St. Anthony the Great—

 Father of All Monks

1 Sam. 16: 1-13

The call of David – selected over his elder brothers who were all passed over – anticipates Our Lord’s teaching: “The stone that was rejected has become the cornerstone.” The ways of God are not man’s ways, and God will not be fit into any rule or principle we can articulate – and possess, and control. Still, His favored way of proceeding seems to be something like the phrase “preferential option for the poor.”

At a time when the early Christian Church was beginning to become heavily wedded with worldly power, God raised up a man to start a movement that would be at the heart of Christian life for the next 1,500 years. St. Anthony heard Christ’s words and, rather than heading into the marketplace, he took the opposite road, heading into the wilderness, and leading a vast spiritual host who would leave all to follow Christ, in silence and solitude. While the Church became rich and powerful, these men and women sought be become poor and powerless in imitation of Christ – and when their own monasteries became rich and powerful, God would raise up reforming figures to lead a remnant further into the wilderness of His mysterious will.

The monastic life remains a treasure at the heart of the Church. But each of us is called to follow Christ into various wildernesses: the office, the headquarters, any human community – the family. The heart itself is a wild place of many spirits, some of them hostile to God and His beloved. Let us join St. Anthony and the monks of all times and places in “keeping vigil” wherever the Lord has placed us. With His help, the hostile desert itself becomes an oasis.

 –

Father Raymond Gawronski, SJ

Marriage of Calvin J. Favron and Avis Mae Opal Coleman

Special Thanks to Dr. Mary Rebecca Koterba, RSM for providing such a grand Food Tower.

“In 1973 Metropolitan Anthony ordained Basil Osborne as priest at the request of the Oxford parish where he had spent four years as a deacon, gaining the respect and trust of the community.  This was the normal way clergy were chosen in the diocese. When the need arose for a priest the parish concerned would identify a candidate from within the congregation whom people felt would make a good pastor and confessor. Metropolitan Anthony would then make a judgement. Men who presented themselves to the Metropolitan in isolation, asking for ordination because they imagined they had a vocation, were generally given short shrift.”

Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005

p. 147-148

———-

The Xinjiang Procedure:  Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.

To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.

One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from SunYat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white,with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The policehad ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.

Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.

With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance.

Right after the first shots the van door was thrust openand two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.

Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant,that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016,  given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years.

Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speakingup in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hard core criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner.

Nineteen years later, in a secure European location, thedoctor laid out the puzzle. He asked that I keep his identity a secret.Chinese medical authorities admit that the lion’s share of transplantorgans originate with executions, but no mainland Chinese doctors, evenin exile, will normally speak of performing such surgery. To do so wouldremind international medical authorities of an issue they would ratheravoid—not China’s soaring execution rate or the exploitation of criminalorgans, but rather the systematic elimination of China’s religious andpolitical prisoners. Yet even if this doctor feared consequences to his family and his career, he did not fear embarrassing China, for he was born into an indigenous minority group, the Uighurs.

Every Uighur witness I approached over the course of two years—police, medical, and security personnel scattered across two continents—related compartmentalized fragments of information to me, often through halting translation. They acknowledged the risk to their careers, their families, and, in several cases, their lives. Their testimony reveals not just aprocedure evolving to meet the lucrative medical demand for living organs, but the genesis of a wider atrocity.

Behind closed doors, the Uighurs call their vast region in China’s northwest corner (bordering on India, Pakistan, Afghanistan,Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia) East Turkestan. The Uighurs are ethnically Turkic, not East Asian. They are Muslims with a smattering of Christians, and their language is more readily understood in Tashkent than in Beijing. By contrast, Beijing’s name for the so-called Autonomous Region, Xinjiang, literally translates as “new frontier.” When Mao invaded in 1949, Han Chinese constituted only 7 percent of the regional population. Following the flood of Communist party administrators, soldiers, shopkeepers, and construction corps, Han Chinese now constitute the majority. The party calculates that Xinjiang will be its top oil and natural gas productioncenter by the end of this century.

To protect this investment, Beijing traditionally depicted all Uighur nationalists—violent rebels and non-violent activists alike—as CIA proxies. Shortly after 9/11, that conspiracy theory was tossed downthe memory hole. Suddenly China was, and always has been, at war with alQaeda-led Uighur terrorists. No matter how transparently opportunisticthe switch, the American intelligence community saw an opening for Chinesecooperation in the war on terror, and signaled their acquiescence by allowingChinese state security personnel into Guantánamo to interrogate Uighurdetainees.

While it is difficult to know the strength of the claimsof the detainees’ actual connections to al Qaeda, the basic facts arethese: During the 1990s, when the Chinese drove the Uighur rebel trainingcamps from neighboring countries such as Kazakhstan and Pakistan, someUighurs fled to Afghanistan where a portion became Taliban soldiers. Andyet, if the Chinese government claims that the Uighurs constitute theirown Islamic fundamentalist problem, the fact is that I’ve never met aUighur woman who won’t shake hands or a man who won’t have a drink withme. Nor does my Jewish-sounding name appear to make anyone flinch. In oneof those vino veritas sessions, I asked a local Uighur leader if he wasable to get any sort of assistance from groups such as the Islamic HumanRights Commission (where, as I found during a brief visit to their Londonoffices, veiled women flinch from an extended male hand, drinks are forbidden,and my Jewish surname is a very big deal indeed). “Useless!” he snorted,returning to the vodka bottle.

So if Washington’s goal is to promote a reformed China, then taking Beijing’s word for who is a terrorist is to play into the party’s hands.

Xinjiang has long served as the party’s illicit laboratory: from the atmospheric nuclear testing in Lop Nur in the mid-sixties (resulting in a significant rise in cancers in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital) to the more recent creation in the Tarim Desert of what could well be the world’slargest labor camp, estimated to hold 50,000 Uighurs, hardcore criminals, and practitioners of Falun Gong. And when it comes to the first organ harvesting of political prisoners, Xinjiang was ground zero.

In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in “social security”—essentially squelching threats to the party—Nijat was employed as the good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-profile cases. I first met Nijat—thin, depressed, and watchful—in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome.

Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the government’s secret bastions: the detention center, its interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came back from an execution shaking his head. According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure—the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming.

“Like someone was still alive?” Nijat remembers asking.“What kind of screams?”

“Like from hell.”

Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough sloppiness to go around.

A few months later, three death row prisoners were being transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become friendly withone in particular, a very young man. As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes like saucers: “Why did you inject me?”

Nijat hadn’t injected him; the medical director had. But the director and some legal officials were watching the exchange, so Nijatlied smoothly: “It’s so you won’t feel much pain when they shoot you.”

The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that hewould never quite forget that look, waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: “Why did you inject him?”

“Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go as soon as possible.”

“What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine did you inject him with?”

“Nijat, do you have any beliefs?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“It was an anti-coagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all going to hell.”

I first met Enver Tohti—a soft-spoken, husky, Buddha of a man—through the informal Uighur network of London. I confess that my first impression was that he was just another emigré living in public housing.But Enver had a secret.

His story began on a Tuesday in June 1995, when he wasa general surgeon in an Urumqi hospital. Enver recalled an unusual conversationwith his immediate superior, the chief surgeon: “Enver, we are going todo something exciting. Have you ever done an operation in the field?”

“Not really. What do you want me to do?”

“Get a mobile team together and request an ambulance.Have everyone out front at nine tomorrow.”

On a cloudless Wednesday morning, Enver led two assistantsand an anaesthesiologist into an ambulance and followed the chief surgeon’scar out of Urumqi going west. The ambulance had a picnic atmosphere untilthey realized they were entering the Western Mountain police district,which specialized in executing political dissidents. On a dirt road bya steep hill the chief surgeon pulled off, and came back to talk to Enver:“When you hear a gunshot, drive around the hill.”

“Can you tell us why we are here?”

“Enver, if you don’t want to know, don’t ask.”

“I want to know.”

“No. You don’t want to know.”

The chief surgeon gave him a quick, hard look as he returnedto the car. Enver saw that beyond the hill there appeared to be some sortof armed police facility. People were milling about—civilians. Enver half-satiricallysuggested to the team that perhaps they were family members waiting tocollect the body and pay for the bullet, and the team responded with increasinglysick jokes to break the tension. Then they heard a gunshot, possibly avolley, and drove around to the execution field.

Focusing on not making any sudden moves as he followedthe chief surgeon’s car, Enver never really did get a good look. He brieflyregistered that there were 10, maybe 20 bodies lying at the base of thehill, but the armed police saw the ambulance and waved him over.

“This one. It’s this one.”

Sprawled on the blood-soaked ground was a man, around 30,dressed in navy blue overalls. All convicts were shaved, but this one hadlong hair.

“That’s him. We’ll operate on him.”

“Why are we operating?” Enver protested, feeling forthe artery in the man’s neck. “Come on. This man is dead.”

Enver stiffened and corrected himself. “No. He’s notdead.”

“Operate then. Remove the liver and the kidneys. Now!Quick! Be quick!”

Following the chief surgeon’s directive, the team loadedthe body into the ambulance. Enver felt himself going numb: Just cut theclothes off. Just strap the limbs to the table. Just open the body. Hekept making attempts to follow normal procedure—sterilize, minimal exposure,sketch the cut. Enver glanced questioningly at the chief surgeon. “Noanaesthesia,” said the chief surgeon. “No life support.”

The anaesthesiologist just stood there, arms folded—likesome sort of ignorant peasant, Enver thought. Enver barked at him. “Whydon’t you do something?”

“What exactly should I do, Enver? He’s already unconscious.If you cut, he’s not going to respond.”

