Inquisition

See also History of the Inquisition

SECULAR JOURNALS

From Newsweek, 12/31/84, A BLAST FROM THE INQUISITION. "The Holy Office of the Inquisition is now called the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and is headed by German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger." This article said that the leader of this Congregation speaks, if at all, with his master's voice. When Ratzinger became head in 1981, it was with the understanding that he could speak up on his own from time to time. Recently, Ratzinger has spoken so scathingly of his church's failures since Vatican II that now the world's bishops are wondering how much he is speaking for the pope and how much for himself.

On every continent, Ratzinger finds the church in crisis. "Liberal- radical theologians are twisting the true faith, the laity are picking and choosing among doctrines to believe (Ed-Theologian Richard McBrien said that American Catholics have learned to be selectively obedient) and North Americans especially are succumbing to hedonism."

Ratzinger says that Vatican II quickly passed from healthy "self-criticism to self-destruction." Influenced by dissenting theologians, too many of the faithful lost the old Catholic conviction that in matters of faith "there is one truth and that this truth is definable in a precise way, that is, by Church authorities."

Today, Ratzinger believes, the very core of Catholic truth is betrayed by dissenting theologians who play down the divinity of Christ and play up the notion that people of other faiths - or no faith at all - can experience the grace of God without accepting Jesus Christ.

At the very least, Ratzinger's report on the state of the church confirms the growing feeling that the pope is shortening his leash on dissenters. The (24 nuns who publicly challenged the church's stand against abortion) insisted that the church cannot impose a consensus on any issue. Clearly, Ratzinger thinks otherwise and so does the pope.

In the book, SAINT JOAN OF ARC by V. Sackville West, we have an interesting note on the Inquisition. Joan had just been renounced by the Inquisition as a "relapsed heretic" , and the Canon of Rouen Cathedral expressed himself thus, "That Jeanne shall be abandoned to secular justice, with the request that they shall act mercifully towards her."

This phrase does not mean what its amiable wording suggests. It is a mere formula, devised by the ingenuity of the Church, a euphemistic way of saying that the culprit shall be burnt. These niceties were perfectly understood between the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities. Thus, while it was recognized that the Church could neither shed blood nor put to death, it was equally well recognized that excommunication was its peculiar weapon, and that, once excommunicated, the outlaw could no longer claim either its protection or its jurisdiction. The handing over of an excommunicate to secular justice meant that the Church blandly washed its hands of all further responsibility, knowing full well, as a contemporary judge neatly expressed it, that "what the one had begun, the other would complete."

Vatican symposium to reexamine Inquisition

From THE RECORD, page A-10

By CANDICE HUGHES (The Associated Press)

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican assembled a blue-ribbon panel of scholars Thursday to examine the Inquisition and declared its readiness to submit the chuch's darkest institution to the judgment of history.

The three-day symposium is part of the Roman Catholic Church's countdown to 2000. Pope John Paul II wants the church to begin the new millennium with a clear conscience, which means facing up to past sins.

For many people, the Inquisition is one of the church's worst transgressions. For centuries, ecclesiastical "thought police" tried and tortured people and burned them at the stake for heresy and other crimes.

"The church cannot cross the threshold of the new millennium without pressing its children to purify themselves in repentence for their errors, infidelity, incoherence," Cardinal Roger Etchagaraty said, opening the conference.

The inquisitors went after Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and presumed heretics. They persecuted scientists such as Galileo. They banned the Bible in anything but Latin, which few ordinary people could read.

The Inquisition began in the 13th century and lasted into the 19th. An index of banned books endured even longer, until 1966. And it was 1992 before the church rehabilitated Galileo, whom it had condemned for saying the Earth wasn't the center of the universe.

The symposium, which gathers from inside and outside the church, is the Vatican's first critical look at the church's record of repression.

Among other things, it will give scholars a chance to compare notes on what they've found in the secret Vatican archives on the Inquisition, which the Holy See opened only recently.

"The church is not afraid to submit its past to the judgment of history," said Etchegaray, a Frenchman who leads the Vatican's Commission on the Grand Jubilee.

Closed to the public and press, the symposium is not expected to produce any definitive statement from the Vatican on the Inquisition. That is expected in 2000 as part of the grand "mea culpa" at the start of Christianity's third millennium.

The great question is whether the pontiff will ask forgiveness for the sins of the church's members, as he did with the Holocaust, or for the sins of the church itself. Unlike the Holocaust, the Inquisition was a church initiative authorized by the popes themselves.

Etchegaray on Thursday swept aside the idea that it can be seen as a series of local campaigns whose excesses might be blamed on secular authorities.

There was only one Inquisition, he said, and it was undeniably an ecclesiastical institution.

The pontiff may give a hint as to his thinking on Saturday, when he meets with participants in the conference.

About 50 scholars from Europe, the United States, and Latin America are taking part.