In the monsignor’s office, above his desk, hangs an oil painting of Robert Bellarmine. Below it is a signed photograph of Pope Benedict XVI. On a library table lie several books on the Arts and Crafts movement and the work of William Morris, which is Cifres’s other passion. At his small apartment in the Vatican, the décor is all Arts and Crafts—the furniture, the wallpaper, the drapes. Morris died in 1896, the same year in which Pope Leo XIII issued his bull Apostolicae Curae, which declared ordinations by the Anglican Church “absolutely null and utterly void.” The condemnation of Anglican Orders, as this action is known, is the subject of the monsignor’s doctoral thesis, which he hopes to complete soon. So Cifres spends a lot of time, intellectually, in the 1890s, when he is not in the 1590s.
But he is also solidly in the twenty-first century. There is a computer in his office, and he is eager to show off the database and retrieval system he has created. The organizational tree of the Inquisition archives now exists online in skeletal form—you can start with a given year, narrow it down to a particular department, then to a specific case, and then to the files of a certain cardinal-inquisitor on that case. Bit by bit, the content of the individual documents is being stirred in. Eventually, you will be able to search documents by word as easily at the Holy Office as in any other database. I asked Cifres if other parts of the Vatican were similarly advanced. He was happy to report that some congregations had adopted this very system. The Vatican Library was also digitizing its collection. And the Archivio Segreto? He offered a resigned smile, which I took to be the equivalent, in curial terms, of falling off his chair. Apparently it was still in the . . . well, pick your century. Cifres had developed his database with the help of a collaborator, Marco Pizzo, at Rome’s Museo del Risorgimento, and some software consultants. The system is called SHADES (the awkward acronym is derived from “software for historical archives description”). One wishes that he’d found a way to call it HADES. Universities around the world can apply for access. Bernard Gui would have been impressed, and perhaps a little envious.
“Not Our Favorite Subject”
When Pope John Paul II agreed to open most of the Inquisition archives to scholars, in 1998, he referred to the Inquisition as “a tormented phase in the history of the Church,” and he maintained on more than one occasion that “the Church has no fear of historical truth.” His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, has said much the same thing. Both popes, whatever their merits and deficiencies, made good on promises to give historians far greater access to the documents in the Vatican’s possession. To be sure, they closed the door at the papacy of Eugenio Pacelli—Pius XII—whose silence during World War II, as evidence mounted of German genocide, has drawn both abiding scorn and uneasy apologetics. Those archives, and everything since, remain sealed. But that is the big exception. When David Kertzer wished to examine the materials in the Edgardo Mortara case, the Vatican’s initial reaction was, as he recalls, “That’s not our favorite subject.” But the staff proved helpful to him nonetheless. Those four volumes in the series The Catholic Church and Modern Science are first-class works of scholarship. Oddly, the four-volume set comes with a refrigerator magnet depicting Pope Benedict XVI—an attempt at branding, maybe, or perhaps official acknowledgment of the reality of magnetism. One can see this change in outlook regarding the archives as a belated recognition of the value of transparency and free inquiry—never the Holy See’s strong point—or as a defensive move in the ongoing war over the ownership of history. No doubt it has elements of both.
To the extent that it was a defensive move, it was probably a smart one. The credibility of the Church on the Inquisition is meager, and partisans who jump to the Church’s defense tend to come across as blinkered and naive. The “pleasant surprises” that Cardinal Silvestrini was hoping for have not materialized. But independent scholars have added texture and nuance to the seven-hundred-year story of the Inquisition. They have put it into a social context. They have documented its unhappy consequences but also shown its limitations—the wide gap between plans and performance, ambitions and competence. The Inquisition emerges in a somewhat fuller light. It seems to have executed a smaller percentage of defendants than most secular courts did. It attempted to codify its practices and place restrictions on its behavior. In other ways, the Inquisition emerges as more disturbing than ever—because it could persist for so long in such a mindless way, sustained and perpetuated by larger forces that no one could quite perceive, let alone understand, much less control. At the same time, it comes across as a bureaucracy like any other, subject to the same myopic imperatives, the same petty ambitions and animosities, that one finds in Dilbert or The Office.
That scholarship would have taken this turn—cutting the Inquisition somewhat down to size—should not be surprising. That is what frequently happens when hard facts collide with a mythic reputation. To cite a different example: with the opening of official archives in Moscow, after the collapse of communism, historians have ventured a view of the inner workings of the Soviet state as in some respects more “normal” than one might have thought—still a fearsome construct, but one in which factors we would recognize as interest groups, politics, and even public opinion had to be taken into account. Modern scholars of the Inquisition disagreed with one another on many points before the archives were opened, and they continue to have their battles. How effective was censorship? Did the Inquisition hold Spain back? But the availability of new raw material has allowed them to play out their arguments on firmer terrain.
