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Censorship—i.e., oversight or regulation of religious content—predates Christianity and includes our Jewish ancestors in Old Covenant times, as The Catholic Encyclopedia reports. In addition, we see in St. Paul’s time that a number of people involved in the occult burned their own books publicly after witnessing the misguided nature of their practices and the genuine, redeeming power of the gospel (Acts 19:19).
At the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), not only do the Council Fathers condemn Arius’s misguided beliefs about Jesus, they also condemned his related book, Thalia.
In 1564, proceeding from a directive the Council of Trent, the Church issued a series of rules on the oversight or censorship of books, including potential canonical penalties for those who publish books with religious content without gaining prior Church approbation. This built on a bull issued by Pope Leo X in 1515.
More recently, Pope Leo XIII issued various guidelines in his 1897 bull Officiorum ac Munerum. Pope St. Pius X, in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, directed all bishops to have qualified theologians review the contents of submitted books with a nihil obstat (“nothing obstructs”) provided to those favorably reviewed, along with the reviewing theologian’s name, and then the imprimatur (“let it be printed”) by the local bishop.
Today, according to canon law, you will sometimes see Church approval given via the simple edict “Printed with ecclesiastical permission” with the name of the approving bishop below and the date he provided his approbation. It’s the same Church approval as an imprimatur, but the name of the censor librorum (“censor of books”) who provides the theological review and his nihil obstat are not formerly noted in the book per traditional canonical custom.