The parallels with Christian scripture are obvious enough. This meagre fragment of text could undo all the efforts of de Vaux's team to distance the Dead Sea Scrolls from early Christianity. In consequence, its very existence was kept a closely guarded secret for fourteen years. It might have remained a secret, had not one of de Vaux's team of scholars let slip a reference to it during a lecture at Harvard University in December 1972. Even then, he refused to let any other researcher make a copy for independent study. Another eighteen years were to pass before the text was anonymously leaked to a journal of popular biblical exploration, Biblical Archaeology Review, which published it in 1990.8
For thirty-two years after it was first translated, then, the text in question had been known to de Vaux's team of scholars but withheld from everyone else. Without breathing a word about it, Church commentators had in the meantime blithely dissembled and equivocated. In 1968, for example, Xavier Leon-Dufour, a friend of de Vaux and a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, wrote disingenuously: ‘None of the Qumran texts speaks of a “son of Man”.’9 He said nothing whatever of a reference to a ‘Son of God’ and proceeded to argue that the leader of the Qumran community, as depicted in the Scrolls, had nothing in common with the figure of Jesus. Eleven years later, in 1979, Cardinal Jean Danielou, another of de Vaux's friends, published an English translation of his own book, The Dead Sea Scrolls and Primitive Christianity. He continued to echo what had become the official ‘party line’. Ignoring the existence of the ‘Son of God’ text, he, too, argued that no connection could exist between Jesus and the leader of the Qumran community.
Not until the early 1990s did the circumstances governing Dead Sea Scroll scholarship begin at last to change. This change was due largely to the stubborn perseverance of Professor James Robinson, head of the team that had translated the so-called ‘Gnostic Gospels’ found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, and Professor Robert Eisenman of the University of California at Long Beach, who had long spearheaded the campaign for release of the Qumran texts. Drawing on negatives obtained from an anonymous source, Robinson and Eisenman issued a two-volume set of photographs, A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For the first time, the entire corpus of Qumran texts was made available to independent researchers.
The sluice gates had finally opened. The Huntington Library in California was one of several institutions holding photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls – for insurance purposes, in case the originals were destroyed in a new Middle East conflict. Within three months of the publication by Robinson and Eisenman, the Huntington defied the Ecole Biblique by announcing its intention to make its collection available to scholars. Eisenman was first to gain access to the material. He and Professor Michael Wise of the University of Chicago quickly assembled two teams, one at each of their respective universities, to embark on a translation of the fifty most significant unpublished texts. These appeared in 1992 as The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered.
Nowadays the Church no longer controls access to the texts found at Qumran, but it still endeavours to control interpretation. Catholic scholars continue to promulgate their own established orthodoxy of interpretation – and in the process attempt to shout down all opposition. So far as the Church is concerned, the Dead Sea Scrolls must remain distanced from the origins of Christianity, lest Christianity emerge in a light inimical to official doctrine and dogma.
14
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
In 1962, the cover-up involving the Dead Sea Scrolls was still intact and effectively unknown to the world at large. The Church at the time had other, more immediate and more contemporary issues with which to contend; and these were of more dramatic and discernible interest to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to the congregation of the faithful, to the media and to the general public. Under Pope John XXIII, the most liberal, lucid, progressive and dynamic pontiff of the twentieth century, the Church undertook to put its own house in order and integrate itself constructively and creatively with the modern age. This enterprise took the form of the Second Vatican Council, which convened on 11 October 1962, and remained in session until the end of 1965.
John XXIII had first suggested the idea of the Council to a conclave of cardinals in January 1959. He desired, he said, a reformist Council which would renew the Church and bring it into accord with the post-Second World War world. He wanted to inaugurate a process of healing which would draw together the diverse churches of Christendom. He sought a new rapprochement with Protestantism. He also wished to repair the rift between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which had been separated by mutual pronouncements of excommunication in 1054.
The Curia promptly went into shock. Assiduous efforts were made to prevent the Pope's Council from occurring – or, if that failed, at least to delay it. Despite such opposition, however, the pontiff proceeded with his plans, employing to constructive effect the authority arrogated by his predecessors. The thrust of the Council he envisioned was to be international and ecumenical. He set about laying the groundwork accordingly, establishing conduits of communication not only with other Christian churches, but with other religions as well. For the first time since the creation of the Church of England, a Roman pontiff met personally with an Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. Similar contacts were established with the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. For the first time, Catholic representatives were allowed to attend a meeting of the World Council of Churches. And a dialogue was inaugurated with Judaism, which was to culminate in an encyclical exonerating the Jewish people from any culpability in Jesus's death.
John XXIII also enlarged the College of Cardinals, creating new members from every continent in the world and making the Curia more truly international than it had ever previously been. In 1960, he formed an official department within the Curia to foster the unification of all Christian churches. In March 1962, he embarked on a comprehensive revision of Canon Law, which was eventually published in 1983.
