In such instances as these, a decentralised Church is being ever more frequently advocated by concerned individuals as a viable alternative. Such a Church might still be able to accommodate a Bishop of Rome, who, in some redefined interpretation of ‘Pope’, might function as an arbiter, a chair-man, a religious equivalent of a military chief of staff. In this capacity, he might still exercise some kind of administrative leadership, but he would be obliged to take cognisance of the needs of his congregation and its bishops across the globe. And those needs – differing as they do between the developed West, Africa, Asia, South America and elsewhere – would at least be accorded the hearing they deserve. Moral and spiritual authority would reside with specific bishoprics and dioceses which possessed the flexibility necessary to adapt to the requirements of their respective and often unique circumstances. In short, the Church would become centred on the diocese, and each diocese would reflect the distinctive needs of its particular flock.
This suggestion, of course, entails considerable oversimplification – more, perhaps, than those who extol it often recognise. To translate it into practice would involve a complicated, disruptive and probably prolonged process. It is not, however, the only possible solution to the question of the Church's future relevance. There are many others. But some form of change would appear patently inescapable if the Church is not to become as much an element of irrelevant history as, say, the Holy Roman Empire, which, if only in theory, once represented its secular and temporal dominion.
At its worst, the Church can constitute – as it often has in the past – a tyranny as great, as oppressive, as noxious, as monstrous as that of any secular dictatorship. At its best, it can provide solace, refuge, advice, support, charity, understanding and one of many paths – not all of them necessarily ‘religious’ – conducing to a sense of the sacred. But for any such institution in the modern world to claim a definitive monopoly of truth, and even more of ‘salvation’, is an arrogance comparable only to the sin of pride for which Lucifer, according to tradition, was banished from heaven – an arrogance that would justify the Cathar heretics of the Middle Ages in seeing Rome as the creation of the demonic ‘Rex Mundi’, ‘King of the World’, the ultimate principle of evil.
As the millennium approaches, the Church has announced its intention to acknowledge and to apologise for certain of the excesses of the past. There have even been rumours that the Church intends to apologise for the Inquisition – or, at any rate, for the zealously sadistic and pyromaniacal tendencies displayed by the Inquisition during the first few centuries of its existence – and that certain of its victims, such as Giordano Bruno, for example, are, like Galileo, to be rehabilitated.
Such measures are both welcome and encouraging. To survive it is necessary to adapt. To mature, however, it is necessary to do more than that. It is necessary to confront the past, acknowledge it and integrate it in a new unity or totality that corrects any previous imbalances. The past cannot be denied or ignored or repudiated or cavalierly consigned to oblivion. It must be brought into some kind of accommodation with the present; and both must serve as the foundation on which a new, more balanced future can be created. In previous epochs, the Church has seldom recognised this necessity. That it appears to do so now is indeed commendable, and indicative of some genuine maturation.
But the apology, as a mere gesture, can often be little more than a fashionable adjunct in our age of ‘political correctness’. To offer facile apologies for past blunders and atrocities has become a vogue in our epoch. Yet while history can be rewritten, it cannot be unwritten. It is easy enough to apologise for a fait accompli that can no longer be undone or reversed. There is little point in apologising for the fate of long-dead Cathars when there is no one to benefit from the apology. And if the Church itself aspires to appear ‘cleaner’, more civilised and more humane as a result, it must do more than just apologise. It must also repent and atone. Such repentance and atonement must have repercussions that apply not only to the past, but to the present as well.
The Inquisition – or, to cite it by its current name, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – is not, of course, the whole of the Church. It is only one aspect of the Church, one office, one department. For many people today, however, including many of the faithful, the Congregation has become equated with the Church. It is often perceived as the single and definitive voice with which the Church speaks on doctrinal matters; and it does nothing to discourage such a perception. This is likely to remain a problem unless other aspects, offices and departments of the Church are seen to be accorded comparable authority – or unless the Congregation modifies its own rigidly inflexible mentality. It is the Congregation specifically, as much as the Church in general, that should repent and atone for the past. And such repentance and atonement should have some benefit for devout Catholics today.
Since its earliest crystallisation, organised religion has endeavoured to address and account for two spheres of the unknown – that which resides within humanity, and that which lies beyond, in the natural world and the cosmos at large. As Western civilisation has evolved, the terrain comprising both unknowns has been increasingly well charted, well mapped, by science and by psychology. That terrain is no longer as unknown as it once appeared to be, and organised religion has retreated from it accordingly. In the unknown that lies beyond, organised religion has reluctantly withdrawn before the apparently ineluctable advance of science. In the unknown that lies within humanity, organised religion has been increasingly challenged and thrown on to the defensive by psychology. On both fronts, organised religion has endeavoured to conduct as orderly a retreat as possible.
