In November 1992, at a ceremony in Rome, before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right. The formal rehabilitation was based on the findings of a committee of the Academy the pope set up in 1979, soon after taking office. The committee decided the Inquisition had acted in good faith, but was wrong. Today the Vatican has its own celestial observatory.
The Vatican noted that archives of the Inquisition and Index had not survived well through the centuries. Because the “Church had a tradition of burning many of the most delicate heresy files,” and the Inquisition’s archive was almost entirely burned on Pope Paul IV’s death in 1559, many documents had been lost. Some “were hauled off to Paris under Napoleon’s rule in 1810…and more than 2,000 volumes were burned. Some fell into rivers during transit, others were sold for paper or became mixed up with other files.” Today the Vatican possesses “around 4,500 volumes, of which only a small part refer to the heresy trials. The rest deal with theological controversies and spiritual questions.”
A book that was never banned by the Church is Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, which is the basis of the theory of evolution. Unlike some Protestant fundamentalist churches that take the Bible literally on the subject of God creating mankind, the Earth, and the universe in seven days, the Vatican has recently stated that it is possible that some species, with the assistance of a higher power, were able to evolve into the species that exist in the world today.
Reporting on the opening of an exhibit of Vatican Archive material in 2008, Newsweek magazine noted that the display included “documents about the Church’s restrictions on the movement of Jews, instructions for persecuting Protestants… There were 18th-century maps outlining theghettos of Rome, Ancona and Ferrara, depicting where Jews could live in pink or yellow and where they were allowed to keep businesses in blue. There were documents with handwritten regulations describing when Jewish women could be out of the gated areas and what they could wear. There were sketches of prisons and extensive lists of banned books and written edicts… One from 1611 outlined how inquisitors should com-port themselves both on the job and off and an illustration showing what their children should wear to school and to the beach. Investigators were even told what pajamas were acceptable.
“Other documents targeted game hunters and fishermen who were thought to be poaching from Vatican grounds. And then there’s a gemencrusted pastoral staff taken in the nineteenth century from a man who was condemned to death for claiming he was a saint. Inquisitors had authority in areas ranging from iconography and the way images of saints and prelates could be portrayed.
“This wasn’t the first time that the Church tried to show that the judges of the Inquisition were not as brutal as previously believed. In 2004, the Vatican published an 800-page report claiming that of those investigated as heretics by the notorious Spanish Inquisition, which was independent of Rome in the fifteenth century, only 1.8 percent of the accused were actually executed. Nonetheless, Pope John Paul II referred to the Church’s 700-year campaign against heresy as a ‘tormented phase’ and the ‘greatest error in the Church’s history.’”
One book that was not banned was the classic nineteenth-century novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. While it was being scrutinized by inquisitors in Rome, who formed a department known as the Sacred Congregation of the Index, one of the Vatican readers considered the story of slavery in the United States to be a coded appeal for revolution. When a second opinion on the book was sought from other inquisitors, they did not consider it harmful and no ban was ever pronounced.
Prior to World War II, “Adolf Hitler’s hate-filled Mein Kampf was also never put on the Index… The censors pondered what to do about the Nazi dictator, with the discussions in the office going on for years.” In the end, examination of Mein Kampf was simply terminated.
More recently, letters sent by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to a German literary critic discussed the Harry Potter novels. “In March 2003, a month after the English press throughout the world falsely proclaimed that Pope John Paul II approved of Harry Potter, the man who was to become his successor sent a letter to a Gabriele Kuby outlining his agreement with her opposition to J. K. Rowling’s offerings” as “morally unhealthy reading” for children. On the issue of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood, “in a letter on March 7, 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger, thanked Kuby for her ‘instructive’ book (titled Harry Potter: Good or Evil?), in which Kuby stated the Potter books corrupted the hearts of the young, preventing them from developing a properly ordered sense of good and evil, thus harming their relationship with God while that relationship is still in its infancy. ‘It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly,’ wrote Ratzinger.
“The letter also encouraged Kuby to send her book on Potter to a prelate who had quipped about Potter during a press briefing which led to the false press about the Vatican support of Potter. At a Vatican press conference to present a study document on the New Age in April 2003,…Fr. Peter Fleetwood made a positive comment on the Harry Potter books in response to a question from a reporter. This resulted in headlines such as POPE APPROVES POTTER (Toronto Star), POPE STICKS UP FOR POTTER BOOKS (BBC Newsround), and HARRY POTTER IS OKAY WITH THE PONTIFF (Chicago Sun Times).”
Largely because Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code presented a tale of an investigation into a centuries-old conspiracy by the Church and Crusaders known as the Knights Templar to keep a secret about Jesus, that if revealed would shake the foundations of Christianity, nothing in the Vatican Secret Archives has been more fascinating to millions of people around the world than finding out what lies within the archives about the notorious knights.
CHAPTER 2
The Truth About the Templars
No pope has had a longer-lasting influence on the course of world history than Urban II. Today’s conflict between Christianity-based democracies of the Western world and Middle East Islamic-fundamentalist terrorists can be traced to his appeal to Christian princes in Europe for a crusade to rescue the Holy Land from Muslims.
“In the speech given at the Council of Clermont in France, on November 27, 1095, he combined the ideas of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with that of waging a holy war… He declared, ‘The noblerace of Franks (French) must come to the aid of their fellow Christians in the East. The infidel Turks are advancing into the heart of Eastern Christendom; Christians are being oppressed and attacked; churches and holy places are being defiled. Jerusalem is groaning under the Saracen (Muslim) yoke. The Holy Sepulchre [the church in Jerusalem that Christian tradition marks as the burial site of Christ] is in Moslem hands and has been turned into a mosque. Pilgrims are harassed and even prevented from access to the Holy Land. The West must march to the defense of the East. All should go, rich and poor alike. The Franks must stop their internal wars and squabbles. Let them go instead against the infidel and fight a righteous war. God himself will lead them, for they will be doing His work. There will be absolution and remission of sins for all who die in the service of Christ. Here they are poor and miserable sinners; there they will be rich and happy. Let none hesitate; they must march next summer. God wills it!’”