Vatican Hosts Inquisition Symposium
By CANDICE HUGHES
.c The Associated Press
VATICAN CITY (AP) – The Vatican assembled a blue-ribbon panel of scholars Thursday to examine the Inquisition and declared its readiness to submit the church's darkest institution to the judgment of history.
The three-day symposium is part of the Roman Catholic Church's countdown to 2000. Pope John Paul II wants the church to begin the new millennium with a clear conscience, which means facing up to past sins.
For many people, the Inquisition is one of the church's worst transgressions. For centuries, ecclesiastical ``thought police'' tried, tortured and burned people at the stake for heresy and other crimes.
``The church cannot cross the threshold of the new millennium without pressing its children to purify themselves in repentance for their errors, infidelity, incoherence,'' Cardinal Roger Etchegaray said, opening the conference.
The inquisitors went after Protestants, Jews, Muslims and presumed heretics. They persecuted scientists like Galileo. They banned the Bible in anything but Latin, which few ordinary people could read.
The Inquisition began in the 13th century and lasted into the 19th. An index of banned books endured even longer, until 1966. And it was 1992 before the church rehabilitated Galileo, condemned for saying the Earth wasn't the center of the universe.
The symposium, which gathers experts from inside and outside the church, is the Vatican's first critical look at the church's record of repression.
Among other things, it will give scholars a chance to compare notes on what they've found in the secret Vatican archives on the Inquisition, which the Holy See only recently opened.
``The church is not afraid to submit its past to the judgment of history,'' said Etchegaray, a Frenchman who leads the Vatican's Commission on the Grand Jubilee.
Closed to the public and press, the symposium is not expected to produce any definitive statement from the Vatican on the Inquisition. That is expected in 2000 as part of the grand ``mea culpa'' at the start of Christianity's third millennium.
The great question is whether the pontiff will ask forgiveness for the sins of the church's members, as it did with the Holocaust, or for the sins of the church itself. Unlike the Holocaust, the Inquisition was a church initiative authorized by the popes themselves.
Etchegaray on Thursday swept aside the idea that it can be seen a series of local campaigns whose excesses might be blamed on secular authorities. There was only one Inquisition, he said, and it was undeniably an ecclesiastical institution.
The pontiff may give a hint as to his thinking on Saturday, when he meets with participants in the conference.
About 50 scholars from Europe, the United States and Latin America are taking part.
AP-NY-10-29-98 1403EST
Catholic Church says must own up for Inquisition
By Alessandra Galloni
VATICAN CITY, Oct 29 (Reuters) - The Vatican on Thursday said it had to take responsibility for one of the darkest eras in Roman Catholic church history and not lay blame for the Inquisition on civil prosecutors.
Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, head of the Vatican's main committee for the year 2000, opened a three-day symposium on the Inquisition saying it was time to re-examine the work of the special court the church set up in 1233 to curb heresy.
Etchegaray said some scholars claimed there were several inquisitions: one in Rome, which worked directly under the Holy See's control, and others in Spain and in Portugal which were often aided by the local civil courts.
``We cannot ignore the fact that this (attempt to distinguish between inquisitions) has allowed some to make apologetic arguments and lay responsibility for what Iberian tribunals did onto civil authorities,'' he said.
``The fact that the Spanish and Portuguese crowns...had powers of intervention...on inquisitory tribunals does not change the ecclesiastical character of the institution,'' he said.
Pope Gregory IX created the Inquisition to help curb heresy, but church officials soon began to count on civil authorities to fine, imprison and even torture heretics.
One of the Inquisition's best known victims was the astronomer Galileo, condemned for claiming the earth revolved around the sun.
The Inquisition reached its height in the 16th century to counter the Reformation. The department later became the Holy Office and its successor now is called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which controls the orthodoxy of Catholic teaching.
Some of the conclusions of the international symposium, which ends on Saturday, could be included in a major document in which the church is expected to ask forgiveness for its past errors as part of celebrations for the year 2000.
The church ``cannot pass into the new millennium without urging its sons to purify themselves, through penitence, of its errors, its infidelities and its incoherences...,'' Father Georges Cottier, a top Vatican theologian and head of the theological commission for the year 2000, told the symposium.
Etchegaray said the conference could also draw on examples that scholars had been able to examine since January, when the Vatican opened secret files.
The archives also opened the infamous Index of Forbidden Books which Roman Catholics were not allowed to read or possess on pain of excommunication. Even the bible was on the blacklist.
Pope John Paul has said in several documents and speeches that the Church needs to assume responsibility for the Inquisition, which was responsible for the forced conversion of Jews as well as the torture and killing of heretics.
While there may have been mitigating historical factors for the behaviour of some Catholics, the Pope has said this did not prevent the church from expressing regret for the wrongs of its members in some periods of history.
He initiated the procedure that led to the rehabilitation of Galileo, completed in 1992.
19:01 10-29-98
