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1. The New Documents
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
b The New Documents 1 January 22, 1998, was a historic day for the Vatican and for cultural history. In the seat of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, successor of the famous academy founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, there took place a symposium titled “The Opening of the Archives of the Roman Holy Office.” Although the whole archive has not been preserved, the collection is still ample. For the first time in history, scholars can analyze the actions of the Vatican with respect to evolution with complete freedom. The cases of Galileo and of evolution have become emblematic of the problems between science and religion, and both have been the subject of much debate .. Although there are many studies on the relationship between evolution and Christianity, until now little was known about conflicts with Vatican authorities , and the facts were frequently distorted owing to the lack of trustworthy information . The recent declassification of documents in the Vatican archives makes it possible to clarify numerous issues and to know in detail how the Vatican reacted in the face of the problems posed by the concept of evolution. On April 24, 1585, the Franciscan cardinal Felice Peretti had been elected pope, taking the name Sixtus V. It is said that he entered the conclave in the fullness of his sixty-four years with a sickly cast, leaning on a cane, but that at the moment of his election, he threw the cane down, ruling with great authority from that day forward. Although the story of the cane may be apocryphal, it is a fact that within two years Sixtus had done away with thousands of bandits who had scourged the Papal States, which then became the safest territory on European soil. He also reorganized the Vatican’s finances and set in motion a distinctive phase in the urbanization of Rome, including a series of public works that remain an important part of the city’s urban landscape. In the five years of his pontificate, he also reorganized the central administration of the Church, creating , with a bull dated February 11, 1588, the system that continues in force in our own times: the central administration, whose head is the pope, is organized 8 | negotiating darwin around a series of “congregations,” which came to function like the ministries of modern nations. Each congregation is directed by a cardinal, and has as members several other cardinals, assisted by consultants and an administrative staff. Although several congregations have disappeared and others have been created or modified, the same administrative organization still exists today. In particular we need to know how two of them, the Holy Office and the Index, functioned, because those were the congregations that took part in the cases that we will examine here. The documents just declassified belong to the archives of these two congregations.1 The Holy Office Since 1965 the Holy Office has been called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It has a tutelary role over matters of faith and morality throughout the Catholic world. Until 1908 it was also called the Holy Roman Inquisition, because it was the tribunal in which acts held to be crimes against faith or morality were adjudicated. The antecedents of this congregation stretch back to the Middle Ages. Permanent inquisitors were created in Europe in 1231. They were charged with converting heretics and to sentencing them in cases of obstinacy, although bishops had the same function in each diocese. The Roman Tribunal was presided over by the pope, assisted by the assessor (the master of the Sacred Palace) and the commissioner. In 1542 Pope Paul III created the modern Roman Inquisition, with the objective of slowing the tide of Protestantism as it spread through Europe and began to make inroads into Italy. The new organism, consisting of six cardinals, extended its authority to all of Christendom. It was highly centralized —a necessity in view of the dispersion of the various tribunals of the Inquisition and of its absorption by the state in Spain (in the Spanish Inquisition, created in 1478, religious and political competencies were intermixed). In the general reform of the Roman Curia in 1588, Sixtus V placed it first among all the congregations, whence it acquired the qualifier “The Supreme,” which is how it was known. The current Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is presided over by a cardinal, just like the other congregations, but in...