God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  A second chapter, the Spanish Inquisition, commenced in the late fifteenth century. As King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile consolidated their rule, the Inquisition in a recently unified Spain pursued its targets independent of Rome. It was effectively an arm of the government, and the monarchs appointed its personnel. The Spanish Inquisition was directed primarily at Jews who had converted to Christianity and whose conversions were suspect—in other words, who were thought to be (or said to be) secretly “judaizing,” or reverting to Judaism. It also focused its efforts on the many Christianized Muslims, who might likewise be reverting to the faith of their heritage. The first inquisitor general in Spain, Tomás de Torquemada, a Dominican monk, embarked on a career that made his name synonymous with the Inquisition as a whole, sending some 2,000 people to be burned at the stake within a matter of years. The Inquisition in Spain would lead to a cataclysm: the expulsion, in 1492, of unconverted Jews from the kingdom.

  Because the domains of the Spanish sovereigns eventually extended to Asia and America, the Inquisition traveled far beyond Iberia. It was active in areas of what is now the United States—New Mexico, for instance. In Santa Fe, religious disputes in which the Inquisition played a role led to executions outside the Palace of the Governors, on the plaza, within sight of today’s boutique restaurants and upscale art galleries. From Spain the Inquisition spread to Portugal and thence to the Portuguese Empire. It could be found operating in Brazil and India, and in places between and beyond.

  The Spanish Inquisition ended at different times in different places. It survived in Mexico until 1820, when independence from Spain was just a few months away, and in Spain itself until 1834, when a royal decree abolished it once and for all. It conducted its last execution in 1826—the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster named Cayetano Ripoll, who had been convicted of heresy. (He was hanged rather than burned at the stake.) In some ultraconservative Catholic precincts there are those who contemplate the record of the Spanish Inquisition with at most a shrug: Yes, the methods were perhaps too enthusiastic—but it was a different time. Let’s not be anachronistic. And don’t forget the threat to the Church! A group of Catholic clerics and activist laypeople are today pressing to have Queen Isabella declared a saint.

  The third but not quite final chapter of the Inquisition, the so-called Roman Inquisition, began in the sixteenth century with the advent of the Reformation. This is the inquisition for which the palazzo was built. The main focus of the Roman Inquisition was Protestantism, but it did not spare Jews, homosexuals, people accused of practicing witchcraft, and certain kinds of quirky or annoying freethinkers and gadflies who might today be called “public intellectuals.” With the Roman Inquisition, the inquisitorial process was for the first time lodged in an organ of state under direct papal supervision. It was a centralized bureaucracy overseen by a papal inquisitor general, whose job was often a stepping-stone to the papacy itself. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, no fewer than three grand inquisitors went on to become pope. The inquisitorial bureaucracy was a fertile recruiting ground for bishops and cardinals. It populated the curia the way the security services now staff the Kremlin. The operations of the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition were entwined with those of the Congregation of the Index, which oversaw censorship efforts—this at a time when the diffusion of the printing press had made ideas more dangerous, and censorship more difficult, than ever before. It was the Roman Inquisition that put Galileo on trial for his arguments about the heavens. In some ways it behaved like a modern institution—its rhythms and procedures, and even its inanities, will be recognizable to anyone with experience of a large bureaucracy. But the chief target was modernity itself, and the ideas and cast of mind that underlay it.

