given verbal permission for the use of banned literature, or such requests may have been destroyed after the required three years. Their loss, however, unfortunately prevents us from knowing who may have been using these books besides Mullock himself. The last edition of the Index was issued in 1948, and it remained in effect until 1966. There is no question that it was a force to be reckoned with when Mullock governed his own little corner of Christendom, but how seriously it was actually taken remains an open question, at least in the middle of the nineteenth century. As bishop, he was undoubtedly aware that published works could be challenged under any one of 12 categories, including books championing heresy or schism; those that avowedly attacked religion and good morals; books by non-Catholics on the subject of religion, unless they contained nothing contrary to the Catholic faith; works that attacked or ridiculed the faith or defended condemned errors; and texts that were deemed obscene or defended the lawfulness of duelling, suicide, or divorce. There is no question that several of the books in Mullock’s library certainly fell within these prohibited categories.

A brief survey of the banned texts that Mullock owned and that also appeared on the Index at the end of the nineteenth century includes: Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1702, Rotter-dam); Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1845); Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli (Frankfurt, 1626); the Qur’an (Paris, 1840); Machiavelli’s The Prince (Montbéliard, 1599); Maimbourg’s Histoire du Lutheranisme (Paris, 1681) and Remarques d’un theologien sur des prerogatives de l’eglise de Rome (Cologne, 1688); Rousseau’s Emilius or New System of Education (Dublin, 1779); and Vertot’s History of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem (Edinburgh, 1770). It is not necessary to consider each of these titles in detail to understand how they may have fit with Mullock’s educational program, but three of them may prove somewhat enlightening, beginning with Pierre Bayle’s massive four-volume Dictionnaire.

The title page to Mullock’s copy bears his episcopal book stamp and an earlier inscription with the Latin legend beneath his name, “sup. Per,” an abbreviation for cum permissu superiorum, advertising that he had the permission of his religious superiors to use it. The author, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), was raised as a Calvinist, converted to Catholicism, and subsequently returned to the Protestant fold, a pilgrimage of faith that would certainly not have gained him any favour in Rome in the first place. He was an advocate of religious tolerance and freedom of thought. His Dictionnaire was first published in the Netherlands in 1697 and its format would eventually inspire the more famous Encyclopédie published by Diderot beginning in 1751, as well as Voltaire’s Dictionnaire, which appeared in 1764. Bayle’s Dictionnaire does not just provide vast amounts of information; it does so in a way that anticipated the rationalism and skepticism that would become hallmarks of the European Enlightenment. The biographies and articles Bayle wrote for his Dictionnaire were straightforward, but also included numerous explanatory notes, many of which were actually longer than the articles themselves, and it was these notes that were the source of trouble since they challenged accepted religious beliefs, exposed readers to conflicting interpretations of historical events, and often did so using irony. He also argued that religious conviction was unnecessary to morality, and that a society could be ethical without having any belief in God. The Dictionnaire was enormously influential over no less a luminary than Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was also on the Index and in Mullock’s library. In fact, Gibbon declared that the Dictionnaire had taught him the subversive possibilities of historical accuracy.[14] Contemporary historians of philosophy maintain that the Dictionnaire’s single greatest influence was to provide an impulse towards modern atheism, and after its publication the work quickly became the most popular reference resource of its kind in Europe. No scholarly library in the eighteenth century was considered complete without it. This particular edition contains an appendix of clarifications, added by Bayle, in response to his condemnation by the Protestant Consistory of the Walloons in Rotterdam in 1691. Among other things, he clarified and modified his positions on atheism, skepticism, and obscenity, though this was not sufficient for the Jesuits, who condemned the book even in revision, with the volumes being publicly burned in France in 1754. In 1757 the Holy Office placed all of Bayle’s writings on the Index of Forbidden Books under the most severe category, and there they remained until 1966 when use of the Index was finally abolished. The Mullock library now only has volume one of the complete set, published in 1702.

