Saturday, November 21, 1998

The pope's dilemma: How to confront the Inquisition

By CANDICE HUGHES

Associated Press

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- In a driving rain in the Czech Republic, the pope asked forgiveness for the crimes of Catholics against Protestants during the Counter-Reformation. On a bleak African island, he apologized for believers who traded in slaves. In a stadium built by Hitler, he said too few Catholics resisted the Holocaust.

Now Pope John Paul II is preparing to confront the Inquisition, one of the darkest chapters in the history of his beloved church. The Inquisition is a symbol of cruelty and intolerance; the confrontation is bound to be painful.

For centuries, the church's "thought police" tried, tortured and burned people at the stake for heresy and other crimes. The holy inquisitors went after Protestants, Jews and Muslims. They persecuted scientists and philosophers. In some countries they even banned the Bible in anything but Latin, which few people could read.

The Inquisition began in the 13th century and lasted into the 19th century. Its index of banned books endured even longer, until 1966. Galileo, condemned in 1633 for saying the Earth went around the sun, had to wait until 1992 for rehabilitation.

What some view as a modern version of the Inquisition exists even today: The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, a guardian of Roman Catholic orthodoxy which disciplines wayward theologians and brings restive bishops to heel.

Now the church is about to embark on its third millennium and John Paul says he wants it to do so with a clear conscience, which means owning up to sins. But whose sins? The sins of believers? Or those of the church itself?

It's a delicate question and inside the Curia, the powerful and protective Vatican bureaucracy, there is resistance to his call for a grand "mea culpa" in the year 2000. An institutional apology risks undermining the authority of the church, the rock on which rests the faith of an estimated 1 billion people.

Even acknowledging personal errors could be risky if the people are popes, supremely powerful leaders endowed with the awesome -- though rarely exercised -- power of infallibility.

So far, the Vatican's approach has been to speak of individual, not institutional, sins.

In its pronouncement on the Holocaust earlier this year, it said, "We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the church ... ."

But, unlike the Holocaust or slavery, the Inquisition was an ecclesiastical institution, authorized by the popes and run by the church.

The Vatican this year opened most of its secret archives on the Inquisition and held a symposium of some of the world's top experts, declaring itself unafraid "to submit its past to the judgment of history."

But the pope told his guests they had not been summoned to make moral judgments. Instead, he said, they were being asked to "help in the most precise possible reconstruction" of the Inquisition's historical context.

Others say the Vatican may have little to fear. For several decades scholars have been reappraising the Inquisition, and some now maintain that the justice it dispensed, though brutal, was neither capricious nor unusual for the times.

"The 'black legend' has been destroyed," said historian Carlo Ginzburg, author of several groundbreaking works on the Inquisition. "But this doesn't erase the ultimate wrongness of killing people for their ideas."

The statue of a dark, hooded figure stands in the Campo di Fiori piazza in central Rome, not far as the crow flies from the Vatican itself. Every Feb. 17, people place flowers there in a quiet tribute to freedom of thought.

Giordano Bruno was one of the most forward-looking philosophers and scientists of his time. But in the eyes of the Inquisition, he was a heretic. He said the universe was infinite -- and the Earth not its center. He espoused the peaceful coexistence of religions based on mutual understanding and free discussion. He said God was everywhere in nature.

His trial dragged on for seven years. But Bruno refused to renounce his ideas. "Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it," he told his inquisitors when they pronounced his death sentence.

A few days later, on Feb. 17, 1600, he was taken to the piazza. His tongue was gagged. And he was burned at the stake.