Vatican displays secret Inquisition documents | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Vatican displays secret Inquisition documents | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Feb. 23, 2008, 8:04PM
Vatican displays secret Inquisition documents

Associated Press

IF you are inquisitive about the Inquisition, a rare public glimpse of centuries-old Vatican documents will leave you wanting more.

There are no heresy trial transcripts or descriptions of torture methods at a show on view in Rome through March 16. Still, enough curiosities on display allow insights into how the Vatican once systematically tried to gain control over many aspects of life that had nothing to do with faith.

For centuries, the archives of what was once known as the Holy Office were secret. Then, in 1998, they were opened to scholars.

The show, at Rome's Central Risorgimento Museum, is the first time the public can study a sampling of what those archives preserve.

There is the 1611 Holy Office order instructing Inquisitors how to carry out their job and how to conduct themselves in their time off the job.

A calendar from 1708 gives the day-by-day schedule of religious orders whose members took turns helping in Rome's hospitals, starting with Holy Spirit hospital, which still serves the city today.

The edicts and orders were printed on what turned out to be remarkably durable material made out of recycled rags at a Vatican printing establishment.

The Holy Office "wanted total control," said Monsignor Alejandro Cifres, one of the show's curators and on the staff of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Holy Office.

The Roman Catholic Church in past centuries had its hand in everything, "culture to literature to economics, even architecture," Cifres said. The Holy Office relied on reports from Dominicans, Franciscans and lay people, he said, and the church had a "network" of monitors.

Napoleon's forces carted off bundles of documents from the Holy Office. The French government later wanted to return the material, but the cost of transport was too high, Cifres said, and the order went out from Rome to burn many of the files.

But documents from famous trials such as that of Galileo were saved, Cifres said.

Galileo had been condemned for supporting Nicholas Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa as the Vatican then held.

Pope John Paul II in 1992 declared the 17th-century denunciation of Galileo in error.