  In 1870, the unification of Italy brought about the demise of the Papal States, the domains where the pope ruled as a temporal monarch. Except for matters of purely internal Church discipline, which carry no threat of secular penalty or physical harm but which can stifle intellectual life and dissent all the same, the Roman Inquisition was at an end. It would take almost sixty years for the pope’s dominion over the tiny walled 108-acre rump state of Vatican City to be recognized by Italy, in a concordat signed by Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. By then, the Congregation of the Inquisition had disappeared into the organizational charts of the Roman curia, though as one historian observes, “No death certificate has ever been issued.” The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith preserves the processes and functions of the Roman Inquisition in milder form. Until the 1960s, it remained in the business of censoring and banning books, though few took heed, and some of those who did pay attention did so for the wrong reasons. During my Catholic childhood, the relegation of a book to the Papal Index seemed to serve mainly as an inducement (though not always a reliable one, as those who tried reading Hobbes or Pascal under the covers with a flashlight will have discovered). Following the practice of the old Inquisition, the CDF still holds regular weekly meetings. It is to the Congregation that bishops, papal envoys, and others send complaints about teaching and theology—the modern-day analogue of medieval denunciations, though the official term is not “denunciation” but “delation,” as if to suggest referral for a medical procedure. I have sometimes found myself conflating the CDF with the CDC—the Centers for Disease Control. There is a certain parallel.

  The Inquisition, plainly, is not what it was. And yet in some ways it is as robust as ever. The historian Edward Peters has noted that the long decline of the actual Inquisition over the centuries was paralleled by the rise of a metaphorical Inquisition that lives on in folklore and popular culture, in works of art and literature, in comedy and polemic. Partly this was a response to, even a mythologizing of, a receding past—a coming to terms with what the Church had done, as perceived through many lenses. Partly it was a response to an evolving present. The world may have been rushing toward whatever we mean by “modernity,” but the methods and mind-set of the Inquisition were clearly not confined to the Church. They had taken on lives of their own and could be found in the institutions of the secular world. Arthur Koestler set his inquisitorial novel, Darkness at Noon, in a simulacrum of Stalin’s Russia, at the height of the purges in the 1930s. In the late 1940s, Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, cited the Inquisition in his summation at the close of the trial of major Nazi war criminals. In the 1950s, Arthur Miller evoked the witch hunts of colonial Massachusetts in his play The Crucible, a parable of the McCarthy era. Other writers—Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell—looked ahead to imagined societies, just over the horizon, where inquisitions of some kind had won control. To conduct surveillance, to impose belief, to censor, to manipulate, to punish people who think differently from those in power: in the modern world the inquisitorial dynamic was more in evidence than ever, and enabled by ever more powerful instruments.

  Dostoyevsky’s tale “The Grand Inquisitor,” in The Brothers Karamazov, is as much a secular parable as a theological one—it is about the corruption of any faith. Dostoyevsky wrestled with religious questions all his life. He also suffered censorship and imprisonment at the hands of the czarist state. On one occasion he endured the trauma of what turned out to be a mock execution. In “The Grand Inquisitor,” Jesus returns to the living world—to Seville, “in the most horrible time of the Inquisition”—and is brought before the leading cleric for interrogation. Jesus himself never speaks, but the Grand Inquisitor delivers a scathing indictment, condemning Jesus for the gift of moral freedom, which mankind can neither comprehend nor wisely use. But no matter. The Church understands full well the implication—understands that moral freedom leads only to trouble—and so has taken steps to curb it. The Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus, “We have corrected your deed. . . . And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep.” And he asks, “Why have you come to hinder us now?”

  In the end, Jesus makes no answer, save to kiss the old man on the l
ips. The Grand Inquisitor sets him free, but with this injunction: “Go, and do not come again.”

  Into the Archives

  The speed limit for motor vehicles inside Vatican City is 20 miles an hour. The forward motion of the curial bureaucracy is slower, as you’d expect with gerontocrats at the wheel. The Holy See takes its time. In 1979, the historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote a letter to Karol Wojtyla, who had recently been installed as Pope John Paul II. Ginzburg, who is Jewish, had firsthand experience of hatred and persecution. His father, Leone, was an anti-fascist agitator who was beaten to death by the Nazis, and young Carlo spent the war in hiding with his non-Jewish maternal grandmother, under the name Carlo Tanzi. In his letter, Ginzburg petitioned the pope to open the Archivio to scholars. Ginzburg no longer has a copy of what he sent—it is probably under seal in the archives somewhere—but he remembers that it began like this: “Chi le scrivo e uno storico ebreo, ateo, che ha lavorato per molti anni sui documenti dell’Inquisizione”—“The writer of the present letter is a Jewish historian, an atheist, who has been working for many years on inquisitorial papers.”

