God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (24 page)

A Second Wind

By 1840, only the Roman Inquisition remained alive. It was already a weakened institution, its temporal sway limited to the Papal States in the central region of the Italian peninsula. Within them, the Inquisition could still act in definitive ways, as the case of Edgardo Mortara had shown. But its days, too, were numbered. On September 20, 1870, the military forces of the Kingdom of Italy trained their cannons on a section of Rome’s ancient Aurelian Wall and commenced a barrage that would last for three hours. The process of Italian reunification had been under way for decades, and the Papal States represented the last holdout. Pope Pius IX remained obdurate, but after France withdrew its protection—Napoleon III had just fallen from power—the outcome was never in doubt. Italian forces laid siege to Rome, and for the sake of appearances, the pope deployed Swiss Guards and the multinational Papal Zouaves to defend the walls. They surrendered when Italian artillery opened a breach not far from the Porta Pia. The pope refused to recognize the unified government and withdrew into the walled enclave around St. Peter’s, becoming the self-proclaimed “prisoner of the Vatican.”
A monument on the restored Aurelian Wall, marking the place where the artillery did its damage, states simply, “Through this breach Italy once again entered Rome.”

In terms of temporal power, the authority of the Holy See was now restricted to 108 acres. But the moment was a turning point. From that time onward, the Church would seek to put its stamp more firmly—and more globally—on the minds of believers, particularly the intellectual class among them. This class included not only theologians, who typically held posts at Church-related institutions, and were therefore subject to some sort of control, but also the growing ranks of educated Catholics, who kept informed and tried to think for themselves. Modern communications, which helped to create this class and make it significant, provided tools that anyone could employ. They could be used to nourish intellectual freedom or to discourage it.

One possible approach was epitomized by Pope Leo XIII, who succeeded Pius IX in 1878. Leo was the first pope who seems recognizably of our own time. He was thin and ascetic, a skilled linguist, a canny diplomat. He believed in the value of scholarship of a contemporary kind. It was Leo who opened up much of the Vatican archives (but not the Inquisition archives) to independent researchers, and who re-established the Vatican Observatory.
Leo was the first pope whose movements are preserved in a motion picture, and the first pope whose voice survives in a recording.
His 1891 encyclical
Rerum Novarum,
with its critique of economic inequality and its prescient warning that neither capitalism nor communism offered the answer, made Catholic social teaching a living force. The encyclical joined an ongoing debate in the world outside the Church, and joined it squarely and with distinction. It was headline news in Europe and America—highly atypical for papal pronouncements up to that point. With electronic messaging literally at their fingertips, reporters followed the progress of its drafting and editing. They published leaks.
They tracked the reaction and the debate in real time. An account in one British newspaper begins, “The
Standard
’s Rome correspondent telegraphs on Thursday . . .”
Rerum Novarum
was an event, and is widely cited to this day. The
New York Times
in 1895 called Leo “not an individual, but the expression of his century.”

Leo was hardly “liberal” in the way secular observers would use that term, and some of the ways in which he was “modern” were oddly antiquarian. Once, years ago, I spent several weeks with a group of Dominican priests outside Rome and in Louvain. Using the most sophisticated techniques available, they were attempting to produce, in scores of volumes, the perfect Latin edition of the works of Thomas Aquinas.
It was a task that Leo himself had set in motion a hundred years earlier, and the Dominicans were still at it. The work will not be finished for decades. (One of the scholars involved, Antoine Dondaine, also happened to be the foremost authority on Inquisition manuals.) The editions they had published were superb—each a testament to fastidious scholarship and deep faith. It may seem counterintuitive that this monument to a thirteenth-century theologian would be erected just as physicists were coming to terms with quantum mechanics. Leo would have observed, in his own defense, that Thomism represented a philosophy in which religion and science are not antithetical. A scientist would have replied, But they
are
.

