ARTICLE

REMOTE MOTES AND
PRESENT BEAMS

by Ralph McInerny

In my library is an imposing volume, aging with some grace thanks to a leather binding and a paper meant to last. It was published in London in 1734 and its title page, in the manner of the day, is a miniature essay. The History of the Inquisition as it Subsists in the Kingdoms of Spain, Portugal, Etc. and in both the Indies, to this Day ... And it goes on and on. The book was compiled and translated by the Reverend J. Baker, M.A. The narrative is illustrated with copper plates. One shows a man who had been condemned "to be burnt but hath escaped by his Confession" and is balanced by another some pages later of a dejected figure, similarly clad, weeping. "The Samana worn by a Relapse or Impenitent etc. going to be burn'd." The book tells a story of injustice, terror, abominable practices, burnings and torture. The tone is that of an English tourist confronted by the incredible practices of Wogs. Somewhat like a British guidebook to Rome lamenting the condition of one or the other of the thousands of churches in the Eternal City, forgetting the decaying churches that punctuate the writer's native heath. Ah, the mote and the beam. One wonders what Reverend J. Baker, M. A. would make of the present parlous condition of the church of which he was a clergyman.

To mention the Inquisition, or to liken something or other to the Inquisition, still gets a predictable response in polite and/or educated society, somewhat as the mention of Galileo does. We all are supposed to know that wild-eyed friars, particularly in Spain, hauled people before the Inquisition on the flimsiest of excuses and subjected them to a Kafkaesque trial, racked them, flailed them, burned them alive, all on the excuse of defending the true religion. Popular fiction and films carry on the tradition of the Reverend J. Baker, M.A. Of course, nowadays it is suggested that a suppressed sexuality lies at the bottom of it all. Why else are those slavering monks lashing half naked women to the wheel?

The myth of the Inquisition dies hard. It has been mortally wounded by historians without a particular axe to grind. But the figure that will haunt the imagination of many is unlikely to be weakened by these scholarly efforts. Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor to whom a powerful chapter is devoted in The Brothers Karamazov will survive, however little the account of him has to do with any facts about the Inquisition. Indeed, he may function more as the Roman foil to Dostoyevsky's beloved Orthodox monk, Father Zossima. This contrast has far more to do with the meaning of Christianity than it does with past historical events, although Dostoyevsky obviously takes the Inquisition to be the kind of aberration that is logically entailed by the errors of the Catholic Church.

I suppose monographs have been written about the Catholic priests who show up as characters in nineteenth century Russian novels. For example, there is the memorable Jesuit who appears in the opening scene of War and Peace and later is revealed to be a Mason. But there is nothing shadowy about the Grand Inquisitor. He plays no role in the action of the novel but is doubtless essential to the unfolding theme of the story. It would be interesting to compare Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor with the outlooks of Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X when they addressed the evils of the modern world. It was the bishops of Rome, almost alone, who stood against the rising tide soon to overwhelm the land of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, a heresy hatched in the British Museum by Marx that would claim victims in the millions. Man was to come into his own at last, but first countless millions had to be slaughtered, eggs broken to make an omelet that would never be. In our age, the souls of numberless victims of one ideology after another have gone to God. War for the sake of peace, injustice that justice might come, brainwashing of the young to free them from the influence of priests. The oddest thing about Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor is that he is accusing the Church of Rome of the very aberrations that modern popes were warning against.

Take away freedom because it is too heavy a burden for men to bear. Promise bread as compensation for enslavement, a sure secular manna instead of pie in the sky. Subjugate the masses. Free man from that alienation of his true self he calls God: God is a name for the human potential needing only liberation in order to be realized. Free man from the state by making him pass through a totalitarian nightmare. At some vague future point the Generic Man would emerge, each individual becoming a cosmos sufficient unto himself after the state has withered away.

From our perspective it is grotesque to think that the threat was posed by Rome. The popes incurred derision from the enlightened, and rough treatment from the lords of this world, for their opposition to the zeitgeist. In the seeming heyday of modernity it was they alone who warned that the world was on the path to perdition. Some within the Church urged a hasty alliance with these new currents and a pope since canonized characterized their efforts as the summation of all heresies.

We hear around us now voices saying that the Church has finally caught up with the modern world. The Declaration on Religious Liberty, one of the great documents of Vatican II, is regularly seen as a capitulation to the "errors" opposed by Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X. I recently read that the Magisterium cannot be authoritative because it has been guilty of error in the past. The Church was wrong about Galileo, wrong about the Inquisition ... The author was a Jesuit, so perhaps allowances should be made.

The recent work of Russell Hittinger suggests that the evils Leo XIII condemned have reached fruition in our own day and have not become truths in the process. Leo wrote tirelessly of true liberty, the liberty of the sons of God. The atheist surrogate is the prelude to enslavement.

The Church has not accepted the Enlightenment conception of rights, thereby emerging from its pre-modern darkness. It is Rights that are killing us, by the millions every year. The Church increasingly uses the language of rights, but the meaning assigned would not be embraced by the secular paladins of rights. We are now told by the latter that each of us has the right to define himself and the universe as he sees fit. Fiant tenebrae.

Against the exaltation of the individual, the Church and great Catholic thinkers like Maritain have recalled the notion of the human person. Is there anything more characteristic of the teaching of Pope John Paul II than its constant recourse to person? The human person is created in the image and likeness of God. Any other view of him is false and will have practical consequences of the most horrendous sort. Not will have. Many alive today have already seen the havoc that a false understanding of the person can wreak. Our task is to recover and renew the true conception of the human person, not to seek alliances with the forces of darkness.

Getting the Inquisition into historical perspective is not to condone evils that were done. But however much those evils may have been committed in the name of the Faith, they stand condemned by the Faith, then and now. Jesuits and others who make a leap from those evils to "errors of the Magisterium" need both punishment and instruction.

Self-appointed Torquemadas would do well to point out that it is Catholic senators and congressmen who are in the forefront of efforts to preserve and expand the "right" to kill the unborn. And the partially born. It was a priest, a Jesuit, a former member of Congress whose sorry record there legitimized the later activities of Catholic politicians. That he was not done disgracing himself was clear when he came to the defense of the presidential veto of the act that would have outlawed partial birth abortions. Let us hope that our flaws and betrayals will not be construed at some future time as an "error of the Magisterium."