It is not your duty to
abstain from reading all the current literature of the day, but it is
your duty to nourish your Catholic mental life by purely Catholic
literature. The more you read of secular works, the more urgent is your
duty to give a sufficient place to those also, which will directly serve
you in doing your duty to God and in saving your soul. Assuredly one of
the most pressing duties at the present day is to recognize fully our
personal and individual responsibility in this matter of reading, and to
examine our conscience closely to see how we are acquitting ourselves of
it.
Before we leave this subject, we wish to ask all those among you dear
children in Jesus Christ, who, whether as fathers and mothers, or as
members of religious institutes, or masters and mistresses in schools,
are charged with the education of the young, to do all in your power to
train those committed to you to a wise and full understanding of this
matter of reading, and to a realization of its enormous power for good
and harm, and, therefore, to a sense of the extreme responsibility
attaching to it. Make them understand that, while all are able to read,
all things are not to be read by all; that this power, like every power,
may be abused, and that we have to learn how to use it with due
restraint.
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