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Vatican to allow Inquisition study
PHILIP PULLELLA
Posted online: Thursday, November 11, 2004 at 0000 hours IST
VATICAN CITY, NOVEMBER 10: The Vatican is opening up more of its archives on the Inquisition as part of unprecedented study of the effect the Roman Catholic Church's attempt to control religious belief had on medieval and modern history.
The project, announced on Tuesday, will see the Holy See cooperate with Italy's Culture Ministry and Italian universities to catalogue thousands of documents about the Inquisition, in which people branded as heretics where killed.
''Such a vast project has never been attempted before and it will be of great importance to respond to the new trends in international research of the control of religious ideas in medieval and modern Europe,'' a Vatican statement said.
Pope Gregory IX created the Inquisition in 1233 to curb heresy, but Church officials soon began to count on civil authorities to fine, imprison, torture and kill heretics.
It reached a peak in the 16th century to counter the Reformation.
Tuesday's Vatican statement said the project would locate and catalogue documents concerning both the Roman Inquisition and the Spanish Inquisition and make them easily available to scholars.
The one-stop shop for Inquisition scholars would help them find documents in Church, state and private archives as well as those in universities around the world.
The decision to assist the project, in which the Church will turn the screws on the Inquisition, was the latest gesture to come to terms with past.
The Vatican sponsored an academic symposium six years ago, and in 2000 Pope John Paul asked forgiveness ''for errors committed in the service of truth through use of methods that had nothing to do with the Gospel''. That was shorthand for torture, summary trials, forced conversions and burnings at the stake.
One of the best-known victims was the astronomer Galileo, condemned for claiming the earth revolved around the sun. He was rehabilitated under Pope John Paul in 1992.
The Spanish Inquisition, for example, founded in 1478, led to the expulsion of the country's Moors (Muslims) and Jews in 1492. The scholars will have access to a mass of details, some of them hair-raising. -Reuters