Dominic and the Inquisition

When Saint Dominic died in Bologna, the Order of Preachers was already founded and had spread throughout Europe. What we call the Inquisition, in the singular and with a capital “I,” did not yet exist. Its history, however, accompanies that of the Dominicans, and one would be accused of partiality, not without reason, if he refrained from mentioning it when drawing up a summary, even an abbreviated one, of the order’s heritage. This task is not without difficulty, so strong is the popular imagination of this institution. For most of our contemporaries, an inquisitor is a serial killer from the Middle Ages dressed in black and white, cruel and fanatical—essentially the character of Bernardo Gui, played with talent by F. Murray Abraham in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film The Name of the Rose. But there are great differences between such depictions and the true story.

The Inquisition began in the thirteenth century as a judicial procedure that allowed the judge, even without an accuser, to open an investigation (inquisitio) into a person whose faith was suspect, to hear witnesses, and to pronounce a sentence. Around 1230, the Inquisition came to mean an ecclesiastical court of exception, working in co-operation with the civil authority, usually by delegation or by papal order. The Order of Preachers was young and susceptible to ecclesiastical demands; its members were capable of conducting a written procedure. The Dominicans, as well as the Franciscans and secular priests, were invited by the papacy to collaborate in the office for the repression of heresy.

Dominic died in 1221, before the foundation of the Inquisition, but his spiritual sons became and remained, in the eyes of many, “instruments of ecclesiastical power and even agents of political propaganda in the service of the Holy See,” as the French historian André Vauchez put it. The Dominicans, moreover, contributed to this association through a deliberate anachronism by claiming Dominic as the first inquisitor from the beginning of the fourteenth century. This baseless claim was repeated until the eighteenth century. In 1666, Father Vincenzo Maria Fontana entitled a chapter of his Sacrum theatrum dominicanum “S. Pater Dominicus Primus in Ecclesia Inquisitor.” In order to affirm this, he did not hesitate to draw on the most varied authors: the medieval Dominicans Bernardo Gui and Nicolas Eymeric, the Spanish Jesuit Sebastian Salelles, the poet Dante Alighieri, and Pope Sixtus V.

From the beginning of the institution in the thirteenth century, the inquisitors, in particular the Dominican inquisitors, met with sporadic resistance, as witnessed by the attacks on the judges of Avignonet in 1242 and on Brother Peter of Verona in 1252. (The latter, canonized as a martyr in 1253, was the second saint of the Order of Preachers.) The Catholic population, however, does not seem to have contested the validity of the Inquisition. As the medievalist Charles de La Roncière wrote of Catholics living at the end of the fifteenth century, “No one seems to me to have been able to judge and explicitly denounce . . . the Inquisition as an abuse.” There is no questioning of the Inquisition as an institution, especially since the Church itself has not ceased, since the censure of Robert le Bougre, to repress its excesses. The question of the philosophical and theological basis of the Inquisition was not really debated until the eighteenth century, with the exception of Erasmus, who was perhaps the first to denounce the contradiction between the actions of the clerics and the teaching of the Gospel. In the Middle Ages, any spiritual divergence was perceived as an extremely serious matter: Offending the Church of God offended God Himself and compromised the common salvation. It was a sort of crime of divine treason. The offense of heresy was felt to be a diabolical undertaking, and it follows that the clerics gradually built up an increasingly negative response to it.

As a result, the historiography of the eighteenth century saw two types of works in opposition. Without batting an eyelid, pious and traditional writers repeated the legend of Dominic as the first inquisitor and said that the brothers naturally followed in the founder’s supposed footsteps. Father Charles-Louis Richard, a Dominican and author of a monumental Dictionnaire universel . . . des sciences ecclésiastiques, thus asserted in 1760 that “Innocent III and Honorius III named Saint Dominic the first Inquisitor General; and twelve years after his death, in 1233, Gregory IX named two friars of his Order to exercise the same office.” In the face of these typical accounts, the French Enlightenment saw the development of a narrative that was radically critical of the Inquisition to the point of rejecting Dominic and the Dominicans at the same time.

