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

by Cullen Murphy

  Beyond the individual cases is the overarching attempt to exert a more systemic form of control—for instance, by putting Catholic universities on a tighter leash, a move embodied in the 1990 document Ex corde Ecclesiae. Among other things, the CDF demanded that presidents, rectors, and professors of theology and philosophy at Catholic universities take an oath declaring that they adhere “with religious obsequium” to whatever the pope and bishops advance as official doctrine at the moment, even if doctrine on some particular issue has no claim to being definitive. In the United States, that demand has been resisted.

  The experience of being called to Rome for interrogation—to answer charges that may be vague, brought by accusers who may be unknown, in accordance with procedures that may remain a mystery—leaves a bitter aftertaste. The German theologian Bernard Häring, who was interrogated but never condemned, compared it to what he had endured at the hands of the Nazis. “During the Second World War,” he wrote in a memoir, “I stood before a military court four times. Twice it was a case of life and death. At that time I felt honored because I was accused by enemies of God.” But to stand accused by the Church he had served all his life? “I would rather stand once again before a court of war of Hitler.”

  In his book The Rule of Benedict, David Gibson offers this vignette from another case:

  When Charles Curran met with Ratzinger in Rome in 1986, before he was stripped of his teaching post, he demanded to face his accusers. Ratzinger said, “Your own works have been your ‘accusers,’ and they alone.” Curran told the cardinal, “You are a respected German theologian, and are on a first-name basis with six German moralists whom I could name, and you know as well as I do that they are saying the same things as I am saying.” Ratzinger replied, “Well, if you would want to delate these people, we will open a dossier on them.” Curran responded, “I’m not here to do your dirty work.”

  The Pelvic Region

  In 2005, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, acting at the behest of Cardinal Ratzinger, effectively removed Thomas Reese, a political scientist and a Jesuit, from his post as the editor of America, a magazine published by the Jesuit Order. Reese had written on Church affairs for years, and continues to do so. His book Inside the Vatican, published before he became editor, is regarded as the authoritative modern account of the Holy See’s operations. Reese remembers once asking Josef Ratzinger whether, given the CDF’s imperfect track record, he ever worried that he might be silencing people who would one day be rehabilitated. Ratzinger replied noncommittally: Well, you pray and do as best you can.

  Reese’s own firing came after years of confrontation, through intermediaries, with Ratzinger—a delicate proxy war whose conclusion was foreseeable. In a balanced way, America had made a point of covering a wide range of controversial Church issues, often involving what Reese calls “the pelvic region”—women’s ordination, clerical celibacy, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, stem-cell research—but also extending to freedom of conscience and the governance of the Church. Once, in an editorial, the magazine had referred to the procedures of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as “inquisitional.”

  One oddity of Reese’s case is that as the affair played out, Reese never had any direct communication with the Vatican. The pressure was forceful, but delicate and indirect. Because of the Jesuit organizational structure, the CDF deals with the order through the superior general, in Rome, who at the time was Peter-Hans Kolvenbach. Kolvenbach would meet periodically with Ratzinger, and Ratzinger would convey his complaints. Kolvenbach would then contact the president of the Jesuit conference in the United States, who would talk to Reese.

  At one point, the Vatican went so far as to insist that America accept the imposition of a censorship board, and proceeded to appoint the member bishops. Reese consulted with Cardinal Avery Dulles, a fellow Jesuit. “Do you think it would help if I wrote Cardinal Ratzinger?” Dulles asked. Reese remembers saying, in effect, “Yes! Yes! Be my cardinal-protector!” The push for a censorship board lost steam—but not the dissatisfaction at the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio. “I never could find out who was actually complaining about me,” Reese recalls. “They would say, ‘Well, bishops are complaining,’ but no one would ever tell you which bishops were complaining.”

  Despite the support of his Jesuit superiors, Reese’s position eventually became untenable. Looking back, his main regret is that he did not attempt, at some point along the way, to get a direct response from Ratzinger. The question he wanted to ask was: “Can a Catholic publication print articles that are critical of what you say, or not?” By the time Reese was relieved of his position, it was too late anyway. Ratzinger was no longer the prefect of the CDF—he was the pope.

  Once, some while ago, I spent an afternoon talking with Hans Küng about his long, troubled history with the Holy Office. He was living on the outskirts of Tübingen, and a large picture window in his house framed the Swabian Alps to the south—the mountains somehow symbolizing, in my mind if not in his, the barrier between him and Rome. He came across as a thoroughly modern sort of man, someone who had always traveled easily among global elites of whatever kind. He is not without a certain self-regard. I remember that, in a stairwell, he kept the framed original of a David Levine caricature of himself. It had run in the New York Review of Books. One imagines that he would sooner accept editing from Jason Epstein than from Josef Ratzinger. But he did join Ratzinger for dinner a few years ago, shortly after the cardinal became pope. The two men agreed beforehand that any discussion of doctrinal differences or Küng’s possible rehabilitation would be off-limits. They met at Castel Gondolfo, the pope’s summer residence, and talked for four hours.