  He heard nothing for nearly twenty years, until, in 1998, he received a letter from Ratzinger inviting him to the opening of the Archivio. Ah, bad luck: he had a conflict, Ginzburg wrote back. Then came a phone call from a monsignor at the Vatican. Ginzburg again demurred. “That’s a pity,” said the monsignor, “because your letter played a role in the opening of the Sant’Uffizio archive.” “Which letter?” was Ginzburg’s reaction. The monsignor said, “Your letter to the pope.” “What a memory!” Ginzburg replied. He found a way to change his plans. The Archivio was not opened fully—scholars could examine documents only up to the death of Pope Leo XIII, in 1903. (“Naturally,” said a Vatican official, without elaboration.) But it was a start. “We know all the sins of the Church,” Cardinal Ratzinger said in making the announcement, “and I hope more will not be added to them.”

  In the academic and religious worlds, the partial opening of the Archivio was a very big deal. It was marked in Rome by two conclaves of Inquisition scholars. Ratzinger was present at the first of them, and the pope himself welcomed participants at the second. The ravages of Parkinson’s disease hampered John Paul’s speech, and those who heard him didn’t quite know what he had said until a transcript was made available the next day. Among other things, John Paul asked the historians not to “overstep the boundaries of their discipline and give an ethical verdict” on the Church’s behavior. Two years later, on Ash Wednesday 2000, the pope led a penitential procession through the streets of Rome to apologize for errors and misdeeds of the past—including, prominently, the Inquisition. Pointedly, the apology referred to deeds done by followers of the Church rather than by the Church itself.

  The man who today presides over the Archivio is Monsignor Alejandro Cifres Giménez, fifty-one, a diminutive Spaniard from Valencia (the city where, as it happens, the Spanish Inquisition’s last execution took place). Cifres is mild-mannered, genial, and competent. He sometimes displays a dry sense of humor. When I asked him whether the magazine I work for was being considered for papal condemnation, he said, “Not yet.” He listens to country-and-western music, has a CD player in his car, and once revealed that among his favorite movies is Happy, Texas, a comedy about convicts on the lam who disguise themselves as gay beauty-pageant coaches, which would probably have earned two thumbs down from the Papal Index. Cifres is not a historian. He is by training a theologian, and also a certified archivist and paleographer. He was brought to the Archivio to be an administrator, his superiors recognizing that the superannuated clerics who had long overseen the Inquisition’s documents were not what an open archive demanded. Cifres obeyed the orders of his bishop and came to work at the Congregation, and directly for Josef Ratzinger. It was Cifres who made the call to Ginzburg.

  The first time I met him, he led the way down a hall to his office near the stacks. I dawdled a little, to read the writing on the document boxes. The Archivio consists essentially of two parts. One is the historical archive, the Stanza Storica, which contains the old files of the Congregations of the Inquisition, the Holy Office, and the Index. But the Congregation is also a living administrative entity—it does Church business and generates paperwork every day, which becomes part of the active archive. A lot of that paperwork—about theological issues, about problems with the clergy—is highly sensitive. Theologians are still called to Rome, and are disciplined or silenced, sometimes after procedures akin to trials. Walking down the hall, I paused at a few shelves of modern files. Msgr. Cifres came back, took me by the elbow, and led me along. When I asked him what the files pertained to, he replied, “How do you say? Defrockings?” On that visit, I didn’t see as many defrocking files as I had imagined there would be, given the immensity of the pedophilia scandals. The shelves are surely groaning now.