The Inquisition may not have been “the eye that never slumbered,” as Prescott put it, but it did leave wounds that never heal. When the archives were at last opened, a looming question was whether the pope would at some point formally apologize for the Inquisition, perhaps in the course of the Jubilee Year, 2000. At a conclave of historians and theologians that marked the occasion, Carlo Ginzburg rose to comment. All eyes turned to him. Ginzburg is the sort of man who attracts attention—those eyebrows!—and the opening of the archives was an event he had played a role in.
Eamon Duffy remembers the moment clearly: “Ginzburg said, ‘This is all very well.’ He said, ‘What I didn’t hear the pope say today, and what I haven’t heard anybody in this discussion say, is that the Catholic Church is ashamed of what it did. Not sorry. Sorry is easy. I want to hear the Catholic Church—I want to hear the pope—say he is ashamed.’ There was a tremendous round of applause from the historians. Not from the theologians.”
“Sorry” was in fact not so easy. A priest in Indiana recently collaborated with a software company to create an iPhone app that can help people examine their consciences and make a confession. You can type in certain generic biographical descriptors (for instance, “priest,” “age seventy-five”), and it will run through the Ten Commandments with your category in mind, asking questions it deems relevant to your situation (“Have I been lazy, halfhearted, or cynical in my ministry?” “Do I hold any resentments against God?” “Have I engaged in sexual fantasies?”). But there isn’t a prompt along the lines of “Did I help, abet, or otherwise enable, a centuries-long worldwide inquisition?” The papal apology, when it did come, had been maneuvered into place slowly, over a period of years, and with careful rhetorical adjustments along the way. The process began with a pastoral letter titled “As the Third Millennium Draws Near,” released in 1994, when the pope acknowledged the actions of “children” of the Church who had “departed from the spirit of Christ and His Gospel.” It continued in 1998 with the document “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” in which the pope offered repentance on behalf of the “sons and daughters” of the Church who had stood by as the Holocaust unfolded. At last, in a penitential service at St. Peter’s in the Jubilee year itself, the pope asked forgiveness for all transgressions committed by the “children of the Church” during the past 2,000 years. The references to “children” and “sons and daughters” seemed to leave the Church’s leadership out of the picture. The formulaic parsing wa
s widely noticed. At least there was no reference to “rogue elements” or “an aggressive major general.”
The wounds never heal: Every year in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori, where a grim, hooded statue of Giordano Bruno rises above the market stalls, secularists and freethinkers gather on February 17, the day of Bruno’s execution, to mark his legacy and attack the Church. The statue was controversial when erected, in 1889—a deliberate thumb in the eye of the papacy by a newly reunited Italy. Anticlerical activists shouting “Death to the butchers of the Inquisition!” had taken to the streets to press for a monument; most of Italy’s civil government attended the unveiling. Today, roses are frequently left at the statue’s base. In 2000, on the 400th anniversary of Bruno’s death, demonstrators in the square mounted a raucous reenactment of the execution. Men in black hoods were on hand to serve as confortatores to the condemned man—playing the role of the clerics who accompanied heretics to the stake, hoping to win a last-minute reconciliation (which did not, however, include a stay of execution).
More open wounds: In 1992, on the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, King Juan Carlos joined Israel’s president, Chaim Herzog, in prayer at Beth Yaakov, the Madrid synagogue. The synagogue could not open its doors until 1968, after Spain lifted restrictions on non-Catholic places of worship. Spain, as it happens, was also the last nation in the European Union to recognize Israel. The king acknowledged that his country had known periods of “intolerance and persecution,” but stopped short of an outright apology. His gesture of reconciliation was not enough for some. That same year, the Spanish parliament approved legislation giving Judaism, Islam, and the various Protestant denominations the same status in law that Roman Catholicism had long enjoyed.
For their part, Muslims—who are far more numerous than Jews in Spain, and whose presence is today far more politically charged—have sought an apology for the expulsion order of 1609, though as yet to no avail. Former prime minister José María Aznar, a conservative, has opposed any apology. He said at a conference in Washington, “I support Ferdinand and Isabella.” So there is still plenty of fuel for the pyre, and no shortage of people willing to apply the flame.
The Inquisitorial Impulse
Meanwhile, there is the phenomenon itself to consider—not the recurring debate over the historical Inquisition but the recurring behavior that brings inquisitions into existence. Call it the inquisitorial impulse. It springs from certainty—from unswerving confidence in the rightness of one’s cause. But conviction alone is never enough. What separates an inquisition from other forms of intolerance is its staying power. It receives institutional support—creating its own or relying on what exists. It goes on and on. Today, the basic elements that can sustain an inquisition—bureaucracy, communications, the tools of surveillance and censorship—are more prevalent and entrenched, by many orders of magnitude, than they were in the days of Gregory IX or Tomás de Torquemada. None of them will be reduced in significance in the years ahead. They will only become more powerful.