Such were the preparations for the Second Vatican Council. When it convened in October 1962, it conducted its business openly, not with the paranoid secrecy that had characterised Church affairs in the past. Indeed, observers from no fewer than eighteen non-Catholic churches were present in an official capacity. This provoked certain members of the Curia and of the Holy Office to complain that the Pope was communicating with heretics – a crime, according to Canon Law.
Throughout the proceedings of the Council, opposition to the Pope was led, not surprisingly, by the Prefect of the Holy Office at the time, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. He attempted repeatedly to ensure that the Council be controlled by the Curia. The Pope's own charisma, however, and the new cardinals he had created, decisively tipped the balance. The Curia's attempt to establish authority over the Council was thwarted. To the assembled ecclesiastics, as well as to the world at large, it became shockingly apparent that the Curia, contrary to popular belief, no longer represented the Church as a whole.
As the Council progressed, the belligerent ‘Old Guard’ were forced into retreat on virtually every measure, and radical new reforms were introduced. One of the most immediately obvious was in the Mass, no longer to be conducted in Latin but in the vernacular. At the same time, the notorious ‘Syllabus of Errors’, promulgated through the Holy Office by Pius IX, was discarded as outmoded and no longer relevant. Before the Council ended, the mutual excommunication of the Roman and Orthodox Churches was to be lifted. In an encyclical published during the spring of 1963, Pope John XXIII explicitly embraced and endorsed the progress his nineteenth-century predecessors had explicitly condemned. And in a statement unique from a Roman pontiff, the encyclical asserted the right of every human being ‘to worship God in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience’.1
On 3 June 1963, shortly after the publication of this encyclical, John XXIII died. On 21 June, Giovanni Battista Montini, a consultant of the Holy Office, was elected to succeed him and took the name of Paul VI. By that time, the Council's programme of
reform had acquired too much momentum to be arrested altogether. There was, however, a noticeable deceleration; and the progress optimistically anticipated by the world at large, Catholic and non-Catholic, was gradually to grind to a halt. It has subsequently gone into reverse.
In certain spheres, the progressive spirit of the Second Vatican Council has remained intact. Mass, for example, is still conducted officially in the vernacular. The Index was abolished, and no serious attempt has been made to revive it. Neither has there been any effort to resuscitate the ‘Syllabus of Errors’. But in many issues of immediate practical relevance to the Church's congregation, the spirit of the Council has indeed been betrayed. Abortion remains a sin punishable by excommunication. And while such prospects as overpopulation and the depletion of natural resources brood like spectres over the planet, the Church plays ostrich, doggedly refusing to acknowledge the threat and maintaining an intransigent position on birth control that keeps it disastrously out of step with the age, alienates many Catholics and creates agonising crises of conscience for many others.
At the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII had created a commission to examine the question of birth control. Was the use of artificial contraception indeed a mortal sin, punishable by mandatory condemnation to hell? Unfortunately the pontiff died before the issue could be addressed by the Council. When it did come up for debate in October 1964, a substantial number of ecclesiastics were manifestly in favour of a more flexible attitude. As this became apparent, the debate was summarily curtailed by Cardinal Agagianian, a prominent member of both the Holy Office and the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The vexed question, which should have been decided by the Council, was instead referred to the new Pope, who asserted his own authority and arrogated the decision to himself.
When the Council inclined towards the commission's recommendations for greater flexibility, Paul VI added his own amendments, which effectively diluted any proposed reform. These amendments were vehemently opposed by the majority of the commission's members. The Pope responded by publishing his infamous encyclical of 25 July 1968, which, with all the authority of his infallibility, definitively banned artificial contraception. The old ‘Syllabus of Errors’ had been discarded, but something no less blinkered, anachronistic and reactionary was promulgated in its stead.