It could, of course, be argued that Mullock collected the Dictionnaire for antiquarian reasons, but the same assertion cannot be made for his personal copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Mullock’s copy is in fact unremarkable. It is a contemporary work, printed in Cheapside in London in 1845, indicating that it was part of his working library. As we know, in this epic six-volume history, Gibbon (who like Bayle would have been considered an apostate by Mullock for embracing and then leaving Roman Catholicism again) asserted that the rise of Christianity was one of the greatest contributors to the fall of Rome. It made no sense, he maintained, to vilify pagan emperors for behaving in the same arbitrary manner as Christian kings had done since Constantine.[15] His theory undermined certain assumptions about the progress of European civilization, and as a result the first Italian edition was immediately placed on the Roman Index (again, remaining there until 1966) for not coinciding with official church history.[16] Why might Mullock have retained it? It would seem likely for the same reason he owned the Dictionnaire — in recognition of the vast encyclopedic scholarship both works represented. Such surveys were immensely valuable to a missionary bishop who wanted to complement more focused works with texts that could deal with the grand sweep of history, comprehensive knowledge that he would be expected to demonstrate in many of his published articles and public lectures. Such books were simply too useful. That some of the opinions contained in both books were objectionable was surely not beyond the scope and intelligence of an educated person like Mullock, who was capable of separating the gold from the dross.

The most significant challenged and banned book in Mullock’s library, however, was without doubt his copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s controversial pedagogical novel, Emilius, which was first published in French as Emile in 1762, the same year as The Social Contract. Rousseau considered Emile to be his finest work and in it he suggests what he believes to be the ideal plan for education, something Mullock was certainly keen on. The book covers five different developmental stages from infancy to adolescence and argues for allowing nature, rather than religion or politics or social norms, to direct education. Children, he argues, should learn through experience, not rote; reading should not formally be taught until age 12; the only moral lesson to be learned is never to hurt anyone. Religious instruction, Rousseau argues, should be substituted with a deistic experience of the universe, with no place allowed for church attendance or ritual observances. Not surprisingly, the book was condemned and added to the Roman Index in 1766. It was also condemned by numerous Protestant bodies as well, but none of that hindered the popularity of the work, which exercised great influence over modern theories of education throughout Europe for more than a century. During the French Revolution, it served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education. The censorship of Emile beyond French borders, however, only served to make it one of the greatest underground best-sellers of the eighteenth century. It was particularly popular in the English-speaking world, and so it is not really surprising that the great Victorian educational critic Matthew Arnold, a contemporary of Mullock’s, mirrored many of Rousseau’s ideas in his plea for reform.

The Roman monitum issued in 1864 did not mention specific titles for condemnation, but it did clearly warn against books by impious men that weakened the character of impressionable youths; it would be very hard to imagine the Sacred Congregation not having Rousseau’s book in mind when it issued that condemnation. Mullock’s copy is part of an incomplete set of the 1779 Dublin printing, translated into English by William Kenrick, and issued 13 years after the Roman condemnation. Like his copy of Gibbon, his Emile was clearly meant to be read and not simply collected for antiquarian purposes. As the inscription indicates, he used the book by licence of Pius VII, who died in 1823, the year that Mullock entered the Franciscans at the age of 16. This is most likely a reference to an exception granted by the Sacred Office of the Index allowing access to certain classics, ancient or modern, which on account of their faults or obscenities should otherwise be condemned. Insofar as they were models of style they could be read by persons engaged in teaching university or higher college classes of literature, and by those who were preparing for such a position in the near future, as well as by those who, on account of their profession, could not function without them. Mullock’s inscription is his affirmation to any inquiring eyes that he judged himself one such person. A similar exception was granted to those engaged in serious theological or Biblical studies, allowing them to use editions of the Bible issued by non-Catholics in both the ancient and modern languages, provided that the Prolegomena and annotations did not impugn the Catholic faith. This explains the licence Mullock records at the beginning of his copy of the King James Bible.