Yet despite the encroachments of science and psychology, despite the fighting withdrawal of organised religion, vast tracts of territory continue to be unknown, both internally and externally. The unknown may appear to recede elusively into the distance, but is unlikely ever to disappear completely, unlikely ever to be entirely and definitively charted. It is naive at best to imagine that we will one day know everything there is to know. On the contrary, there is bound to remain an element of genuine mystery, in ourselves and in the cosmos around us. Nor would we wish things to be otherwise.
Organised religion can still have a role to play in our lives, in our society, in our world. For the millions who turn to it in quest of solace, consolation, compassion, understanding and even wisdom, the Church need not be reduced to irrelevance or consigned to the obsolete debris of history like the old Holy Roman Empire. If it is to escape such a fate, however, it and the Congregation that codifies its doctrine must emerge from their bunkers. Newer and stronger bridges must be built to other Christian denominations, to the spectrum of non-Christian faiths and creeds. Such bridges must also be built to the sciences and to psychology – so that organised religion's two arch-rivals, in attempting to chart the unknown, can chart what is chartable, while not trespassing on domains of genuine, valid and necessary mystery. And bridges must be built to the arts, as well. In the past, the arts had aided organised religion in testifying to the sacred. By the mid nineteenth century, however, as Flaubert maintained, religion had abdicated all responsibility for such testimony; and the artist, as a matter of increasingly conscious and deliberate policy, had assumed the role abandoned by the priest. In attempting to comprehend and convey a sense of the sacred, the numinous, the spiritual or whatever one wishes to call it, the priest must now learn from the artist. The Pope himself, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, must display an understanding of spirituality comparable to that of Rilke, for example, Yeats or Patrick White.
Such are the challenges confronting the Church as a whole, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in particular, on the eve of the millennium. The extent to which the Church and the Congregation rise successfully to these challenges will determine the future of the Catholic faith in the twenty-first century.
Caption:
The standard of the Inquisition in Spain. Found
ed in 1478, the Spanish Inquisition was not finally abolished until 1834.
Caption:
A procession of Inquisitors and victims to an auto de fe in Goa, the Portuguese colony in India.
Caption:
The conclusion of an auto de fe in Goa, with public burnings of those convicted.
Caption:
Two ornate and theatrical autos de fe of the Spanish Inquisition in Plaza Mayor, Madrid (top) and Valladolid (above).
Caption:
On 30 June 1680 an auto de fe was held in Madrid in the presence of King Carlos II of Spain and his young bride. Fifty-one people were burned alive or in effigy.
Caption:
Conrad of Marburg, the ruthless and notorious head of the Inquisition in Germany from 1231. His excesses led to his denunciation by bishops and princes and to his murder in 1233.
Caption:
Jan Hus, the Bohemian ecclesiastical reformer, who was excommunicated by the Pope in 1411. Refusing to recant, he was burned alive in Constance in 1415.
Caption:
The Inquisition put their victims to the ‘question’ – they tortured them. If found guilty, they were handed over to the secular authorities to be ‘relaxed’ – that is, burned.
Caption:
Top and above Freemason John Coustos was arrested by the Inquisition in Lisbon in 1743, where he was tortured and interrogated for his crime of Freemasonry. After his release, he published a book in England in 1746 that described and illustrated his experience, The Sufferings of John Coustos for Freemasonry.
Caption:
A mass burning of witches in Toulouse in 1577; over 400 were burned that year. A Papal Bull of 1484 had established the reality of witchcraft to the Church's satisfaction.
Caption:
A sixteenth-century woodcut of three witches being burned in the Harz mountains, Germany.
Caption:
A seventeenth-century illustration of the Malefitz House built at Bamberg specifically for the interrogation and torture of suspected witches.
Caption:
Top and above The use of torture was recommended to all Inquisitors and secular judges when seeking confessions to support accusations of witchcraft.
Caption:
Testing the guilt of a witch in Sweden by ducking: if she drowned, she was presumed innocent; if she survived, it was presumed to be with the devil's aid and so she would be burned.
Caption:
Interrogation of a witch: any faint or fit was taken as proof of demonic possession.
Caption:
Illustrations depicting the general attitude towards witchcraft in the eighteenth century and earlier.
Caption:
Nine women burned for witchcraft at Dumfries, Scotland, 13 April 1659.
Caption:
Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed ‘Witchfinder-General’ in East Anglia during the English Civil War, who was responsible for many false accusations of witchcraft.
Notes
NOTE The full bibliographical details, when not cited here, are to be found in the Bibliography.
1: A Fiery Zeal for the Faith
1. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, p.78.
2. ibid., p.81
3. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, I, p. 53.
