Censorship at Its Height
It was under this iron pope that censorship reached its greatest severity and extent, and that the Inquisition at Rome took on the same fearsome and savage Spanish face. Paul IV probably believed that censoring publications and preventing the spread of heresy were bounden duties of a Church founded by the Son of God, whether Catholic or Protestant, since if the Church is a divine institution, its opponents must inevitably be satanic; and against such devils the greatest religious duty is perpetual struggle, to prevent insult to the majesty of heaven.
The Long History of Censorship
Censorship was as old as the Church itself. The Christians of Ephesus in the apostles' age burned a large number of books on "curious arts", whose value was estimated at "fifty thousand pieces of silver." The Council of Ephesus (150, as given in the source) forbade the circulation of unauthorized books. On many occasions popes ordered the burning of the Talmud and other Jewish books. In later times translations of the Bible by Wycliffe and, later, by Protestant translators were forbidden on the ground that they contained anti-Catholic prefaces, notes and terms.
The art of printing increased the Church's anxiety, as it was always trying to keep its followers from contamination by misleading ideas. The Fifth Lateran Council (1516) ruled that henceforth no book was to be printed without the Church's examination and permission. Civil authorities too made rules against publishing unauthorized writings: the Senate of Venice in 1508, the Diet of Worms, Charles V and Francis I in 1521, and the Parlement of Paris in 1542; in 1543 Charles extended Church supervision of publications even to Spanish America.
The First Indexes
The first public list of forbidden books was issued in 1544 by the University of the Sorbonne, and the first Italian list of such books was printed by the Inquisition in 1545.
In 1559 Paul IV for the first time officially issued the "List of Prohibited Authors and Books." It forbade the circulation of forty-eight editions of the Bible corrected by heretics and barred sixty-one publishers and printers from continuing their trade. From 1519 onward, according to the source, no Catholic was allowed to read a book without the name of an author and publisher and the place and date of publication; and from 1559 onward the official "let it be printed" permission of Church authorities was necessary to publish any work. Booksellers and scholars complained that this strict censorship would bring stagnation of learning and their own bankruptcy, but Paul by his insistence forced them to submit. In Rome, Bologna, Naples, Florence and Venice thousands of volumes were burned, in Venice ten thousand volumes in a single day.
After Paul's death, churchmen condemned his measures, attributing them to his harshness and lack of discernment. The Council of Trent annulled his list and issued in its place a more moderate roll of prohibited books, called the "Tridentine Index" (1564). In 1571 a special congregation was appointed to revise the list at regular intervals and republish it in new editions.
Judging the Index
It is hard to judge the result of this censorship. Paolo Sarpi, a friar who had turned from his path and opposed the Church organization, described the Index as "the finest secret ever discovered for ... making fools of men." It must be said that censorship probably contributed to the intellectual decline of Italy after 1600 and of Spain after 1700; but it cannot be overlooked that economic and political factors had a greater effect on that decline. Freedom of thought, in the words of an English historian who wrote the history of his country's development with the most honest pen, lasted better in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones, for the absolutist treatment of the Bible by Protestant clergy did far more harm to freedom of thought and scientific inquiry until 1750 than the Indexes and the Inquisition. In any case, humanism withdrew from Catholic and Protestant lands at the same time. In literature the zest for life faded, and research into Greek history and the love of the works of ancient pagan writers declined, to the point that victorious theologians accused the Italian humanists of arrogance, corruption and irreligion, perhaps not without reason.
The Revival of the Inquisition
Book censorship was carried out with tolerance until Paul IV entrusted its enforcement to the Inquisition (1555). The Inquisition, founded in 1217, had lost power and prestige in the gentle rule of the Renaissance popes. But when the last strenuous attempt at reconciliation with the Protestants failed at Regensburg, and Protestant doctrines spread within Italy itself and even among the clergy, and large cities such as Lucca and Modena were threatened by the Protestant movement, Cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa, Ignatius of Loyola and Charles V joined hands and asked the pope to restore the Inquisition's power. Paul III yielded (1542), appointed Carafa and five other cardinals to revive it, and gave them authority to send chosen clergymen with full power as their representatives across the Christian world. Carafa set to work with his usual harshness, set up headquarters with prisons for offenders, and drew up for his subordinates directions such as these:
- When the faith is in danger, no delay is allowed; at the least suspicion, strict and serious precautionary measures must be taken quickly.