By the time he had reached the middle of the nineteenth century as bishop in St. John’s, Mullock was likely reading his copy of Emile for reasons other than simply knowing his enemy. It should be noted that Mullock was the last bishop of the St. John’s diocese before the wide-sweeping imposition of neo-Scholasticism on the Catholic world, the Church’s official response to educational reforms like those espoused by Rousseau and Arnold. He would not have personally experienced (or necessarily advocated for) the neo-Scholastic return to certain medieval educational practices, like rote memorization, or for the supremacy of Thomism as it emerged in the Catholic academy (especially seminaries) from the 1870s onward, affecting Catholic education into the twentieth century. Mullock, in fact, does not appear to have personally owned any of the works of Thomas Aquinas, or at least they were not in the library he made publicly accessible. He was, however, very well aware that he was establishing an educational system in a heterogeneous and complex new world. In a report dated June 1862 to the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in Rome he wrote that he had “founded the public college and seminary. For this, I accepted from the Colonial Government 3000 pounds, from the people 500, and from my own income 4000. . . . Each year I receive 600 pounds for the public school in which 110 students are educated . . . [the] students are taught all that pertains to an English education and in the following languages: Greek, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian.”[17]

For all of its religious flaws, the presence of Rousseau’s Emile in his library might be an indication of the intellectual balance he hoped to achieve when founding his new St. Bonaventure’s College, and receiving a substantial amount of public funding for it in the process. Over the 100 years since Rousseau’s death, it must be remembered that the British Protestant intelligentsia had largely embraced the secular aspects of Rousseau’s educational principles. Mullock, the interested and invested educator, at the very least, had to be familiar with the basic principles of Rousseau’s theories in the first place, since his Protestant educational colleagues in the colony, like Bishop Feild, most certainly would have been. In addition, Rousseau’s emphasis on experience in learning was something Mullock would have likely embraced himself, especially after his years of studying on the Continent. It should also never be forgotten that Mullock was a well-known disturber of the peace who may have seen in Rousseau’s contentious prose the spur to a debate he would prefer that his native Catholic charges were competent to engage in, since ignorance of their opponents’ arguments would hardly provide them protection. “The present generation in Newfoundland,” he wrote “leaves a mighty inheritance to their children, and we are forming the character of a future nation.”

We may never definitively know why Bishop Mullock had these books in his library, nor how he intended them to be used. Ideally, one would like to compare his library to other early Canadian episcopal libraries to see just how common the practice of keeping banned books actually was. Unhappily, with the exception of Bishop Seghers’s library in Victoria, there are few contemporary examples with which to compare it. The Roman Catholic dioceses of Halifax, Charlottetown, Saint John, Kingston, Hamilton, London, and Toronto have not maintained the libraries of their early bishops in their integrity, if at all. As a result it is almost impossible to determine whether banned books formed a regular feature of colonial bishops’ working libraries in British North America. By preserving, as far as possible, the core of Bishop Mullock’s library in one place, intellectually if not physically,[18] and making it accessible to scholars, the archivists of the Archdiocese of St. John’s have ensured that this library retains its important role as a window into history. Certainly, by keeping Bishop Mullock’s books together as an intellectual subset of the greater library, a layer of meaning is added to the books themselves. They help scholars delve deeper into the personality of the man, but also into the times and environments that formed him.

In conclusion, it would appear that the controversial and forbidden books that Mullock collected reveal an appreciation for the encyclopedic mind that was one of the pre-eminent features of Enlightenment scholarship. He would have understood that such books had a direct impact on the society and educational systems that were emerging, even in post-Tridentine, pre-neo-Scholastic Newfoundland. Mullock was interested in preparing a Catholic population to take its rightful place alongside the Protestant intelligentsia that had assumed they had the natural right to govern, and so these books could not be ignored. Whether they were allowed on the open shelves with the rest of the collection must remain a tantalizing question in the absence of circulation records. Yet even if they were kept in a restricted section of his library, traditionally known as “Infernos” in seminaries, the important thing is that they still would have been there, with the possibility for access. In their own way, such forbidden volumes formed a small part of his greater agenda for the advancement of the people he fought for intellectually, as well as politically and spiritually.