#nihil obstat

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Nihil Obstat

Nihil Obstats, Imprimaturs, and Church Censorship

Full Question

        What are the origins and uses of the nihil obstat?        

Answer

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.

Jorge Garcia apresenta “Nihil Obstat”, na Capital 35

A J.Gar.Cia Dança Contemporânea inicia o ano dando sequência à série de apresentações dos espetáculos do repertório que celebra, desde 2015, sua trajetória de 10 anos de existência. Desta vez, a obra revisitada é “Nihil Obstat”, trabalho inaugural da trilogia composta ainda por “Imprimi Potest” e “Imprimatur”, que fica em cartaz de 20 a 31 de janeiro (na primeira semana, de quarta a domingo, e na…