The Spanish Inquisition

...Like the contemporary income tax, it was generally disliked but accepted...

...Ambassador to the Vatican where he is to lobby for Lannan's red hat...

...The debate over "blood purity," over whether those with Jewish ancestry should be excluded from public life, took place among inquisitors as well as among other Spaniards...

...Kamen often seems too willing to make arguments based on the absence of evidence...

...With tinges of racism and pique at feeling shut out of the game by the third worlders, the Americans engineer a schismatic conclave at Avignon, France, which elects an Italian and their kind of progressive, Pius XIII...

...Nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians continued to be influenced by this conventional view, adapting it to documentary evidence in a variety of ways...

...Lannan and the twenty others named along with him are excluded from the conclave, which elevates another c o n s e r v a t i v e , the frail Pope Benedetto...

...The subplot features Julian O'Keefe, an ultramontane jettisoned from the semiCommonweal aj 4 August 14, 1998...

...NOT A GREELEY NOVEL John Christie ~ eed to brush up your Spengler...

...Although The Spanish Inquisition is an impressive achievement, critical readers may find several weaknesses in it...

...Meanwhile, Lannan, who had earlier supported the White House in a dispute over a lesbian Supreme Court justice, calls in the favor and gets Morrow appointed as U.S...

...With The Red Hat, he's a long way from Fort Elbow and targets heftier clerical prey...

...Italians, many of whom were in Spanish-occupied provinces during the sixteenth century, distrusted and disliked Spain and its customs...

...Kamen's ground-breaking study stimulated a stream of studies on the Inquisition, many making fruitful use of statistical approaches...

...Even when Kamen's conclusions are debatable, he asks the right questions...

...Modern Jewish historians, recognizing that the Inquisition was initially directed specifically at converted Jews, have maintained that the totalitarian repression was largely antiSemitic...

...The institution was neither popular nor widely opposed...

...Even those books that did appear on the Index, moreover, were available to readers who wanted to find them...

...In effect, then, there were different Inquisitions at different times...

...Carl L. Bankston III teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana...

...There's more...

...The definitive history written by the American Henry Charles Lea in 1890 took the Inquisition out of the realm of myth and placed it in the realm of historical fact, but Lea still saw the Holy Office as a huge totalitarian engine of repression and terror...

...Spain's regional diversity meant that its authority varied greatly from one place to another, hardly touching the lives of people in many areas...

...In response to those who claim that the Inquisition stifled literature and culture in Spain, Kamen provides impressive evidence that the Holy Office had little impact on literary production or on the circulation of books and ideas...

...Kamen disputes the view that the Inquisition was an expression of fanaticism among the Spanish populace...

...Many scholars have argued that the Inquisition strangled the intellectual, cultural, and political life of Spain...

...bishops, theologians, and seminary rectors await the death of John Paul II, whose pontificate they view as having thwarted what they think Vatican II really meant: ordaining women, easing out celibacy, muting, if not ending, all church prohibitions and negatives, and stressing Christian love...

...Using the tribunal's prosecution records, he provides statistical evidence that there were five major phases...

...This image, according to Henry Kamen, is a result of the fact that most of the early accounts of the Holy Office were written by its enemies...

...Caught your breath...

...In the late sixteenth century, the inquisitors turned their attention to Protestants and Moriscos, converted Muslims...

...Underground movements that hide from officialdom, though, may also hide from the prying eyes of historians...

...One need only reflect on the fact that Spain's greatest cultural epoch, the Siglo del Oro, flowered in the midst of the Inquisition to see that Kamen is probably right on this point...

...Most important, he succeeds in reinterpreting a dark legend of torture and persecution as a series of human attempts to deal with issues of belief and social conflict...

...He believes that there was relatively litfie secret Judaism among the conversos, since secret Jews left little documentation...

...You can with this novel about an emerging African and Asian Catholicism and its corresponding Western dissipation...

...The action is, you might say, headlong...

...However, it was never reducible to xenophobia or anti-Semitism...