THE BUREAUCRATIC MACHINE
Bureaucracy is a human artifact, and for all its negative reputation, it provides the management and inertia that keep modern societies operating. Armies and airports, highways and schools, all run on bureaucracy. Every payment by any government is the product of a bureaucracy. Spain’s vast colonial empire was relatively weak because its bureaucratic structures were modest; the strong bureaucratic traditions of China, in contrast, go back 5,000 years.
One rule of thumb about bureaucracies, however, is that they tend to expand: their mission becomes broader, their personnel become more numerous, and their reason for existence becomes the fact that they already exist. Over time, bureaucratic procedures affect more and more areas of life, from the conduct of a classroom to the boarding of an airplane to the final moments in intensive care. And over time, more and more people find themselves invested in particular bureaucracies, because their livelihoods depend on them. The growth has been especially pronounced in the area of domestic and national security. A 2010 Washington Post report found that in the United States, some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies now exist to deal with national-security concerns—amounting to an “alternative geography” of America that is “hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” Bureaucracies become closed systems. They tend to restrict access to the information they control to those with official clearance. They are intent on autonomy.
Security experts have long criticized the methods used by the Transportation Security Administration—the government agency that oversees screening at airports—as inefficient and largely pointless, even as the methods have become more invasive, mindless, and routine. An individual’s name can be added to the official U.S. terrorism watch list as the result of a single tip that is “deemed credible.” That list, which holds some 440,000 names, is secret, and people cannot discover if their names are on it. The TSA continues to add layers of scrutiny. Recounting his experience with the new “back-scatter” x-ray body-scan machines, the columnist Dave Barry described in a radio interview how he had been subjected to a physical examination after being informed that the machine had detected a condition the security guards referred to as a “blurred groin.” In April 2011, a six-year-old girl was made to undergo an “enhanced pat down” at an airport in New Orleans, an episode that caused controversy when video of the search was posted on YouTube. The TSA responded that “the security officer in the video followed current standard operating procedures,” which is undoubtedly true, and the point.
In primitive states, procedures rarely have much longevity. In more advanced states, the organs of government grind on, often impervious to attempts at control. That characteristic marks even well-intended measures. Some years ago, in an issue of The American Prospect on the subject of “The Inquisitorial State,” the columnist Anthony Lewis described how the appointment of special prosecutors and independent counsels with open-ended mandates and deep pockets had led to a culture of obsessive investigation. The rationalists of the Enlightenment conceived of government as a machine, something that had “levers” and “wheels” and “springs” and that, if properly built, could run with minimal intervention. The problem, it turns out, is making it stop.
In the end, bureaucracies take on lives of their own. That is why, for a century, the Inquisition censors on the wharves of that harbor in Portugal dutifully checked every incoming ship for contraband books, and wrote up the prescribed reports, even though their searches turned up nothing. Observing the gradual transformation of “government into administration, of republics into bureaucracies,” Hannah Arendt commented, “Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
UNDER OBSERVATION
In the late 1990s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation implemented a program that employed “packet sniffing” software to monitor certain e-mail and other communications. The effort was probably doomed the moment it became widely known that the software’s code name was Carnivore. The National Security Agency, the U.S. intelligence arm chiefly responsible for tracking messages and data transmitted through the Internet, the telephone, and other electronic means, runs a similar program, commonly known as Echelon. Various lists circulating on the Internet purport to identify some of the thousands of keywords that trigger the NSA’s attention. They include some words you’d expect, such as “assassinate,” “cybercash,” and “smallpox,” and some you might not, such as “unclassified,” “nowhere,” and “Trump.”
In the aftermath of 9/11, efforts like Carnivore and Echelon were joined by Total Information Awareness. That program was formally dismantled, but similar initiatives survive under different names. So do other kinds of monitoring. In 2007, Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, recounted an episode
that had occurred three years earlier, when the White House sought to get authorization for a domestic surveillance program by the NSA that the Justice Department believed was illegal. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, was in intensive care after surgery, but the White House counsel and the White House chief of staff arrived unexpectedly at his bedside to obtain his signature. Comey had gotten there first, and Ashcroft refused to sign. But surveillance of this sort continues. The potential for “deep packet” inspection—drilling far down into electronic communications for sought-after information—is embedded in various kinds of computer software. The U.S. government insisted on having a point of access in case of need. Washington is not alone in this capability. Systems can be bought off the shelf, and companies will provide bespoke systems to seemingly any customer. The government of Iran has been eager to investigate the activities of political dissidents. In 2008, Iran set up a sophisticated inspection system with the help of Siemens and Nokia.
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