4. ibid., pp.54–5.
5. ibid., p.20.
6. Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade, p.93.
7. ibid.
2: Origins of the Inquisition
1. Vicaire, Saint Dominic and His Times, p. 146.
2. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, I, p.329.
3. ibid., p.329.
4. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France 1100–1250, p.208.
5. ibid., p.211.
6. ibid., pp.211–12.
7. ibid., p.214.
8. ibid., p.215.
9. ibid., p.216.
10. ibid., p.217.
11. ibid., p.224.
12. Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila, p.233.
13. Lea, op. cit., p.464.
14. Maycock, The Inquisition, p.157.
15. ibid., p.158.
16. Lea, op. cit., p.541.
17. ibid.
18. Maycock, op. cit., p.173.
19. Lea, op. cit., p.552.
20. ibid., p.553.
21. ibid., II, p.334.
22. ibid., I, p.494
23. ibid., p.368.
3: Enemies of the Black Friars
1. Stoyanov, The Hidden Tradition in Europe, p.xvi.
2. ibid., p.193.
3. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, II, p.355.
4. ibid.
5. ibid., p.357.
6. For example, 4th Grand Master Bertrand de Blanchefort, 1153–70. See a discussion of this point in Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, pp.44–5.
7. See discussion in ibid., p.44 referring to the work of the abbé M.-R. Mazières published in ‘La Venue et le séjour des Templiers du Roussillon à la fin du XIIIme sièle et au début du XIVme dans la vallée du Bézu (Aude)’, Mémoires de la Société des arts et des sciences de Carcassonne, 4th ser., vol. 3, Carcassonne, 1957–9, pp.229–54.
8. Addison, The History of the Knights Templars, p.206.
9. See the discussion in Baigent and Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge, pp.56–73, especially pp.64–5.
10. Lea, op. cit., I, p.260.
11. ibid., p.295.
12. ibid., p.296.
13. ibid., II, p.171.
14. ibid.
15. ibid., p.173.
4: The Spanish Inquisition
1. Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, p. 139.
2. ibid., p. 137.
3. ibid., p.49. The full text appears in Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, I, pp.587–90.
4. Kamen, op. cit., p.49.
5. ibid., p.50. The full text appears in Lea, op. cit., I, pp.590 – 92.
6. Lea, op. cit., I, p.174.
7. Kamen, op. cit., p.69.
8. ibid., p.174.
9. ibid., p.178.
10. ibid., p.176.
11. ibid., p. 186.
12. ibid., p.188.
13. Lea, op. cit., III, p. 5.
14. ibid., p.22.
15. ibid., p. 17.
16. Kamen, op. cit., p.20.
17. ibid., p.21.
18. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, p. 1090.
19. Kamen, op. cit., p.57.
20. ibid., p.301.
5: Saving the New World
1. Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, p.233.
2. ibid., p.233.
3. ibid., p.286.
4. ibid., p.347.
5. ibid., p.455.
6. ibid., p.461.
7. ibid., p.466.
8. ibid., p.510.
6: A Crusade Against Witchcraft
1. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, III, pp.493 – 4.
2. Bede, A History of the English Church and People, I, 30 (pp.86 – 7).
3. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p.521.
4. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, p.32.
5. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, IV, p.206.
6. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, III, p.497.
7. Malleus Maleficarum, p.29.
8. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, III, p.506.
9. ibid., p.498.
10. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, p. 194.
11. Malleus Maleficarum, pp.30 – 31.
12. ibid., p.19.
13. ibid., p.24.
14. ibid., p.19.
15. ibid., p.33.
16. ibid., p.53.
17. ibid., p.203.
18. ibid., pp.205–6.
19. ibid., p.208.
20. ibid., p. 117.
21. ibid., p.121.
22. ibid., p. 122.
23. ibid., p.221.
24. ibid., p.253.
25. ibid.
26. ibid., pp.267–8.
27. ibid., p.268.
28. ibid., p.111.
29. ibid., p.445.
30. ibid., p.470.
31. ibid.
32. ibid., p.471.
33. ibid.
34. ibid.
35. ibid.
36. ibid., p.473.
37. ibid., p.230.
38. ibid., p.483.
39. ibid., p.482.
40. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, IV, p.206.
41. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, III, p. 539.
7: Fighting the Heresy of Protestantism
1. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, p.66.
2. Chastel, Art of the Italian Renaissance, p.202.
3. ibid.
4. Kidd, The Counter-Reformation, p.44.
5. ibid., p.59.
6. ibid., p.57.
7. Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Vatican City, 1948. Thereafter issued with additions following p.509.
8. Agrippa, The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, p. 328.
9. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, VII, p.292.
10. ibid., p.293.
11. ibid.
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