Lies, damned lies and statistics

Spectator, The, Jan 1, 2000 by Read, Piers Paul

THE INQUISITION

by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh

Viking, 16 99, pp. 318

It used to be said that the Devil had all the good tunes and there have been times when a Christian, reading Hume, Voltaire, Gibbon or Nietszche, felt bound to agree. They scoffed at religion with wit and style. This autumn, however, Old Nick seems to have lost his touch, for, closely following John Cornwell's unconvincing book on Pope Pius XII, Hitler's Pope, we have an another intemperate attack on orthodox Catholicism presented as a history of the Inquisition.

The authors are Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, the duo who, with Henry Lincoln, wrote the highly successful farrago of historical speculation, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. In this new work, The Inquisition, they follow Cornwell in explicitly linking a supposedly damning episode in the Church's past with the policy of the present Pope, John Paul II, and his 'Grand Inquisitor', Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Inquisition, they rightly point out, was a legal process established by Pope Innocent III to identify Cathar heretics in Languedoc. The law under which it operated was derived from the code of the Roman empire which had some 60 injunctions against heresy, and the use of torture and the burning of unrepentant heretics were also part of that Roman heritage. It was not the brain child of St Dominic who initially sought permission from Pope Innocent III to preach to the pagans on the Vistula but was redirected to Languedoc; nor was it simply 'the product of a brutal, insensitive and ignorant world'. The Inquisition was encouraged by a number of humane and sagacious rulers as a means of preserving order: the highly intelligent Emperor Frederick 11 of Hohenstauffen, who was almost certainly an atheist himself, authorised the burning of relapsed heretics, and the Emperor Charles V, having seen the dire results of religious differences in his Dutch domains, emphatically endorsed the work of the Inquisition in his kingdom of Spain.

Baigent and Leigh, however, show no interest in understanding the subtleties and paradoxes in the history of the Inquisition, nor do they give us the benefit of the researches of contemporary historians. Their principal source is the work of the American historian, Henry Charles Lea (there are over 40 references to his books) whose History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages was first published in 1888 and who accepted too readily Protestant propaganda from the time of the Reformation. In the same way as their book is illustrated with ancient engravings showing the atrocious torture of brave Protestants or comely witches by hooded Dominicans, so Baigent and Leigh's statistics show the wild exaggeration of an earlier age. They talk of 'the hundreds of thousands whose bodies were forcibly sacrificed for the sake of their souls', and describe how 'in Seville alone, by the beginning of November, the flames had claimed another 288 victims'. Compare this with the judgment of the foremost historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Henry Kamen, made in 1997:

It would seem that during the 16th and 17th centuries fewer than three people a year were executed by the Inquisition in the whole of the Spanish monarchy from Sicily to Peru.

Kamen is quoted by Baigent and Leigh but clearly they prefer the dramatic statistics and the gory details to be found in Lea.

When they touch upon the case of the Templars, who were interrogated under torture by the inquisition, they speculate as they did in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. There is no firm evidence that Templar leaders came from prominent Cathar families or planned to found a Templar principality in Languedoc: it was rather the Hospitallers who had Cathar sympathies. When they give us facts, they often get them wrong. King Philip IV of France did not kidnap the Pope: the attempt made by William of Nogaret was thwarted by the people of Anagni. It is a gross oversimplification to say that Pope Clement V was 'the French monarch's abjectly docile puppet' (I would refer them to the study of Clement V by Sophia Menache); nor did the French kings 'kidnap the entire Papacy in 1309 and move it from Rome to Avignon': Clement V had been residing in Poitiers and moved to Avignon precisely because it was adjacent to the Papal enclave of the Comtat Venaissin and was outside the kingdom of France. With two authors and the acknowledged help of 15 others, the historical content of this book should have been better.

When we come to Baigent and Leigh's diatribe against the present papacy we find further errors. They say that to Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 'worship of Mary is crucial': it is an elementary teaching of the Catholic Church that you worship God alone. They say that Hans Kung 'had his licence to teach theology revoked': in fact it was his licence to teach Catholic theology that was revoked because what he taught was no longer consistent with the Church's teaching. It betrays extraordinary ignorance to write that 1,000 years ago 'the Church had been largely decentralised, and the Pope had simply been the Bishop of Rome': Leo the Great in the fifth century, Gregory the Great in the sixth, Gregory VI, Innocent III or Boniface VII, all claimed and exercised far greater powers than Pope John Paul 11.