15 Dec No One Appreciates the German Inquisition
Given the heaviness and ponderousness of our last two notes, we wanted to end the week with something lighter and, hopefully, much shorter than yesterday’s marathon rant. Unfortunately, the world is unwilling to cooperate and continues to offer nothing “light” about which to write. Or maybe it’s just us. We don’t know.
In any case, we decided that something less heavy would have to do in place of something light and hopeful. We’re pretty sure we failed to deliver.
This morning, our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity ended their must-read daily note with an item on the most overrated and most underrated political figures of all time. “At the CTUP Christmas party this year we put this question to the team and board members….” Their lists read as follows:
Most Overrated
Barack Obama (3 picks); FDR (2 picks); Alexander Hamilton; Nikki Haley; John McCain; Mitt Romney; Che Guevara; Arnold Schwarzenegger
Most Underrated
Calvin Coolidge (3 picks); Pope John Paul II (2 picks); Donald Trump; Bill Clinton; Mark Sanford; Steve Forbes; Jimmy Carter (on regulation, it was specified, but there were groans)
These are interesting lists, to say the least.
At the Political Forum Institute Christmas Party – which I decided to have over lunch and enjoyed tremendously – I thought about the lists and considered one change: I would take Pope Saint John Paul II off the underrated list – not because he wasn’t important and impactful and the right man at the right time, but because he’s not really underrated. Putting him on the list is a little like putting Reagan or Margaret Thatcher on the list. Everyone (everyone sensible, at least) knows how important he was. As John O’Sullivan put it, John Paul, Reagan, and Thatcher were, collectively, “three who changed the world.”
We would replace John Paul II on that list with his successor, Pope Benedict XVI. Unlike the erstwhile Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Ratzinger actually is underrated. Not only do people not think to put him on lists like this one, but his incredibly important teachings/advice/admonitions have gone almost entirely unheeded. He was, for half a century, the most important Christian intellectual in all of Christendom, and his absence in Church leadership has been felt profoundly. And just as his predecessor subtly addressed the greatest threat to peace on earth during his papacy, so did Benedict address the greatest threat in the subsequent era, a threat that is still profoundly affecting the global order.
Before he was the Pope, Ratzinger was a Cardinal and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith was formerly the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. And before that, it was the Sacred Congregation for the Universal Inquisition.
Most people associate the term “Inquisition” with the Spanish Inquisition. And the Spanish Inquisition was, most historians agree, a fairly gross abuse of ecclesiastical power by Tomas de Torquemada and his patrons, Isabella of Castile and her husband Ferdinand. It culminated in the unjust and barbarous slaughter of at least 2,000 Spanish Jews, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and the perpetuation of anti-Semitism on the Iberian Peninsula.
That said, the Inquisition, as it’s more broadly defined, was and still is a valuable tool for the defense of the Catholic faith. Originally founded to combat the Catharist heresy in the late 13th and early 14th Centuries and to wrest control of Church discipline from secular authorities, the Medieval Inquisition eventually evolved into a more formal congregation within the Church, with the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition officially established in 1542 by Pope Paul III. The Medieval Inquisition, its Roman successor, and even its modern manifestation, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, have all been charged with protecting the faith and defending the Church against heresy. And while Pope John Paul II correctly lamented the excesses of the early Inquisition, calling it a “painful chapter of history” characterized by, among other things, the unwarranted “use of violence in the service of truth,” there is little question that the institution as a whole has served a valuable purpose and helped to exorcise many of the heretical scourges that have threatened the Church since the late Middle Ages.
The Inquisition’s very existence is, in part, what differentiates Christianity from Islam. The Inquisition, in short, enabled the establishment of a Christian orthodoxy that, in time, rejected such moral abominations as violence committed in God’s name. The Inquisition facilitated the eradication of all sorts of evils that have, over the centuries, been erroneously called “Christian.” And in so doing, it permitted the Christian world to unite in rejecting violence as a means for enforcing God’s will.
Just over 17 years ago, Pope Benedict XVI issued a challenge to the world’s Muslims to define themselves and to define the type of God in which they believe. Pope Benedict spoke of faith and reason, arguing that the two cannot exist separately and, moreover, that when they exist in harmony, violence in God’s name is impossible. Specifically, Pope Benedict spoke of logos, i.e. Divine Reason, as the animating force of God’s nature. He argued that logos – faith and reason in perfect accord – is the key to human potential, freedom, and civilizational progress.
This challenge was specifically and unambiguously the challenge of the Inquisition.
What is Islam? What is it not? How does it define itself and what sort of God does it worship? Does it believe in a God of logos? Or does it believe in some other type of God, a god of voluntas, or pure will?
In his famous address at Regensburg, Pope Benedict declared that “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and with the nature of the soul.” In so doing, he challenged Islam to reject violence, to reject an arbitrary and willful God who demands violence of his people, and thus to accept God as perfectly and completely rational.
We would argue, moreover, that this challenge was born directly of Pope Benedict’s specific life experiences and his unique and formative involvement in the defense of the faith against heresy as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Pope Benedict, of course, was roundly criticized by the press and by mainstream political forces for insulting Islam and for needlessly instigating rancor between his Church and the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. But he did no such thing. In truth, he asked – begged – Islam to take up the painful, disagreeable, and occasionally bloody challenge of the Inquisition, to define itself, once and for all, and either to move past its history of violence or to concede that it is anything but a “religion of peace.”
In light of the events of October 7 and the subsequent two months, we can’t help but think that the world would be a far better place if instead of reflexively criticizing him, the global political establishment had joined Pope Benedict in his pleas to Islam.
Of course, they didn’t. And he remains radically underrated today.