Leo’s was one approach to engagement with an evolving world. The other approach prevailed. It was a sensibility that considered the world’s Catholics as, in effect, the spiritual subjects of a spiritual monarch. Doctrine was rigid, hierarchy was sacred, and theological speculation was impermissible. In 1864, Pius IX had promulgated his Syllabus of Errors, a list of eighty beliefs that Catholics must condemn.
These included the belief that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church”; the belief that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true”; and the belief that the pope “ought to come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”
The first Vatican Council, under the same pope, had proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility. It was this peremptory action, not the claims of some secular ruler, that provoked Lord Acton’s famous remark: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Acton, himself a Catholic, filed trenchant dispatches from the council and tried to rally opposition to infallibility. In his eyes, one historian writes, the doctrine epitomized all the tendencies he hated: “towards power and against freedom, towards persecution and against toleration, towards concealment and against openness.”

The Holy See may have been reduced to a few gilded acres, but there were no real limits on what today would be called the papacy’s virtual presence. The Congregation of the Inquisition was formally abolished in 1908—that is to say, its name was retired—but its functions were rolled over into a new Congregation of the Holy Office, which, under a sweeping reorganization in 1917, was given broad new powers to police the faithful.
The Congregation of the Index was also abolished—but not the Index of Forbidden Books
,
which was lodged within the Holy Office. The governing structures of the Church were powerfully centralized—and focused on the papacy—in a way they had not been before. Theologically and politically, the rest of the Church needed to fall into line.

The Holy Office was the point of the lance. As the writer Paul Collins has noted, “The interests of the Inquisition were increasingly focused outward to the universal Church.”
The conservative and controlling mind-set of this period is perfectly preserved in the form of the
Catholic Encyclopedia,
first published in 1907. In the entry on “inquisition” it observes, “History does not justify the hypothesis that the medieval heretics were prodigies of virtue, deserving our sympathy.” It defines “censorship of books” as “a supervision of the press in order to prevent any abuse of it.”

The decisive event at the turn of the century was the contest over what would come to be called Modernism—indeed, would come to be called the Modernist heresy. Modernism had no single source or target, and was not really a movement until labeled a deviant phenomenon by the Church—a textbook instance of the power of a name to define a foe into existence. Some of those who would be called Modernists were exponents of the new biblical criticism: the idea, which had gathered momentum and credibility throughout the nineteenth century, that the Bible must be understood as a historical document, its truths conditioned by authors writing in the context of particular times. Other Modernists were attuned to the challenges of science—notably the theory of evolution and its consequences. Still others had social concerns in mind—democracy, nationalism—and speculated about how the Church might respond, adapt, encourage.

From the perspective of a hundred years on, one can see that the Modernists were destined to “win” on all counts in the long run. In the short run, they would lose, being driven from teaching, from the priesthood, or from the Church altogether. George Tyrrell, a Jesuit, was expelled from his order and, when he died, was refused burial in a Catholic cemetery. (A priest who made the sign of the cross over his grave was suspended.)
The movement was condemned by Pius X in an encyclical in 1907; the pope hurled the word “anathema” repeatedly, like thunderbolts.
In 1910, the Holy Office mandated that all clerics worldwide take a special anti-Modernist oath—“lengthy and ferocious,” in the words of the historian Eamon Duffy, “and creating a stifling ethos of unjust and suspicious hyper-orthodoxy.”
The oath was not abandoned until the 1960s. I knew priests who had to take it, and who described it openly as a charade—gibberish to be mouthed in order to pass through a hoop. A friend of Duffy’s, a parish priest in Clapham, remembers being made to take the anti-Modernist oath on four separate occasions as he moved from one stage to the next on his clerical path.

“Let’s Not Make a Jonah of Him”

The long, haunting ordeal of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, one of the premier Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, began a little more than a decade after the advent of the oath. It would continue for thirty-five years, and although vindication of a sort did one day come, it did not come in his lifetime. Teilhard was born in France and in 1911 was ordained a Jesuit priest. The Jesuits have long been regarded as the intellectual elite among Catholic religious orders, and they are typically trained in academic specialties beyond theology. Rather than cloistering themselves away from the secular world, as contemplative orders do, they engage actively in that world. Among traditionalists, they have a reputation for skepticism, epitomized in George Tyrrell’s famous prayer: “O God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.” Teilhard’s academic work was initially in geology and paleontology. He spent years on excavations in China, and was involved in the discovery and analysis of Peking Man. His lifelong immersion in paleontology informed his theological speculations about human origins and the future of human evolution. These were dangerous topics.