- No distinction is to be made in favor of any prince or prelate, however exalted.
- Those who try to put themselves under the protection of a ruler are to be treated with the utmost severity. Only those who openly confess their offenses are to be shown leniency and fatherly mercy.
- No one is to disgrace his name by showing indulgence to heretics of any sect, and especially to the followers of Calvin.
Terror in Rome
Paul III and Marcellus II checked Carafa's flaming zeal and reserved for themselves the right of final pardon on appeal by the accused. Julius III was too weak to wrestle with Carafa, and under this pontiff several heretics were put to death in Rome. In 1550 the new Inquisition ordered that every Catholic priest who did not preach against Protestantism be brought to trial. When Carafa himself became pope as Paul IV, the body worked with more tyranny and influence; and, in the words of Cardinal Seripando, "under his inhuman severity the Inquisition gained such a reputation for harshness that it was no longer expected that judgments so terrible and alarming would be issued from any other seat of judgment on earth."
The jurisdiction of the inquisitors covered a range of offenses: blasphemy, the sale of church offices, offenses against sexual morality and marriage law, violations of the Church's rules on fasting, and many other breaches that had nothing to do with heresy. Here is a passage the source quotes from a great Catholic historian:
The impulsive and credulous pope accepted every accusation, however unjust ... The inquisitors, constantly spurred on by the pope, were forced in some cases to smell heresy where an impartial and cautious judgment found hardly a trace of it ... The envious and slanderous were busy seizing on accusing words that happened to fall from the lips of men, even those who all their lives, like firm pillars, had held up the Church against heretics, and pinning on them the baseless charge of heresy ... A reign of terror had been set up, and all Rome was gripped by fear.
Cardinals Accused
At the height of this savage period (31 May 1557) Paul IV ordered the arrest of Cardinal Giovanni Morone, bishop of Modena; on 4 June of that year he summoned Cardinal Pole, his legate in England, to Rome to be examined on a charge of heresy, and he even said of the College of Cardinals that it too was tainted with heresy. Mary Tudor, queen of England, protected Cardinal Pole and did not let the pope's summons reach him. Morone was accused of having accepted and signed the Regensburg agreement on "salvation of man by faith alone", of having treated heretics in his jurisdiction with tolerance, and of friendship with Cardinal Pole, Vittoria Colonna, Flaminio and other dangerous figures.
After eighteen days in the Castel Sant'Angelo, Morone was found innocent and the inquisitors issued permission for his release; but he refused freedom and declared that he would not leave his prison until the pope himself voted for his innocence. Paul refused, and Morone stayed there until the pope's death. Flaminio deceived the inquisitors with a lie and escaped, but Paul said of him, "We burned his brother Cesare in the square before the church of Minerva." The pontiff, raging, with resolute impartiality hounded even his own relatives on suspicion of heresy. Pope Paul IV is reported to have said: "Even if my own father were a heretic, I would gather wood to burn him."
The Pope's Death
Fortunately Paul too was mortal, and after four years of rule he received his reward. Rome celebrated his death with four days of joyful riot. In that time the crowd pulled down his statue, dragged it through the dirt of the streets and drowned it in the Tiber; then they set fire to the Inquisition's buildings, freed its prisoners and scattered its records. Had the pope been alive, he might have answered those protests that only a man of his unshakable will and courage could have reformed the moral corruption of Rome and the abuses of the Church, and that it was he who succeeded in this, the very task at which his predecessors had failed. It is a great pity that in the work of reforming the Church Paul IV kept Torquemada in mind and lost sight of Christ.