  The dinner invitation lay far in the future—and was something not even to be imagined—on that afternoon in'Tübingen. Our conversation was about the past, about origins. “Always the first thing to ask about doctrine is, Would Jesus himself understand this?” Küng explained. “Karl Rahner once said that Jesus would not have understood the first Vatican Council on infallibility. But the Church instead asks the question of Grand Inquisitor: Why do you, Jesus, come to disturb us? We have our dogmas about you. We know much better than you. You were not so outspoken. You were not so clear. We have made it much better than you said it.”

  6. War on Error

  The Secular Inquisition

  Without torture I know we shall not prevail.

  —SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM, 1575

  Politics is not religion, or if it is,

  then it is nothing but the Inquisition.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, THE REBEL , 1958

  “If Mr. Lea Is Not Stopped . . .”

  THE VAN PELT LIBRARY at the University of Pennsylvania dates back to the 1960s, and like many institutional buildings from that era, it seems designed to make your heart sink. But take the elevator to the sixth floor, and you will find to your relief that the doors open on to the nineteenth century. In 1881, the historian Henry Charles Lea replaced his ample garden with an equally ample library at his home in Philadelphia. After his death, the books and furnishings were given to the university. The walls, thirty feet high, are paneled in eastern black walnut. Dramatic staircases rise to a balcony that girds the room. Marble busts gaze down from the upper reaches. The bookshelves hold 7,000 volumes, and the books are enclosed by doors of glass or mesh, or held back by velvet ropes, as if the rambunctious contents demand restraint.

  It is an important room. Lea was the most accomplished American historian of his era, and at his desk in this library he produced three weighty tomes on the Medieval Inquisition and four volumes of equal heft on the Spanish Inquisition. The achievement is all the more remarkable given that Lea had almost nothing to work with: the relevant research materials simply weren’t available in America. In 1842, an exasperated president of Brown University had noted that “the means do not exist among us for writing a book, which in Europe would be called learned, on almost any subject whatever.”

  Lea was s
eventeen when that statement was made, a quirky and precocious boy with a particular interest in conches. His family was educated and wealthy (the money came from publishing), and Lea was taught almost entirely at home by a private instructor. As his interests turned to history, he confronted the handicap all American scholars faced: few books, no manuscripts. But Lea had money to spend. He wrote to booksellers across Europe, acquiring what he needed. Libraries and monasteries lent him original manuscripts. If manuscripts were for sale, he bought them. If they could not be borrowed or bought, he had them copied. It was a good time to be a book buyer. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had upended the nobility and the Church; private libraries beyond counting had been dumped on the market. “If Mr. Lea is not stopped,” Benjamin Disraeli warned, “all the libraries of Europe will be removed to Philadelphia.”

  The Inquisition was not Lea’s original focus. He worked up to it slowly, starting with medieval French history, then ecclesiastical history, then legal history. In hindsight, it’s not hard to see where all this study was leading. The inventories he kept show that he acquired his first books on the Inquisition in 1868, including a very old copy of Nicholas Eymerich’s manual for inquisitors. All the while, he was running the family business (his company, Carey & Lea, held the U.S. rights to Poe, Austen, and Dickens, and to Gray’s Anatomy) and pursuing a multifarious career as a doer of good (public health, civil service reform) in that edifying nineteenth-century way. Eventually, in the 1880s and 1890s, Lea turned to writing the great works on the Inquisition that would secure his reputation, tossing off monographs on clerical celibacy and the moriscos of Spain in between. When he died, in 1909, he had just undertaken a major study of witchcraft. He left behind a collection of books and manuscripts relating to the Inquisition that was believed at the time to be unsurpassed anywhere outside the Vatican.

  Lea was sometimes criticized as an amateur, but in terms of results he was by any standard a professional. He was not the first to attempt to place the study of the Inquisition on a sound historical footing. In the early seventeenth century, a Venetian named Paolo Sarpi took up his pen—in voluminous letters, in journal articles, and in a pseudonymously published book on the Council of Trent. Sarpi was not an objective observer. He had been forced to defend himself before the Inquisition more than once. But his perspective has an up-to-date feel about it: he saw the Inquisition’s work less as a purely religious undertaking than as an effort driven by political rivalries and personal agendas, as would be true of any program advanced by any state power.

  Later in the century, the Protestant pastor and theologian Philipp van Limborch, in the Netherlands, published his massive Historia Inquisitionis, which encompassed all the inquisitions—Medieval, Spanish, Portuguese, Roman—and consisted largely of verbatim extracts from Inquisition documents, skillfully arranged and contextualized. Limborch was a close friend of John Locke’s and shared his views on religious toleration. Locke’s Letter on Toleration was dedicated to him. The religious wars of Europe were over, but not religious persecution. Plenty of examples were ready to hand, Catholic and Protestant alike. John Calvin’s Genevan Consistory, an ecclesiastical court, meted out severe discipline in matters of doctrine and morals. Limborch’s denomination, the Arminians, had suffered greatly at the hands of the Calvinists. But in the eyes of both Limborch and Locke, the Inquisition stood as the most imposing counterexample to the state of affairs an enlightened polity should embrace.