In November 1963, during one of the debates at the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Frings of Cologne presumed to criticise the Holy Office itself. Its methods, he said,
are out of harmony with modern times and are a cause of scandal in the world… No one ought to be judged and condemned without being heard, without knowing what he is accused of.2
Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, in charge of the Holy Office at the time, was intent on maintaining the regime of his predecessor and mentor, the sinister Merry del Val. Any attack on the Holy Office, Ottaviani replied, was a ‘direct insult to the Pope’.3
In the age of television and mass media, however, not even the Holy Office could remain entirely indifferent to matters of image and public relations. In 1965, under the auspices of Pope Paul VI, the institution shed the name that had provoked fear and revulsion for centuries. Directed by its new Prefect, the Yugoslavian Cardinal Franjo Seper, it became – less menacingly if also more sententiously – the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Under this ponderous appellation, the former Inquisition has continued to operate ever since, as if a sanitised title could distance it from its bloody and incendiary past. In 1997, however, Dr Paul Collins, a Harvard graduate and priest, wrote that
the Holy Office may have changed its name, but the ideology underpinning it has survived. It has certainly not changed its methods. It still accepts anonymous accusations, hardly ever deals directly with the person accused, demands retractions and imposes silences, and continues to employ third-rate theologians as its assessors. This body has no place in the contemporary Church. It is irreformable and therefore should be abolished.4
Dr Collins goes on to observe that the faults of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are essentially the faults of the entire Roman Curia – which exists solely ‘to prop up papalism… to serve papal power, not the ministry of the Church’.5
According to a somewhat less critical commentator, the Congregation
is the instrument through which the Holy See promotes the deepening of faith and watches vigilantly over its purity. Accordingly, it is the custodian proper of Catholic orthodoxy. Not by chance does it occupy first place on the official list of the Congregations of the Roman Curia.6
The Congregation was ratified in its precedence by Pope Paul VI, who stated that it ‘deals with questions of greatest importance’ in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. It is not at present a large institution. No longer can it dispatch squadrons of aggressive Inquisitors across the globe. It is believed to number perhaps some thirty individuals who work for it on a full-time basis. While their declared raison d'être is to safeguard the ‘purity’ of the faith, their real purpose is to protect the power of the Papacy and to stifle dissent. To this end, they have become adept at what their Prefect calls the ‘art of soprassedere’ – the Italian word for postponing decisions – in order to let situations ‘ripen’.7 In other words, the Congregation will act when it is confident of being able to do so with impunity, on its own terms – to muzzle, investigate, suppress or even excommunicate a dissident theologian, for example. When it cannot act with impunity – when, for instance, there is a threat of a backlash from the faithful – the Congregation will hold both change and the decision-making process at bay, and play for time. While doing so, it will store up and nurture rancour, resentment and vindictiveness, bringing its grudges almost lovingly to fruition. During the mid-1990s, a joke made the rounds of the Vatican's – officials: a newly born infant is found in the chambers of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation's Prefect is scandalised, thinking one of his own priests responsible. A monsignor takes him aside, however, and endeavours to assuage his anxiety: ‘Surely it is not by us. In this office nothing is completed in nine months.’ functionary concurs and adds: ‘A child is a very fine thing, it is the fruit of love. Therefore it is surely not by us.’8
Of all the so-called Congregations, or departments, of the Curia, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the most important. It dominates the Curia. It is always listed first. In effect, it is the single most powerful department of the Vatican. Its official president is the Pope. Its chief executive, the modern incarnation of the Grand Inquisitor, is known as the Prefect. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, the Congregation's ‘primary function has always been to assist the Pope in his task of preserving the integrity of the Church's doctrine of faith and morals’.9 According to a more independent commentator, the Papacy, since the First Vatican Council of 1870 if not before, ‘has been determined to bring theology under its control’;10 and the Congregation is its primary instrument for doing so.
The Congregation is housed in what used to be the Palace of the Inquisition, the Casa Santa, a large edifice with an impressive gateway situated in the Via del Sant‘Ufficio, close to Saint Peter's. The former dungeons have been converted into offices and archives. It is from these headquarters that the Congregation conducts its business, much of it technically judicial. The head of the Congregation's judiciary and at least two of its associate judges are always Dominicans, thus preserving the traditional link to the original Inquisition of the thirteenth century.
In 1967, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith adopted its current name, another body was created to operate in tandem with it, the International Theological Commission. The Commission's role was to act in an advisory capacity to the Congregation. In 1976, the Commission urged the Congregation to employ methods that were less ‘inquisitorial’ and more conciliatory. In its proceedings up to the present the Congregation has taken little heed of this advice. One commentator has summarised its recent activities:
In add
ition to reviewing faculty appointments and promotions at ecclesiastical faculties, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith also examines the writings of theologians brought to its attention by bishops, nuncios, or other theologians. Greater attention is given to those theologians who become popular in the mass media and whose books are read by a wide audience. The Vatican also focuses on theologians who deal with certain topics: sexual ethics, birth control, abortion, clerical celibacy, divorce and remarriage, papal authority, episcopal authority, the resurrection, and the divinity of Christ. Liberation theologians in Latin America and Africa have received attention because of their writings on church authority and on class conflict. Asian theologians writing on the relation between Christianity and Asian religions, have been investigated as well. The Vatican is also concerned about feminist theologians writing on sexuality, patriarchy in the church, and women priests.11
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith investigates any theologian, teacher or ecclesiastic whose pronouncements, whether written or oral, might be seen to deviate from official orthodoxy. Denunciations of any such transgressor from other theologians, teachers or ecclesiastics are also welcomed. As soon as the Congregation commences its investigation, a file is opened containing all relevant material – statements by the individual under scrutiny, newspaper clippings, other media reports, letters of complaint from colleagues or parishioners. According to procedures established in 1971, staff and high functionaries of the Congregation meet on Saturdays to study the case in question. If they decide an error of faith is indeed involved, an ineluctable course of action ensues – always with great secrecy.
The Congregation begins by contacting the accused's immediate superior, for instance the local bishop, who exhorts him to retract or modify his assertions. If the Congregation decides that false or dangerous opinions are being promulgated in writing, the author may be contacted directly. A warning from his superior or from the Congregation itself will be the first indication the accused receives that he is under investigation. He will be granted one month in which to respond to the accusations against him. He may also be summoned perfunctorily to Rome in order to explain himself in person.
The Inquisition Page 23