The most famous example of this criticism is offered by Voltaire. Virulent and talented, the philosopher launched the polemic of numbers by accusing the Inquisition of having condemned “more than a hundred thousand so-called sorcerers . . . and a greater number of immolated heretics.” Statistics were used to impress people, while appealing to the “scientific” emphasis of this period. In his Traité de l’intolérance, Voltaire harshly condemned the methods of the Holy Office, and in his poem La Pucelle, he placed Dominic in Hell. Published in 1769, the article “Inquisition” in the Philosophical Dictionary begins with these words: “The Inquisition is, as is well known, an admirable and entirely Christian invention to make the Pope and the monks more powerful and to make a whole people hypocritical.” The author concludes his description of the auto-da-fé with the following words: “They sing, Mass is said, and men are killed.” After such charges, described with such talent, Dominic and his followers seemed definitively doomed to opprobrium, especially since the Voltairian critique was taken up in the article on the Inquisition in the Encyclopaedia written by the Chevalier de Jaucourt. Also, in 1778, on the eve of the revolution, Mirabeau published a poem in twelve songs in Amsterdam entitled Guzmanade ou l’établissement de l’Inquisition. A new penal philosophy had taken the opposite view of the real nature of the Inquisition, so much so that the Dominicans were carried away with it.

In 1839, after the revolutionary break in France, Father Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, a young Parisian priest already famous for his oratorical talent and his gifts as a polemicist, understood that his project of living in France as a Dominican required an explanation of the phenomenon of the Inquisition to public opinion. Before entering the novitiate in Italy, he published a Mémoire pour le rétablissement en France de l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs, which was intended, among other things, to combat preconceived ideas about the Inquisition. In a long letter from 1839 addressed to Dom Prosper Guéranger, founder of the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, the novice Lacordaire described his point of view:

I entered the Order of St. Dominic only after having studied and understood its nature, which seemed to me to be absolutely opposed to the popular opinion that has been formed of it. There are few learned men in France who do not regard St. Dominic and the Dominicans as burners of men, as an order founded to defend the Church by iron and fire. If it were so, I would never have given him even the nail of my little finger. . . . No doubt he was not a nineteenth-century liberal, but . . . he understood the inadequacy of force to save the Church, and the need to have recourse to an apostolic regeneration. . . . It was this peaceful view that made him what he was and what he is. . . . I therefore bring to the restoration of order in France the spirit of poverty, gentleness and unction of St. Dominic; the profound persuasion that the apostolic spirit is the only true bulwark of the Church, and that force, a secondary and unfortunate means, is never more than the effect of a legitimate need for defense, in which the Church must temper the ardor of its own people much more than it must excite it. The Inquisition is over. . . . We must therefore leave to the past what is past, and draw from the ruins that which is immortal in its nature, that is to say, the spirit of Jesus Christ, the spirit of grace and love. If God grants me the grace, I will leave the Order of St. Dominic in the reputation of the sweetest order in the world.

The enterprise of Lacordaire was only partially successful. In the violent polemics that arose in France from the time of the Third Republic, the black legend of the Inquisition found new vigor: Politicians, authors of dictionaries, playwrights, historians, authors of school textbooks, painters, and caricaturists associated Catholicism with inquisitorial barbarity. Freethinkers, rationalists, and atheists were not the only ones to associate Christianity with judicial arbitrariness; some Catholic preachers and polemicists praised the violence exercised by the Inquisition. In the heat of the controversy, the memory of the gentle face of Dominic and his sons often hardened into a grimace, and Dominic and the French Dominicans were held jointly responsible for this crime. The Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX siècle offers a particularly interesting case in point. This freethinking, anticlerical monument built by Pierre Larousse and a whole team anonymously grouped around him developed the theme of the Catholic Inquisition with entries that aroused the readers’ horror and reprobation.

The nineteenth century saw the death of the Inquisition as had been historically known. It even lost its name in 1908, when Pope Pius X reformed the Roman Curia. The word disappeared from the vocabulary of the Roman dicasteries, and the surviving Congregation of the Holy Office devoted itself mainly to the examination and possible condemnation of works or doctrines judged to be dangerous in relation to orthodoxy or morality. In this capacity, it intervened in theological disputes during the twentieth century, such as those linked to the Modernist crisis. Despite its transformation, the institution was no less contested. On November 8, 1963, Josef Cardinal Frings, archbishop of Cologne, intervened in the aula of the Second Vatican Council by remarking during the discussion of the scheme on the Church that a clear distinction had to be made between administrative and judicial procedures. This, he said, applies to all the Roman congregations, including the Holy Office, “whose way of proceeding in many things is not up to the standard of our time.” No one, he added, can be condemned without first being heard, nor without having the means to defend himself and to correct himself. In this perspective, the Holy Office underwent a radical reform in 1965, although Dominican religious continued to collaborate closely with the new Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as advisors.