  Sitting behind his desk, in Roman collar and black, short-sleeved clerical shirt, Cifres tried to convey a sense of how complicated his position is. To begin with, money is tight. In earlier times, the Inquisition could rely on a certain amount of revenue from confiscations (though not nearly as much, historians say, as has sometimes been alleged). Confiscation, happily, is no longer an option. Cifres had created a Friends of the Inquisition Archives program—Tabularii Amicorum Consociato, to give it the official name—to raise money from private donations. He also charges a modest fee for use of the Archivio. He did not mention plans for a gift shop.

  The filing system also presents challenges. There is a logic to it, but it is not a familiar logic. Nothing is classified according to any modern category, much less arranged alphabetically. What you need to know in order to find something is the bureaucratic structure and mental map of the Vatican itself—less technocratic Dewey decimal system than intricate “memory palace” of Matteo Ricci. Documents dealing with defrockings are in the Sacerdotal section. Documents dealing with apparitions, revelations, and other extraordinary phenomena are in the Disciplinary section. Documents dealing with censorship are in the Doctrinal section. A huge category under the Doctrinal rubric is called simply Dubia (“Doubts”)—documents relating to intimate questions of faith as relayed by priests and bishops from around the world. Doubt occupies an oddly exalted status in Catholic theology. It’s a state of mind experienced by everyone, but also an essential tool of philosophical inquiry: “doubting well” is a step toward truth, as Aristotle (and Aquinas) maintained. Theologians love to slice and dice. What kind of doubt have we here? Is it positive or negative? Speculative or practical? Simple or methodical? Real or fictitious? Distinguished careers have been built on a bedrock of doubt.

  In practice, certainty has been more highly prized by the Church. Until 1920, a placard over the doorway to the Vatican Archives threatened excommunication for anyone entering without permission. The Vatican is committed, it now says, to free inquiry in the archives. Access to the historical files has gradually been expanded—scholars can now study materials dating up to the death of Pope Pius XI, in 1939. But you can’t escape the reminders of censorship and other controversies. Wandering among the shelves in sections where the archival materials remain off-limits, I noticed rows of fat document boxes labeled “Küng,” “Boff,” “Lefebvre,” “Greene.” The urge to reach out and pull one down was almost irresistible. Hans Küng and Leonardo Boff are prominent Catholic theologians whose work has frequently been targeted by the Vatican. Marcel Lefebvre, a breakaway right-wing archbishop, was excommunicated in 1988 by Pope John Paul II. Graham Greene’s work came under intense Vatican scrutiny in the 1940s and 1950s.

  One day, among the stacks, I came across two polished wooden boxes, resembling old library card-catalogue drawers, with hinged wooden tops. The boxes rested one above the other on a wooden rack of Victorian vintage. The lower box was labeled “A–K,” the upper one “L–Z.” Inside each box, well-worn index cards ran its length, their upper edges velvety from use. I took one of the boxes down and flipped quickly through the cards, seei
ng citations for works by Sade, Sartre, Spinoza, and Swift, among hundreds of others.

  “What’s this?” I asked Msgr. Cifres, showing him the box. He took it from me, closed the top, and put it back on the rack. “That,” he said, “is the Index of Forbidden Books—the very last one.” I thought of the whispered horror from decades ago—the Papal Index!—and found it hard to imagine that it all came down to soiled cards in a shoebox. There is no longer a Congregation of the Index, once so closely associated with the Inquisition, and the much-feared Papal Index was discontinued in 1966. Its open coffin had rested briefly in my hands.

  The Index was not, however, completely repudiated; the very document that abolished the Index also reaffirmed its “moral value.” The CDF still looks closely at books and periodicals, and sometimes issues a monitum, or warning. The absence of an official Index does not mean the absence of things you should not read. Some will remember that although the Vatican has never taken an official position on the Harry Potter books, and certainly has not issued a monitum, Cardinal Ratzinger in 2003 raised an eyebrow in a private letter at the “subtle seductions” of the series. Ratzinger’s comments came even before the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth volume, which introduced the character Dolores Umbridge, the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts. Umbridge is a skilled practitioner of thought control: