The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., has been one of my favorite places in the world for over a quarter-century, ever since I lived right next door to it at Catholic University. Its bookstore is especially impressive–I’ve spent many, many hundreds of dollars there over the decades. In this morning’s Washington Times, Julia Duin reports that the Shrine is refusing to let its bookstore stock one of the best Catholic books of the past year–Philip Lawler’s The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture. Now, this is certainly not censorship in the legally problematic sense — indeed, the Shrine’s action is doubly protected by the First Amendment, as an act of both its own free-speech rights and its right to free exercise of religion. But it is nonetheless, in my view, a mistake. Lawler’s book criticizes the U.S. Catholic bishops, but it is the work of a faithful and orthodox Catholic. What makes this situation especially galling is that Catholic bookstores, in my experience, are much more likely to stock books that contradict and undermine Catholic teaching than, e.g., Evangelical bookstores are to stock books that contradict and undermine Protestant teaching. I have always tried to interpret this charitably: Catholic booksellers might just be more secure in their faith, less afraid to give a hearing to contradictory views. To keep Lawler’s book out — and Lawler says, in the Duin story, that the Shrine’s is not the only Catholic bookstore to have done so — sends a less wholesome message about what the priorities are: Contradict our theology if you want to, but don’t you dare criticize the hierarchy.