In this new institutional context, from the very end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, a new effort to reread the documents and draw new conclusions appeared among historians, especially thanks to the work of Henry Charles Lea. This scholarly work stimulated the study of Catholic historians. In France, Célestin Douais, a Dominican tertiary and an editor of the work of Bernardo Gui, had already published a study on Les Albigeois in 1879, and the lay academic Jean Guiraud undertook a Histoire de l’Inquisition au Moyen Âge (1935–1938). Their impact was not as great as that of Lea’s work, probably because of their desire to put the Inquisition into context and because it was more difficult to get public opinion to accept a nuanced presentation, but these authors helped to open the way for the real historiographical and theological turning point that took place in the years 1970 to 1975, which led to a more serene, though sometimes severe, perspective of the reality of the Inquisition.

This effort at objectivity was made possible by a very large number of academic works, both Catholic and non-Catholic, which sought to make the texts speak for themselves and which abandoned an apologetic assessment. The Cahiers de Fanjeaux, the result of colloquia organized since 1965 in the Lauragais, have greatly contributed to this work. The attention paid to the archives and the return to the sources has led to a relative consensus on the reality of the Inquisition. In an important article from 1988, the Italian Adriano Prosperi summarized this evolution by speaking of a “new image” of the Inquisition among historians, believing that the demonizing stereotype shaped by literature, under the impact of the Reformation and especially the Enlightenment, as well as its romantic fascination, have practically disappeared among professional historians. The discovery of the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century has made it possible to perceive, by comparison, the differences in the justice systems of contemporary dictatorships and the Inquisition. The rules of the latter were harsh, as was the case for the entire judicial system of the time, but they were also precise and objective. Prosperi called for an examination not only of the victims but also of the inquisitorial phenomenon itself, paying attention to the aims of the Inquisition, an approach that had previously been neglected by the romantic analysis of the judicial system. In 1998, ten years after that article, the same researcher, analyzing the opening of the archives of the Holy Office, confirmed the reorientation of the historical perspective, attributing it to the new attitude of the Church toward its past. He underlined the novelty represented by the Church’s adherence to the process of historical research.

The Dominicans participated in the movement encouraged by Pope John Paul II; between 2002 and 2009, four international university colloquia questioned the role of the Dominicans in the Inquisition but also in the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies in the modern period, and in its multiple intellectual or artistic representations. This joint movement was marked by the unprecedented act of Saint John Paul II on March 12, 2000. Together with seven collaborators from the Roman Curia, the pontiff made seven requests for forgiveness to God on behalf of the Christian people. The second request concerned the faults committed in the service of the truth. Cardinal Ratzinger, “recognizing that men of the Church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes resorted to non-evangelical methods in carrying out their duty to defend the truth,” invited us to pray that each of Christ’s faithful “may know how to imitate the gentle and humble Lord Jesus.” The Holy Father then addressed this prayer to God:

Lord, God of all men, in certain periods of history Christians have sometimes indulged in intolerant methods and have not observed the great commandment of love, thus sullying the face of the Church, your Bride. Show mercy to your sinful children and accept our firm intention to seek and promote the truth in the sweetness of charity, knowing well that the truth is imposed only by virtue of the truth itself.

It is now better understood that medieval justice was hard on the victims and that the medieval Inquisition undoubtedly played, for a time at least, a role in regulating violence. For its part, the Church better understood that if truth had rights, so did people; if it is legitimate for the Church to oppose what it deems to be errors, it must do so with “the weapons of light” evoked by Saint Paul in the Epistle to the Romans, not with weapons of war.

This essay is extracted from Saint Dominic and His Mission, published by The Catholic University of America Press and translated from the French by the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia.