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which had gathered momentum and credibility throughout the nineteenth century, that the Bible must be understood as a historical document, its truths conditioned by authors writing in the context of particular times.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.
The documents in the case—the complaints, the responses, the internal deliberations, the views of consultants, the correspondence between prelates in Rome and London—lie in file boxes in the Inquisition archives. Because they date to the 1940s and 1950s—too recent to be routinely accessible—special permission is needed to examine them. Josef Ratzinger, when he was still the prefect, granted that permission to Peter Godman.
“The German translation has been published and immediately we’ve received protests. What to do?” That’s a handwritten marginal note from 1949 on one of the earliest Holy Office memoranda about The Power and the Glory. Given such concerns, the book was put into the hands of two Vatican censors, who duly read it and recorded their observations for the file. They found the book “paradoxical,” a work that troubled “the spirit of calm that should prevail in a Christian.” They noted the author’s “abnormal propensity toward . . . situations in which one kind of sexual immorality or another plays a role.” And they did not care for a sardonic remark by one character in the book: “It is good to see a priest with a conscience.” The censors considered putting the book on the Index (it had already been banned in Ireland), but in the end recommended that someone in authority, perhaps Cardinal Bernard Griffin, the archbishop of London, give Greene a dressing-down and a warning.
Still, the files reveal some internal resistance to the idea of censure. One high-ranking Vatican official, Giovanni Battista Montini, had read Greene and admired him. He urged that The Power and the Glory be given a second look, and recommended Msgr. Giuseppe De Luca for the job. De Luca, a close friend of Montini’s, was an intellectual and a bibliophile. (Upon his death, in 1962, he left his personal collection of more than 120,000 volumes to the Vatican Library.) De Luca delivered a long and scathing dissent from the report of the two censors. And he had this to say about the role of writers like Greene:
To condemn or even to deplore them would be looked askance at in England, and would deal a grievous blow to our prestige: it would demonstrate not only that we are behind the times but also that our judgment is light-weight, undermining significantly the authority of the clergy which is regarded—rightly—as unlettered bondslaves to puerile literature in bad taste. The crew should not be confused with the pilot: today, great writers are the real pilots of much of mankind, and when the Lord, in His mercy, sends us one, even if he is a nuisance, let’s not make a Jonah of him; let’s not throw him to the fishes.
De Luca continued in this vein; he was shrewd and worldly, and not a bad critic. But his dissent arrived at the Holy Office too late. Instructions had already gone out to Cardinal Griffin, who called Greene on the carpet in a private meeting—among other things, asking him not to republish The Power and the Glory without making revisions. Griffin also preached from the pulpit about the failings of Catholic novelists. The matter was left at that, with no further condemnation. There survives in the record a somewhat toadying letter from Greene to Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, the secretary of the Holy Office. “I wish to emphasize,” Greene wrote, “that, throughout my life as a Catholic, I have never ceased to feel deep sentiments of personal attachment to the Vicar of Christ, fostered in particular by admiration for the wisdom with which the Holy Father has constantly guided God’s Church.”
Dirty Work
Giovanni Battista Montini, the man who came to Graham Greene’s defense, was elected to the papacy in 1963, becoming Pope Paul VI. It was he who presided over the Second Vatican Council, which his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, had convened. Those old enough to remember the mid 1960s can easily, if wistfully, recall the spirit of openness and excitement the council generated. The fact that the deliberations were conducted in Latin somehow made its modernizing agenda seem all the more ambitious. When it began, in 1963, librarians at Boston College, a Jesuit institution, still kept books on the Index in a locked cage in the basement, away from students; by the time it ended, the Index itself had been abolished. The excitement was not confined to religious circles. The New Yorker covered its deliberations in a long series—thirteen articles in all—by the pseudonymous Xavier Rynne (in actuality, a Redemptorist priest named F. X. Murphy), who reprised the interpretive role originated by Lord Acton.
It is easy to portray the council as a battle of liberals versus conservatives, which is precisely what Rynne did. If that view is simplistic, there is still a basic truth to it. The strong will of Paul VI kept the council from falling apart, though on issue after issue he himself tended to vacillate, earning the nickname amletico—“Hamlet.” Paul embodied the ambivalence at the heart of the modern Church. Gathered with him was the cast of characters, many of them young, whose contests and relationships would shape the Church over the next half century. The future John Paul II was present as Karol Wojtyla, the new archbishop of Kraków. Josef Ratzinger was there as a young advisor to Cardinal Josef Frings, of Cologne. Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, Bernard Häring—they were all participants.
It was at the very end of the council that the Congregation of the Holy Office was renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The new name could not alter the fundamental nature of the organization. John le Carré built his novel The Looking-Glass War around a ramshackle British intelligence agency known as The Department. Its days of glory are past. Its tradecraft is rusty. But on it plods, until the opportunity for extraordinary mischief at last arises. The CDF is in some ways like The Department—always fighting the last Reformation. It attracts the most conservative curial clerics as personnel. Intellectually, it has a reputation for mediocrity, however brilliant its prefect may be. It is bureaucratic and slow. Its procedures build on centuries of Roman habit. To the extent that those procedures are knowable, it is apparent that they are not followed scrupulously: many theologians have found themselves ensnared in processes that seem capricious and opaque.
The instruments available to the CDF are not what they once were. It does not torture, except perhaps in a psychological sense. It does not burn books, or their authors. But it can withhold a license to teach as a Catholic theologian. It can bar people from jobs at certain Catholic institutions, and dismiss people from those same jobs. It can apply pressure through the leadership of religious orders. It can also formally excommunicate, though that is rarely done. The CDF holds the greatest leverage over Catholics in positions of official influence—and in particular, insidiously, over those among them who wish to remain loyal to the Church as an institution. It has no leverage at all over those who simply decide to walk away.
At the time of the Vatican Council, the Holy Office had come under harsh and sustained attack. In a dramatic moment during the second session, in 1963, Cardinal Frings rose to condemn its “methods and behavior” as “a cause of scandal.” He went on: “No one should be judged and condemned without being heard, without knowing what he is accused of, and without having the opportunity to amend what he can reasonably be reproached with.” The language was supplied by his young advisor, Josef Ratzinger. The Holy Office, Ratzinger himself wrote in 1965, “prejudged every question almost before it had come up for discussion.” In 1968, he signed his name to the so-called Nijmegen Declaration, which said in part: “Any form of inquisition, however subtle, not only harms the development of sound theology, it also causes irreparable damage to the credibility of the church as a community in the modern world.”
By 1981, Ratzinger had become the prefect of the CDF, under P
ope John Paul II. And events had changed him. Before long, he would be known as the Grand Inquisitor. As Garry Wills has observed, “Sixties unrest in the Church soon had the effect on Ratzinger that campus unrest had on American liberals who bolted the Democratic Party and became neoconservatives.” A quarter century of “inquisition, however subtle” would ensue. Indeed, it was already under way.
In 1979, the CDF, citing “contempt” for Church doctrine, stripped Hans Küng of his right to teach as a Catholic theologian at the University of Tübingen. Küng had called into question Church teachings on infallibility, celibacy, birth control, and other matters. In 1985, the Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff, a leading proponent of “liberation theology” in Latin America, was silenced—that is, ordered not to publish or to speak publicly—for a year. Boff was also assigned a personal censor to review his writings. Soon thereafter, Charles Curran, who had argued that it was permissible for theologians to dissent on doctrine that had not been declared infallible, was declared to be neither “suitable nor eligible” to teach Catholic theology and was barred from doing so at Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., where he was a professor.
In 1986, the Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx, who held controversial opinions on a variety of subjects, and who had been called to Rome for intensive questioning on three occasions over the course of a decade, was informed that much of his work was “in disagreement with the teaching of the Church.” In 1988, Matthew Fox, a Dominican priest with a New Age bent, was silenced for a year. He was eventually expelled from the Dominican Order. In 1997, the Vatican took the extreme step of excommunicating a Sri Lankan priest, Tissa Balasuriya, who had written a book that seemed to depart from established doctrine on original sin and the divinity of Jesus. A year later, he signed a “profession of faith” and produced a careful statement noting that errors and ambiguities had been “perceived in my writings.” Balasuriya also agreed to submit future writings to Rome for review before publication. The excommunication was revoked. But the litany of names goes on.
God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World Page 19