years. Its "rules" were occasionally modified, new regulations were added or old ones abrogated, other books were inserted in the catalogue; but the essential features remained the same.
In 1897, Leo XIII took the matter up again. The index of forbidden books was thoroughly revised. About a thousand titles were dropped. The "rules," too, were revised, "to make them milder, without altering their nature, so that it cannot be difficult or irksome for any person of good will to obey them."
This, then, represents the whole book legislation of the Church. There are no other documents, except the decrees by which, as occasion demanded, individual books were forbidden. The encyclical of Pius X on Modernism merely enjoins on the bishops special vigilance in regard to publications infected with modernistic views.
This universal legislation, however, does not preclude the local prohibition of books by bishops or other ecclesiastical authorities. Thus Spain had, until 1820, its own
