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Heresy Charges. The imprimatur is no guarantee that a book will not be attacked as heretical. Last year Bishop Joyce granted Sheed & Ward an imprimatur for Jesuit Biblical Scholar John L. McKenzie's Authority in the Church (TIME, May 13, 1966). Although the book was later honored by the Catholic Press Association as the year's outstanding American theological work, Archbishop Robert E. Lucey of San Antonio recently denounced it as "openly heretical" on at least two counts. McKenzie retorted that Lucey should either withdraw his complaints or make formal charges of heresy to Rome.
More and more often, Catholic authors and publishers are simply not bothering to ask for imprimaturs, especially for books—like those attacking clerical celibacy—that would not be likely to get them anyway. So far at least, there have been no concerted complaints from the hierarchy (though bishops still occasionally warn their flocks against books they dislike), and students of church law agree that the rules on imprimaturs would simply fall into disuse if enough publishers and writers ignored them.
That would be true even in Italy. Rome said not a word recently when the Italian publishing house of Mondadori published a collection of essays called Is God Dead? without any indication that the book had an imprimatur.
Among the contributors were Canon Charles Moeller and Monsignor Pietro Pavan, both of them officials of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which sets the rules for censorship in the church.