The American Catholic Voter: 200 Years of Political Impact Book

I've read most of Jonathan Kirsch's work, beginning with The Harlot by the Side of the Road. In his earlier books, he's an engaging writer able to winkle out some of the lesser known aspects of commonly accepted ideas and stories in Western history - as in his first book, Harlot, which highlighted "real" and obscure but important stories from the Hebrew and Christian bibles.

In recent works, however, I've felt that Kirsch has been throwing together poorly integrated essays in response to popular obsessions, and I've become less and less eager to read his latest. In A History of the End of the World, it was millennialism; in The Grand Inquisitor, it's torture. The poverty and haste of his latest effort is evident early and clearly in the writing style, which is tedious and labored. Hardly a page goes by without Kirsch mentioning that the Inquisition has existed for 600 years, wreaking its mischief on anyone who disagrees with the Church.

Even as a general primer on the history of religious persecution and the "Inquisition" as an institution of the Roman Church, the book is not very satisfying. The author establishes a strawman in discussing the "apologists" for torture in academia and relying (according to the notes, at any rate) almost entirely on the grand doyen of inquisition studies, Henry Charles Lea, who was writing in the late 19th century. In his zeal to build up the image of the Roman Inquisition as a major arm of the Church, with influence over every aspect of Catholic life, Kirsch ignores the real nuances and differences in how inquisitions manifested themselves across time and space, and in how opposition to papal supremacy expressed itself in the same period. There is a serious question about whether one can write of The Inquisition (except in very specific terms like the Spanish persecutions) or whether one must write of "inquisitions" set up by papal authorities in response to specific situations (like the Templar suppressions). And then there're the matters of diocesan inquisitions established by local bishops and others mounted by secular leaders.

Kirsch also does little to support his claim that there was a vast, west Europeanwide "bureaucracy of inquisition." True enough, there was an office (and there still is) in the Vatican that monitors how faithful Catholics are to Church dogma, there are any number of instructional manuals penned by inquisitors such as Bernard Gui (better known popularly perhaps as William of Baskerville's foe in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose), there were men trained up as questioners, and meticulous records of the trials and questionings were often kept but there's little evidence (certainly little enough for the early centuries of persecution) that the inquistions were instituted by a locally established official. Rather, a "heresy" might be detected by a local official (lay or clerical) or accusations of heresy might be brought by a local resident and then inquisitors were dispatched to the region, where they utilized the local "talent" to get to the bottom of things. Sometimes these investigations would lead to what we would consider widespread judicial murders; other times, there would be an intensely uncomfortable period of public confessions and penances and the persecutorial fever would pass (as happened in the French village of Montaillou in the 14th century).

Above and beyond that, Kirsch has little to say about the relative lack of inquisitorial persecution in regions like England, Germany and Scandinavia, where politics and culture made Rome unpopular.

Kirsch also argues that the laws the Church and secular rulers imposed on inquisitors were hypocritical and mere "window dressing," rarely enforced. Now, as to the latter, I would tend to agree. As our own government has discovered, it's very difficult to restrain people once the green light has been given to inflict pain as a method of interrogation or punishment. As to the former contention, from my own readings, this seems entirely wrongheaded. First off, until quite recently, torture has been an integral part of law enforcement in the West. It's nice that we moderns at least recognize its illegitimacy (even if we don't always act on that insight) but to apply it to the motivations of 12th century politicians and clerics is absurd. Secondly, the Church's emphasis on legalism is a natural development from its roots in the Roman Empire, where the "rule of law" was a very important consideration in the legitimacy of government. I believe the Church's canon lawyers were sincere in trying to limit torture's use only to those who "deserved" it. Modern sensibilities may recoil at this legitimization of violence but is it any more hypocritical than Alan Dershowitz's ludicrous notion of "torture warrants" to mitigate the abuses of the Bush Administration in recent history? That the Church largely failed in its efforts says more to me about the pathology of violence than to the bad faith and intentions of canon lawyers.

Having said that, Kirsch does bring out the essential unfairness of the inquisitorial process. Once ensnared in this Kafkaesque nightmare it was nearly impossible to win (not, at least, without powerful and influential friends). You were guilty and couldn't be proven innocent. At the best, you confessed, named names (part of the confession), and hoped the penance wasn't too onerous. (Part of the revisionist historians' claims are that most sentences stopped well short of death and the notorious auto-da-fe.)

The final chapters of the book leave the "history of terror in the name of God" to look at the "inquisitorial" mindset of the Nazis, communists and America (HUAC and the post-9/11 scare). Beyond the fact that none of these latter-day inquisitions were specifically acting in for God, this section is too short and superficial to be very informative or useful. It's my primary reason for thinking this was a hastily thrown together effort to capitalize on the current concerns about torture. These final chapters are a prime example of the schizophrenia of the book - either it's an appraisal of the inquisition in the Roman Church, or it's an examination of the inquisitorial tendency in societies, or it's a comparative study of religious and secular inquisitions. Conceivably, the book could have been all three but it would have needed to be much longer and examined evidence and arguments much more thoroughly.

I don't think I would recommend it to anyone without an already strong background in the subject's historiography. There are better introductions to the topic (Edward Peter's Inquisition and Torture come to mind) and as to the topic of torture and persecution in general there are better works focused on their particular manifestations.