My, but the newspapers are outdoing themselves in the attempt to come up with clever headlines for this one. From the Sun-Times, we get Vatican: Inquisition overblown; from the Dallas Morning News, Vatican: Inquisition overblown; from the International Herald Tribune, of all places, we get Vatican downsizes the Inquisition
John Paul II Letter on Inquisition Symposium
On Publication of the Minutes of 1998 Conference
Date: 2004-06-15
To the Venerable Brother
Lord Cardinal Roger Etchegaray
Former President of the Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000
1. I have received with profound appreciation the volume that gathers the "Minutes" of the International Symposium on the Inquisition, organized in the Vatican from Oct. 29-31, 1998, by the Historical Theological Commission of the Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.
The symposium was in response to the desire I expressed in the apostolic letter "Tertio Millennio Adveniente": "It is appropriate that ... the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel and, instead of offering to the world the witness of a life inspired by the values of faith, indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal" (No. 33).
Before public opinion the image of the Inquisition represents in some form the symbol of this counter-witness and scandal. In what measure is this image faithful to the reality? Before asking for forgiveness it is necessary to know the facts exactly and to acknowledge the deficiencies in regard to evangelical exigencies in cases in which it is so. This is the reason why the Committee asked for the consultation of historians, whose scientific competence is universally recognized.
2. The historians' irreplaceable contribution constitutes for theologians an invitation to reflect on the conditions of life of the People of God in their historical journey.
A distinction should guide the theologians' critical reflection: the distinction between the authentic "sensus fidei" and the prevailing mentality in a determined period, which might have influenced their opinion.
One must appeal to the "sensus fidei" to find the criteria for a just judgment on the past of the life of the Church....
Newsday.com - World News: Vatican reports a kinder, gentler Inquisition
Combined News Services
June 16, 2004
Torture, burning at the stake and other punishment for the faithful condemned as witches or heretics by church tribunals during the Inquisition was not as widespread as commonly thought, the Vatican said yesterday. "The recourse to torture and the death sentence weren't so frequent as it long has been believed," Agostino Borromeo, a professor at Rome's Sapienza University, said at a news conference yesterday. [...] In many cases, courts ordered mannequins to be burned when the condemned escaped capture.
That last line is the one that would indicate that someone kind of missed a point somewhere. After all, it amounts to, "Well, we would have killed more people if we could have found them, but we couldn't, so we just burned up a few dummies instead."
It's also worth noting that even though there may have been fewer people killed for heresy than originally thought -- although how they could really be certain of that, given recordkeeping at the time, one wonders -- in a few places, the depredations of the Inquisition were quite thorough enough.
Talk of trials, burned witches and forbidden books has echoed in the Vatican after Pope John Paul asked forgiveness for the Inquisition, in which the Church tortured and killed people branded as heretics. [...] A chart showed that Germany was where more male and female "witches" were killed by civilian tribunals around the start of the 15th century. Some 25,000 people of the then population of 16 million, were killed. But the percentage record went to Lichtenstein, where 300 people, or some 10 percent of the tiny population of 3,000, were killed for convictions of witchcraft.
Witchcraft counting for only one type of heresy, one suspects that Lichtenstein probably lost somewhat more than 10% of its population to the Inquisition when all was said and done.
Posted by iain at June 16, 2004 02:25 PM