...By the eighteenth century, there was little heresy left to root out and the Inquisition quieted down once again...

...In popular imagination, the Inquisition was a sort of all-powerful Gestapo of blackhooded monks dedicated to eradicating freedom of thought by an insidious program of torture and burning...

...There's much to value in this novel...

...Why does he examine the expulsion and dispersion of Spain's Jews in the second chapter and then look at Spanish anti-Semitic racialism in the eleventh chapter, separating these closely related topics with chapters devoted to a variety of other themes...

...The clarity of the writing will make it appealing to interested general readers, as well as to specialists...

...Kamen effectively debunks the myth of the Inquisition as a single, powerful, centrally controlled police mechanism...

...The o r g a n i z a t i o n of the book is Commonweal 2 3 August 14, 1998 sometimes perplexing...

...It also varied over time...

...This is followed by a round of excommunications that brings the recalcitrant American bishops, for now, back into line...

...Because the Inquisition was directed against converted Jews or Muslims for much of its history, Kamen maintains that it did appeal to xenophobic and antiSemitic strains in Spanish thinking...

...The Americans grumble about the conclave's legality and clamor for a new conclave, but Benedetto dies, conveniently, they can't help but think, in a plane crash...

...The schism collapses and Pius XIII repents before Timothy...

...Another is James Morrow, Lannan's seminary friend who's now a widowed University of Notre Dame author of a history of American Catholicism's decline...

...Kamen's new book is a rewriting and extension of his original one that incorporates the findings of three-and-a-half decades of research...

...In the mid-1960s, Henry Kamen, then a graduate student, published a major revision of these common interpretations of the Holy Office...

...His careful scrutiny of available documents suggested that the Inquisition was much more modest in scope, much less malevolent, and much less destructive than commonly believed...

...The chapter devoted to the structure and politics of the Inquisition and the chapter devoted to its operation provide an excellent description of the Holy Office as a functioning bureaucracy, but it is difficult to understand why these two chapters should be placed in the middle of the book...

...The main characters are Archbishop Thomas Lannan of Washington, D.C., who's campaigning to be a prince of the church...

...Even its notorious torture chambers were actually less brutal than the methods of most other judicial systems of the time, including those of England and the Netherlands...

...Protestants, especially English and Dutch Protestants, were predisposed to see a Spain in the grip of a fanatical Catholic institution...

...Many people also saw denunciations to the Inquisition as a good way to get at enemies...

...As concern over the conversos calmed down, in the early sixteenth century, so did the Inquisition...

...In 2004, modernist U.S...

...John Paul II names Lannan a cardinal but dies before the consistory...

...It's worth anybody's time, even though in his depictions of post-Vatican II progressives Mclnerny, cofounder of Crisis magazine, forsakes the scalpel for a baseball bat, and plausibility loses...

...Because the inquisitors were silent about their own activities and Europe's most active printing presses were English and Dutch, the propaganda of foreign enemies became the conventional view of the Inquisition...

...Despite these problems, Henry Kamen's new version of his classic work is a major contribution to the history of religion and the history of Spain...

...He points out that Commonweal 2 2 August 14, 1998 Lope de Vega, the greatest playwright of the Siglo del Oro, did not appear on Spain's Index of prohibited books until a century after his death...

...In much earlier novels, like The Priest (1973) and Gate of Heaven (1975), Notre Dame's distingtfished philosopher Ralph McInerny was funny and timely in dissecting the inane manifestations of modernism abounding in his fictional diocese of Fort Elbow, Ohio...

...To their consternation, the succeeding conclave elects another conservative, the Tanzanian Pope Timothy who sees the church's future as more with the growing, devout African and Asian masses than with the decadent, affluent West...

...He craves the honor so that, with ambition at last behind himself, he can be humble...

...It began, in the 1480s, as a result of fear that converted Jews were retaining their old faith...

...During the seventeenth century, the regulation of the faith of ordinary Spaniards became the focus...

...Why, for example, does Kamen place his discussion of the creation of the Inquisition myth in the final chapter rather than at the beginning...