The Inquisition by John A. O’Brien (review)

670 BOOK REVIEWS Despite the Vatican's ineffectiveness in the modem world, there is a fascination about its activities far in excess of its influence. Vatican gossip is always more interesting that that of any other government. Part of this has to do with tradition and manners; part of it is that juxtaposition of secular and sacred so well illustrated by the remark made by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, when the French Ambassador accused him of lying: " the Cardinal cooly replied that he was merely doing what all diplomats did, and that in any case the Pope would give him absolution if necessary." Jos:E M. SA.NcHEZ Saint Louis University St. Louis, Missouri The Inquisition. By John A. O'Brien. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1973. Pp. 233. $6.95. The present volume, by a well-known Catholic scholar, traces the history and operation of the Inquisition in its medieval, Spanish, and Roman forms. It closes with chapters on several celebrated cases that came before the Inquisition-of Joan of Arc, Savonarola, and Galileo-and a final chapter entitled, A New Era, in which the author brings out the significance of the changes that were initiated by Pope John XXIII and Vatican Council II. The book is a useful, popular, and readable account of this celebrated tribunal about which many people have only hazy ideas. Though filling a need, the volume must be read with discrimination, keeping various reservations in mind. Though the author grounds himself on the sources, primary and secondary, he serves notice in his Foreword that he does not aim at complete objectivity. It is best to let him speak for himself. Neither have I failed to let my moral indignation come to the surface when narrating the cruel and inhuman actions of the Inquisitors. For a historian to relate such incidents with icy indifference and no feeling of repugnance would be to strip history of moral values and undertones and put it on par with wrestling with a problem in mathematics. Running as a leitmotiv through the volume is the principle of freedom of thought and conscience against the violence and coercive measures of the Inquisitors who generally regarded a day's work wasted if it brought no victim to the jail, dungeon or stake. This last statement is a value judgment, an exaggerated generality that must do injustice to a great many inquisitors. The author might have added a word at this point to the effect that inquisitors were, at least in BOOK REVIEWS 671 part, victims of their concrete historical environment and, like ourselves, subject to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual blindness of their age, limitations that very few men can escape. Not only does O'Brien fail to mention this mitigating circumstance but he also labors the incongruity of the Inquisition and the actions of the inquisitors who professed to be agents of the Church of Christ and yet sanctioned systematic cruelty, torture, and burnings at the stake. He returns to this in one form or another on six separate occasions (pp. 1, 40, 45, 49, 58, 70). From the opening paragraphs of the chapter on witchcraft an indiscriminate reader could gain the impression that all the condemnations and burnings for witchcraft were carried out by the Inquisition. The witchcraft craze was not limited to the Inquisition or to Catholic leaders and countries but was shared by the Protestant reformers, not excluding Luther and Calvin, and Protestant countries. O'Brien mentions these facts later in the chapter but in a muted key. Perhaps this is excusable in a book on the Inquisition, though the chapter does attempt an overview of witchcraft . The author is guilty of a simplistic statement in the same chapter. He writes that "the philosopher Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600, was burned at the stake as a heretic because he stated publicly that many so-called witches were merely psychologically disturbed old women." Bruno's errors were much more profound and general. A. Puppi writes in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (vol. II, 889): "His (Bruno's) violent and imprudent criticisms against every doctrinal profession not illumined by philosophical and personal knowledge, his rejection of all authority...