Summary

This article attempts to answer the question concerning the attitudes of the Catholic Church and readers in the years 1918-1939 to books, particularly those which were "banned". I tried to establish what the term "banned books" signified for the contemporary Catholic critics. My research required to refer to the year 1896, when Pope Leon XITI approved "General Decrees" in his bulla "Officiorum ac munerum" which was the first attempt to define precisely the concept of the "amoral book".
Next I tried to find to what extent the regulations of Pope Leon XHI were still valid in the new social and political situation after the year 1918. It was found that in connection with an intensive development of literary pornography in the interwar period the decrees of Leon XIII required more specific interpretation and discussion. I was particularly interested to know which authors and for what reasons the Catholic Church condemned in the interwar period. I confronted the opinions of Catholic critics with readers' preferences and tried to find out whether readers obeyed the Church ban on reading some specified books.