The author of Are We Rome? and an editor at Vanity Fair, Murphy offers an informative and engaging history of the Catholic Church’s famous office of the Inquisition. The office was established in 1231 to investigate and eliminate various forms of Christian heresy – Cathars at first, but it eventually included Protestants; Jews too! Why Jews? Jews who converted to Christianity, especially as a result of the primary motivator, duress, were often regarded with suspicion to still secretly practice Judaism – which would be heresy. Expelling all Jews from Spain, for example, was rationalized in part as a way to protect the “Holy Catholic Faith” from “judaizing and wicked Christians” within its ranks. Ironically, Jews were forced to convert or leave, and those who converted could stay, being now regarded as Christians. Thus the policies developed to control those within the Church, when the Church runs the State, lead naturally to the Church controlling the destiny of those who are not by definition within its membership.
The office has been reinvented many times over the centuries, and today is known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, over which Pope Benedict XVI, when Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, presided as prefect. Now that parts of the enormous archives have begun to be opened to investigation by “outsiders” in recent years, Murphy examines these records toward a specific narrative. Focusing on the themes of surveillance, censorship, and “scientific” interrogation developed through the centuries by this office, Murphy critically reveals the ideas and mechanisms of the Catholic Church in its war on “error.” But that is far from the only victim of Murphy’s crusade: his sights are set also similarly revealing dynamics at work in modern governments, not least in the policies and conduct of the United States and its allies in their war on “terror.” Bibliography, index.
Nonfiction
God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
- Review
By
– April 30, 2012
Mark D. Nanos, Ph.D., University of Kansas, is the author of Mysteryof Romans, winner of the 1996 National Jewish Book Award, Charles H. RevsonAward in Jewish-Christian Relations.
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