God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (25 page)

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 Pope 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.

Beyond the individual cases is the overarching attempt to exert a more systemic form of control—for instance, by putting Catholic universities on a tighter leash, a move embodied in the 1990 document
Ex corde Ecclesiae.
Among other things, the CDF demanded that presidents, rectors, and professors of theology and philosophy at Catholic universities take an oath declaring that they adhere “with religious
obsequium
” to whatever the pope and bishops advance as official doctrine at the moment, even if doctrine on some particular issue has no claim to being definitive.
In the United States, that demand has been resisted.

The experience of being called to Rome for interrogation—to answer charges that may be vague, brought by accusers who may be unknown, in accordance with procedures that may remain a mystery—leaves a bitter aftertaste. The German theologian Bernard Häring, who was interrogated but never condemned, compared it to what he had endured at the hands of the Nazis. “During the Second World War,” he wrote in a memoir, “I stood before a military court four times. Twice it was a case of life and death. At that time I felt honored because I was accused by enemies of God.” But to stand accused by the Church he had served all his life? “I would rather stand once again before a court of war of Hitler.”

In his book
The Rule of Benedict,
David Gibson offers this vignette from another case:

When Charles Curran met with Ratzinger in Rome in 1986, before he was stripped of his teaching post, he demanded to face his accusers. Ratzinger said, “Your own works have been your ‘accusers,’ and they alone.” Curran told the cardinal, “You are a respected German theologian, and are on a first-name basis with six German moralists whom I could name, and you know as well as I do that they are saying the same things as I am saying.” Ratzinger replied, “Well, if you would want to delate these people, we will open a dossier on them.” Curran responded, “I’m not here to do your dirty work.”

The Pelvic Region

In 2005, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, acting at the behest of Cardinal Ratzinger, effectively removed Thomas Reese, a political scientist and a Jesuit, from his post as the editor of
America,
a magazine published by the Jesuit Order. Reese had written on Church affairs for years, and continues to do so. His book
Inside the Vatican,
published before he became editor, is regarded as the authoritative modern account of the Holy See’s operations. Reese remembers once asking Josef Ratzinger whether, given the CDF’s imperfect track record, he ever worried that he might be silencing people who would one day be rehabilitated. Ratzinger replied noncommittally: Well, you pray and do as best you can.

Reese’s own firing came after years of confrontation, through intermediaries, with Ratzinger—a delicate proxy war whose conclusion was foreseeable. In a balanced way,
America
had made a point of covering a wide range of controversial Church issues, often involving what Reese calls “the pelvic region”—women’s ordination, clerical celibacy, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, stem-cell research—but also extending to freedom of conscience and the governance of the Church.
Once, in an editorial, the magazine had referred to the procedures of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as “inquisitional.”

One oddity of Reese’s case is that as the affair played out, Reese never had any direct communication with the Vatican. The pressure was forceful, but delicate and indirect. Because of the Jesuit organizational structure, the CDF deals with the order through the superior general, in Rome, who at the time was Peter-Hans Kolvenbach. Kolvenbach would meet periodically with Ratzinger, and Ratzinger would convey his complaints. Kolvenbach would then contact the president of the Jesuit conference in the United States, who would talk to Reese.

At one point, the Vatican went so far as to insist that
America
accept the imposition of a censorship board, and proceeded to appoint the member bishops. Reese consulted with Cardinal Avery Dulles, a fellow Jesuit. “Do you think it would help if I wrote Cardinal Ratzinger?” Dulles asked. Reese remembers saying, in effect, “Yes! Yes! Be my cardinal-protector!” The push for a censorship board lost steam—but not the dissatisfaction at the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio. “I never could find out who was actually complaining about me,” Reese recalls. “They would say, ‘Well, bishops are complaining,’ but no one would ever tell you
which
bishops were complaining.”