COLUMN

TOUGH LOVE

By Laura Garcia

The Inquisition is over, its rationale explained, and its excesses long since duly noted and repudiated. Yet the specter of the Inquisition continues to be invoked, serving as a handy stick with which to beat the Catholic Church, or at times that part of the Church most zealous for orthodoxy, namely, the Pope and bishops united with him.

The Spanish Inquisition gets special attention here. One historian of that era recently wrote that "no institution in Western history has so fearful a reputation as the Spanish Inquisition" (Henry Kamen, "The Secret of the Inquisition," New York Review of Books, 2/l/96, p. 4). It is remarkable that the executions sponsored by Protestants and Muslims in the same period (continuing in the Islamic world into the present day), not to mention the millions carried out by Hitler's Gestapo or by Stalin in Russia in our century, should be deemed less fearful than the Spanish Inquisition.

As terrible and regrettable as the methods of the Inquisitors were, truth is not well served by implying that these were invented by the Catholic Church or that they were exclusive to her, since neither was the case. Further, when the means of the Inquisition are (justly) condemned, often little is done to appreciate the threats to Church and State that provoked it, and how these appeared to persons living under their shadow. G. K. Chesterton writes of this phenomenon, "I should like the professors to be moved to tears by the thought that they had no real intimate inside knowledge of the Reign of Terror or the Inquisition. I should like to know that historical scholars felt the void in their experience, the deplorable gaps in their own personal knowledge, due to their having never come into close touch with assassination or torture" (London News, 8/15/25).

It's not that anyone is calling for a revival of the Inquisition, but genuine objectivity requires that one enter as much as possible into the psychological and intellectual experience of former times, recognizing the obstacles posed by the assumptions and biases of one's own time. As Chesterton warns, "The historian ought to be made to understand that his day is only a day. He is apt to treat it as if it were a day of judgment." We can find ourselves so busy plucking the speck from the eyes of our late brethren that we fail to see the beam in our own. That torture cannot be justly used in the interrogation of the accused, that heresy should not be punished with death - these are vitally important truths, and we are fortunate to live in times that recognize them (though we are certainly not the first to do so, since St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom were among many bishops who opposed the death penalty for heretics). But in the matter of tolerating doctrinal anomalies our times clearly err on the side of indifference, which may prove far more fatal to the souls of our contemporaries than the Inquisition was to the material well-being of those subjected to it.

One of the qualities that makes the milieu of the Inquisition so remote for us is its zeal for religious truth and its deep awareness of the dangerous consequences of error in matters of faith. Twentieth-century culture has experienced a wide-scale loss of faith, followed by general skepticism about ultimate questions and an anti-intellectual approach to religion, reducing it to a matter of taste or of feelings. We have lost our nerve in contending for the truth, and we have ceased to fear either for our neighbors or for ourselves lest we should fail to lay hold of it. We have fallen into what Cardinal Newman calls "the languid, unmeaning benevolence which we misname Christian love" (Parochial and Plain Sermons, v. 2, ser. 23).

This easy, tax-free, mindless ecumenism is the beam in our eye that blinds us to the need to preach the gospel, in season and out, to reprove, exhort, and admonish. If we are called to speak the truth in love, surely this is because speaking the truth is an act of love. Since Christ several times in Scripture seems to insist on the possibility of eternal damnation, we can hardly afford to be careless of our own opinions and conduct, or of our fellow human beings who stand in danger of incurring divine judgment. We must pray, Newman tells us, for witnesses of Christ who will not shrink from "proclaiming the narrowness of the way of life, the difficulty of attaining heaven, the danger of riches, the necessity of taking up our cross, the excellence and beauty of self denial and austerity, the hazard of disbelieving the Catholic Faith, and the duty of zealously contending for it."

When we lose sight of these truths, we are apt to view those who act on them with attitudes ranging from suspicion to contempt. This explains why the shadow of the Inquisition is invoked by certain Catholics today who are called to account for publicizing theological opinions hostile to the magisterium. This resort to name-calling affords a clear rhetorical advantage, since it evokes the revulsion felt for certain methods of the Inquisition in order to vilify its purpose as well. The attempt is to make any inquiry into the orthodoxy of a person's published opinions seem an unsavory and uncharitable affair. Never mind that those investigated in our day are largely official representatives of the Church and its teaching - priests, or theologians with a canonical mission to teach in the name of the Church. Given the repeated opportunities afforded such persons to explain and defend their views, or to suggest an interpretation compatible with Church doctrine, and the fact that penalties typically consist in nothing more than revoking a canonical mission, any resemblance to the Inquisitions of earlier times is exceedingly remote. Such inflammatory rhetoric both grossly overestimates the suffering of those in the present and trivializes the genuine abuses of the past.

When the Office of the Inquisition became the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, some argued that it should not simply be renamed but wholly abolished. This apparently assumes that the only challenges to Church teaching come from without, and that they are easily recognized to be incompatible with the Faith. Unfortunately, neither is true. Our Lord entrusted the apostles with the task of handing on what they had received from Him, guarding its integrity, and resisting all attempts to revise or embellish it. To fulfill this obligation is not unloving; it is what genuine love demands. Newman reminds us that St. John, the eloquent apostle of love, is the same man who writes in the Apocalypse of the presence of the One "whose head and hairs are white like wool, as white as snow, and whose eyes are as a flame of fire, and out of His mouth a sharp sword." In Christ, love and truth are inseparable. This is the great truth that brought the Inquisition to an end, and that requires the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to continue its work, its labor of love.

Laura Garcia is the mother of four, the wife of Jorge and a member of the Philosophy Department at Rutgers.