A new exhibition gives the public a first glimpse of centuries-old Vatican documents about the Inquisition, including a 400-year-old order detailing how to crack down on heresy. The curiosities allow fascinating insights into how the Vatican once systematically tried to gain control over many aspects of life that had nothing to do with faith.
If you are inquisitive about the Inquisition, however, the show at Rome's Central Risorgimento Museum will leave leave you wanting more, since there are no heresy trial transcripts or descriptions of torture methods on display.
The archives of what was once known as the Holy Office had been kept secret for centuries. They were opened only to scholars in 1998 but for the first time to the public on Thursday.
Items include the 1611 Holy Office order instructing Inquisitors how to carry out their job as well as conduct themselves in their time off the job.
A 1703 list of rules spells out a crackdown on Huguenots and heretics and those sheltering them. Huguenots were persecuted French Protestants.
A 1599 edict targets game hunters, bird hunters and fishermen who were poaching at a Vatican estate south of Rome.
The edicts and orders of the Inquisition were printed on what turned out to be remarkably durable material made out of recycled rags at a Vatican printing establishment.
The Inquisition was a systematic crackdown by Catholic Church officials to defend doctrinal orthodoxy.
Catholics suspected of being heretics, witches or others considered of dubious faith — including Muslims and Jews who had converted to Catholicism — were among the targets.
But, as the exhibit makes clear, the Inquisition went beyond mere doctrine.
A calendar from 1708 gives the day-by-day schedule of religious orders whose members took turns helping in Rome's hospitals, starting with Holy Spirit hospital, which still serves the city today.
The Holy Office "wanted total control," said Monsignor Alejandro Cifres, one of the show's curators and on the staff of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Holy Office.
The Church in past centuries had its hand in everything, from "culture to literature to economics, even architecture," Cifres said.
The Holy Office relied on reports from Dominicans and Franciscans in convents and even lay people, Cifres said.
Many documents from the Holy Office were lost when Napoleon's forces carted them off. When the French government, after his fall, wanted to give back the material in the early 1800s, "the cost of transport was enormous," Cifres said Wednesday.
The order went out from Rome to burn many of the files.
But documents from famous trials like that of Galileo were saved, Cifres said, and much of the other material had been duplicated and held in local churches or institutions.
Galileo, the Italian astronomer, had been condemned by the Church for supporting Nicholas Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not vice versa as the Vatican then held. Pope John Paul II in 1992 declared the 17th-century denunciation of Galileo in error.
On display is the first tome, from the early 1600s, of banned books. The last index was published in 1930 and reprinted in 1948. Pope Paul VI abolished the index in the mid-1960s.
Even scholars who have consulted some of the material in the Archives were surprised at some of the exhibits.
Grabbing the attention of Andrea Del Col, a professor of the history of the Reformation and Counterreformation at the University of Trieste, were pencil and watercolor drawings for the design of a crucifix for San Damiano Church in Assisi.
The Holy Office's "corrected" version of the sketch eliminated graphic spurts of blood pouring out of Jesus' knees in the original design.
The Vatican once controlled the lives of Rome's ancient, tiny Jewish community.
On display is a 19th century drawing indicating the Ghetto neighborhood where Jews were allowed to live, and the streets where they could have their stores.
The exhibition runs through March 16.
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