  Then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Juan Antonio Llorente published his monumental Histoire Critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne, a study of the Spanish Inquisition that made extensive use of the archives in Madrid. Llorente knew his way around the material: he had been its archivist for years. For a time, he had served as secretary to the Inquisition. Some of his preoccupations seem contemporary: How did the Inquisition’s bureaucracy actually work? What happened locally, on the ground, when decisions were sent forth from the tribunal in Madrid? What role did the Inquisition come to play in court politics? What long-term effects did it have on Spain’s national life—for instance, on its intellectual vitality and its economic development?

  Questions of this kind were new. Today we take for granted a form of storytelling about the past that strives for at least some objectivity, whatever the writer’s agenda may be. Even the most controversial subjects can be addressed soberly—indeed, are most persuasively addressed that way. The battle over the Inquisition, in contrast, had been waged mainly by polemicists, their outlooks colored by creed. Protestant Britain harbored deep suspicions of Catholic Spain, with some cause, and thus the Black Legend became a common trope in literature and art throughout the English-speaking world. The cruelties of the Inquisition, the superstitions of Catholicism, the brutal conquest of the Americas, the threat of the Armada—all this was combined into a demonic caricature of Spaniards and their culture (calling forth from Spain, in response, the White Legend, which advanced an angelic caricature with equal fervor). The impact of the Black Legend has been durable. It’s why Hispanic peasants always cross themselves in the movies, and why Latin lovers can never be trusted.

  Henry Charles Lea was hardly immune to it, and he harbored the suspicions of his class and time toward Roman Catholicism. He was no admirer of the Church, and saw the Inquisition as the embodiment of forces that stood athwart the advance of civilization. “I have not paused to moralize,” Lea wrote, “but I have missed my aim if the events narrated are not so presented as to teach their appropriate lesson.” But his work marks the point at which Inquisition history, passing into the hands of true historians, was relaxed to the secular arm.

  It wasn’t just Inquisition history that made the transition. By the time of Lea’s death, the Inquisition template, or something like it, had long since passed into hands other than those of the Church. One historian observes that the ground had been well prepared: “The Inquisition, church and state courts, and the legal codes of the Church’s Lateran Council (1215), taken together, meant that early modern Europeans inherited a fully fledged apparatus of persecution and an intellectual tradition that justified killing in the name of God.”

  A set of disciplinary procedures, targeting specified groups, codified in law, organized systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, justified by a vision of the one true path, backed by institutional power: following this definition, inquisitions are not hard to find. Sometimes they retain a religious dimension—for example, the Elizabethan campaign against English Catholics and other dissenters from the established church; or the campaigns against doctrinal foes by Calvin in Geneva and Zwingli in Zurich; or, closer to our own era, the “dirty war” in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, waged by conservative, arch-Catholic generals against a shadowy Marxist menace. Sometimes the visionary dimension is secular (think of France after the Revolution, or the fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth century). Sometimes the needs of the state itself become a kind of absolute (as during the Algerian War in the 1950s, or in Brazil during the period of military governments in the 1960s and 1970s). Add to this an element of fear—the sense of existential threat that lay behind the Red Scare in America after World War II, or, also in the United States, some of the antiterrorism measures enacted during the past decade in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

  Inquisitions may combine all these elements, but they also require an infrastructure. In his book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, Jacobo Timerman gives a searing account of his torture and interrogation at the hands of the Argentine military. He begins the book by calmly remarking an irony: that his Jewish family had fled the Spanish-controlled Netherlands for the Ukraine in the sixteenth century, to escape the Inquisition, and had then fled the Ukraine for Argentina in the 1920s, to escape the Soviets. The Jews of his village in the Ukraine had been rounded up and killed by the Nazis in 1942. Now, in the late 1970s, Timerman had come full circle, a captive of people with the same persecutorial ze
al that had driven his family from the Netherlands four centuries earlier.

  Timerman does not dwell on the institutional apparatus that an inquisition requires. The same tools that sustained the Inquisition sustained the dirty war, during the course of which some 30,000 Argentinians, most of them young, were arrested, tortured, and killed. Language itself was warped. People thrown alive from airplanes into the sea were referred to by the authorities as “fish food”; the term for torture was “intensive therapy.” But the structural underpinnings were institutional. “As newspaper accounts of the time declared,” one scholar later wrote, “this junta appeared to consist of professional bureaucrats.” She described the immense governmental effort involved in compiling lists, building camps, training interrogators.

  Transportation, communications, and other institutional conditions have to be arranged. Indoctrination has to be well advanced to ensure loyalty and expertise. In short, coordination and advance planning are required, and these things take time and a high degree of organizational experience. . . . This degree of advance organization involves an extensive bureaucratic decision-making and implementation capacity.