In the early 1920s, an essay on original sin that Teilhard had circulated privately came to the attention of the Holy Office. To this day, no one is quite sure how it did. Original sin refers to the doctrine that humanity exists in a fallen state—a condition represented by the transgression of Adam and Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. “There is a twofold and serious difficulty in retaining the former representation of original sin,” Teilhard wrote in 1922. “It may be expressed as follows: ‘The more we bring the past to life again by means of science, the less we can accommodate either Adam or the earthly paradise.’”
Statements like this caused official consternation. Teilhard was summoned to Rome and asked to sign a statement that (in his words) he would “never
say
or write anything against the traditional position of the Church on original sin.”

In what was to become a pattern, he submitted obediently, though with frustration, and signed the statement. One factor in his decision was summarized in a letter: “I weighed up the enormous scandal and damage that an act of indiscipline on my part would have caused.”
In another letter, Teilhard wrote, “Some people feel happy in the visible church; but for my own part I think I shall be happy to die in order to be free of it—and to find our Lord outside of it.”
Several years later, Teilhard completed a book called
The Divine Milieu,
a work of spirituality that contemplated Christian belief in the context of evolutionary destiny. He circulated the manuscript privately, and then sought permission to publish. Permission was denied. The same fate befell virtually all his subsequent works, including his masterpiece,
The Phenomenon of Man,
which describes human evolution as a path toward greater complexity and collective consciousness. The Holy Office leaned on him hard, forbidding Teilhard to teach, forbidding him to accept a chair at the Collège de France, even forbidding him to reside in Paris, historically a hotbed of theological sedition. Once, in Rome, in the late 1940s, Teilhard looked across a room during a cocktail party and saw a Dominican theologian from the Holy Office—a man who had been aggressively involved in the anti-Modernist campaign, and who had denounced Teilhard publicly only a few years before. Teilhard pointed him out to a friend, saying, “This is the man who would like to see me burned at the stake.”
And yet in every instance, Teilhard complied with the wishes of his superiors. Thus, from a letter to the head of the Jesuit Order, in 1947: “The Father Provincial has recently communicated to me your letter concerning me of 22 August. I have no need to say that, with God’s help, you may count on me.”

By the time of his death, in 1955, Teilhard was recognized worldwide for his scientific achievements. But he had seen none of his greatest theological work appear in print. It would all be published after his death—rapidly—eliciting a stern and public condemnation from the Vatican. Citing “ambiguities and even serious errors,” the Holy Office urged priests and teachers “to protect minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers of the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his associates.”
The warning was reiterated in 1981. In 2009, Pope Benedict made a positive reference, in passing, to Teilhard in a sermon, prompting speculation that his status might soon be officially upgraded. At this writing, that had not yet happened.

A less severe but no less characteristic picture of the internal machinations of the Holy Office involves the odd case of Graham Greene, a convert to Catholicism. Greene’s novels frequently raised issues of theological ambiguity. They also led to narrative resolutions that provoked thinking people to reflection, and the Holy Office to apoplexy. One novel in particular,
The Power and the Glory,
about a deeply flawed “whisky priest” in Mexico—a fugitive on the run from anticlerical authorities, who will kill him if they can—attracted vehement criticism from conservative Catholics. When he wrote the novel, in 1940, Greene may have been less concerned about threats from the Vatican than about threats from 20th Century Fox. (By one account, he had gone to Mexico, where the idea for the novel germinated, in order to escape a libel action, brought by the studio, for an article he had written about Shirley Temple’s performance in
Wee Willie Winkie.
)
Because the book was in English—not one of the traditionally civilized or Catholic languages—the Holy Office was slow to take notice. That changed after it was published in France and Germany, and complaints began to arrive in Rome.