Series: Faces of Science

Hubert Wolf from Munster was one of the first researchers in the world permitted to enter the secret Inquisition archives of the Vatican in order to work on his history of the Index of prohibited books. His research is often as suspenseful as detective work

About the Vatican, Dan Brown hasn’t the foggiest. That is true at least of those passages in his international bestseller Illuminati in which symbologist Robert Langdon is searching for a world conspiracy in the specially ventilated and well-assorted high-tech box of its secret archives. “This description is completely a figment of Brown’s imagination”, emphasizes the 49 year-old Münster church historian, theologian and priest Hubert Wolf. “It’s a quite normal archive. And its holding have been only sketchily researched. When you untie a bundle of papers, open a parchment-bound volume or a box, you are often the first researcher to do so.”

Seen in this light, Wolf’s quarrying in the labyrinthine and dusty collections does rather resemble the activities of Brown’s hero: “My work is like a detective story, where new evidence is always turning up that I have to trace”.

Why Heine – and not Hitler?

Wolf is in fact a kind of historical detective, who, in addition to researching the pontificates of Pius XI und Pius XII, is dedicated to studying one of the darkest pages of Church history: the Index Prohibitorum Librorum, the List of Prohibited Books, by which the Inquisition attempted, in the course of the Counter Reformation after 1542, to subjugate the newly emerged market for printed books and its allegedly heretical publications to total censorship. For example, until 1966, Catholics were forbidden, on pain of excommunication, to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Heinrich Heine’s Travel Pictures (Reisebilder) .

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, on the other hand, was spared. “Beginning in 1934, the Inquisition worked intensely for two years to prepare a condemnation”, explains Wolf. “Pope Pius XI couldn’t then manage to make up his mind, because he saw Hitler as the legal representative of his state, whom it is Christian’s duty to obey according to the Epistle to the Romans”.

Even Protestants can write like Catholics

That the Vatican had concerned itself with the case of Hitler at all was completely unknown until the revelations of Wolf and his group of about ten researchers. Not all the Inquisition’s trials ended with laying down a public taboo. According to Wolf’s estimates, at least half of the denounced books were acquitted in an elaborate process with preliminary and main hearings, written opinions and intense discussions amongst the Cardinals.

For example, he and his researchers have discovered that the reading of Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s classic about the emancipation of the American slaves, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was to be prohibited. “The ignorance of the author of the first opinion, who imputed that the book was a call to revolution, made me see red”, remembers Wolf. “In contrast to him, the author of the second opinion actually read the whole book. He came to the conclusion that the emancipation of the slaves was a thoroughly Catholic concern, even if formulated by a Protestant writer. His vote for acquittal then carried the day.”

The conversion of Pope Benedict XVI.

The first encounter of the farmer’s son Wolf with the book guards of the Vatican came about rather by accident. After being consecrated as a priest and in spite of an excellent diploma, he was sent by his bishop into the Swabian provinces, where the disappointed young man discovered three hundred letters of the Tübingen theologian Johannes Evangelist von Kuhn in a stable that had been converted into an archive: the Inquisition had treated the nineteenth century scholar roughly. In order to research Kuhn’s trial thoroughly for his doctorial dissertation, Wolf requested the then Prefect for Catholic Dogmatics and heir of the Inquisition’s concerns to grant him access to the secret archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The later Pope Benedict XVI promptly complained to Wolf’s superior about the rude brashness of this request from an unknown researcher.

Against the advice of his dissertation advisor, Wolf traced Kuhn’s trial without the internal documents – and defiantly sent the finished work to Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome. The Cardinal was so impressed by the book that in 1992 he enabled Wolf to gain access to the archives. In its dark cellar, at a table that was much too high and embellished by a gigantic crucifix, Wolf began by checking the facts of his dissertation. The result: “With the exception of one point, which I couldn’t know about, it was all right”.

“Animated by the love of truth”

In 1998, the Vatican opened the door of the Inquisition archives. Following Johannes Paul’s II acknowledgement in 2000 of the Church’s guilt in using “methods of intolerance” in its internal affairs, the most recondite bundle of documents is now available to the scrutiny of scholars of all faiths. There is even a modern visitor’s room with twelve places, complete with electrical connections for laptops.

Nevertheless, thanks to Cardinal Ratzinger’s special permission, the Münster church historian is far ahead of his colleagues. At a private audience in 2005, he and his research group, representatives of the German Research Foundation and Schöningh publishers presented Pope Benedict XVI with the first six volumes of Grundlagenforschung zur Römischen Buchzensur durch Inquisition und Indexkongregation (i.e., Basic Research on the Roman Book Censorship by the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index). The Pope, who as Cardinal had once been so angered by the historian, browsed through the thick volumes with interest and talked with the research group, recalls Wolf. “It was a conversation among scholars animated by the love of truth.”

The Catholic Church’s public censorship of books is now history. “Today the Vatican expresses only private opinions in these questions”, says Wolf, and smiles to himself: “For example, that I don’t particularly like Dan Brown’s thrillers”.

The goal of Hubert Wolf and his research group is the systematic investigation of the Catholic Church’s censorship of book from1542 to 1966 – including files, written opinions and the work of assistants. The twelve-year project is financed by the German Research Foundation. In 2002, Wolf was further awarded the 1.55 million euros of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the most prestigious German scholarly award. A year later followed the Communicator Prize for conveying the results of research to a general public. In 2006, Wolf was awarded the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz.

Hubert Wolf: Papst und Teufel: Die Archive des Vatikan und das Dritte Reich (C.H. Beck Verlag, München, 2008), 360 pages, ISBN: 3406577423, 24,90 euros.

Hubert Wolf: Index: Der Vatikan und die verbotenen Bücher (C.H. Beck Verlag, München, 2007), 303 pages, ISBN: 3406547788, 12,95 euros.