But there was a response. As Enver’s scalpel went in,the man’s chest heaved spasmodically and then curled back again. Enver,a little frantic now, turned to the chief surgeon. “How far in shouldI cut?”

“You cut as wide and deep as possible. We are workingagainst time.”

Enver worked fast, not bothering with clamps, cutting withhis right hand, moving muscle and soft tissue aside with his left, slowingdown only to make sure he excised the kidneys and liver cleanly. Even asEnver stitched the man back up—not internally, there was no point to thatanymore, just so the body might look presentable—he sensed the man wasstill alive. I am a killer, Enver screamed inwardly. He did not dare tolook at the face again, just as he imagined a killer would avoid lookingat his victim.

The team drove back to Urumqi in silence.

On Thursday, the chief surgeon confronted Enver: “So.Yesterday. Did anything happen? Yesterday was a usual, normal day. Yes?”

Enver said yes, and it took years for him to understandthat live organs had lower rejection rates in the new host, or that thebullet to the chest had—other than that first sickening lurch—acted likesome sort of magical anaesthesia. He had done what he could; he had stitchedthe body back neatly for the family. And 15 years would elapse before Enverrevealed what had happened that Wednesday.

As for Nijat, it wasn’t until 1996 that he put it together.

It happened just about midnight, well after the cell blocklights were turned off. Nijat found himself hanging out in the detentioncompound’s administrative office with the medical director. Followinga pause in the conversation, the director, in an odd voice, asked Nijatif he thought the place was haunted.

“Maybe it feels a little weird at night,” Nijat answered.“Why do you think that?”

“Because too many people have been killed here. And forall the wrong reasons.”

Nijat finally understood. The anticoagulant. The expensive“execution meals” for the regiment following a trip to the killing ground.The plainclothes agents in the cells who persuaded the prisoners to signstatements donating their organs to the state. And now the medical directorwas confirming it all: Those statements were real. They just didn’t takeaccount of the fact that the prisoners would still be alive when they werecut up.

“Nijat, we really are going to hell.”

Nijat nodded, pulled on his beer, and didn’t bother tosmile.

On February 2, 1997, Bahtiyar Shemshidin began wonderingwhether he was a policeman in name only. Two years before, the ChinesePublic Security Bureau of the Western city of Ghulja recruited Bahtiyarfor the drug enforcement division. It was a natural fit because Bahtiyarwas tall, good-looking, and exuded effortless Uighur authority. Bahtiyarwould ultimately make his way to Canada and freedom, but he had no troublerecalling his initial idealism; back then, Bahtiyar did not see himselfas a Chinese collaborator but as an emergency responder.

For several years, heroin addiction had been creeping throughthe neighborhoods of Ghulja, striking down young Uighurs like a medievalplague. Yet inside the force, Bahtiyar quickly grasped that the Chineseheroin cartel was quietly protected, if not encouraged, by the authorities.Even his recruitment was a bait-and-switch. Instead of sending him afterdrug dealers, his Chinese superiors ordered him to investigate the Meshrep—atraditional Muslim get-together promoting clean living, sports, and Uighurmusic and dance. If the Meshrep had flowered like a traditional herbalremedy against the opiate invader, the Chinese authorities read it as adisguised attack on the Chinese state.

In early January 1997, on the eve of Ramadan, the entireGhulja police force—Uighurs and Chinese alike—were suddenly ordered tosurrender their guns “for inspection.” Now, almost a month later, theweapons were being released. But Bahtiyar’s gun was held back. Bahtiyarwent to the Chinese bureaucrat who controlled supplies and asked afterit. “Your gun has a problem,” Bahtiyar was told.

“When will you fix the problem?”

The bureaucrat shrugged, glanced at his list, and lookedup at Bahtiyar with an unblinking stare that said: It is time for you togo. By the end of the day, Bahtiyar got it: Every Chinese officer had agun. Every Uighur officer’s gun had a problem.

Three days later, Bahtiyar understood why. On February5, approximately 1,000 Uighurs gathered in the center of Ghulja. The daybefore, the Chinese authorities arrested (and, it was claimed, severelyabused) six women, all Muslim teachers, all participants in the Meshrep.The young men came without their winter coats to show they were unarmed,but, planned or unplanned, the Chinese police fired on the demonstrators.

Casualty counts of what is known as the Ghulja incidentremain shaky. Bahtiyar recalls internal police estimates of 400 dead, buthe didn’t see it; all Uighur policemen had been sent to the local jail“to interrogate prisoners” and were locked in the compound throughoutthe crisis. However, Bahtiyar did see Uighurs herded into the compoundand thrown naked onto the snow—some bleeding, others with internal injuries.Ghulja’s main Uighur clinic was effectively shut down when a squad ofChinese special police arrested 10 of the doctors and destroyed the clinic’sambulance. As the arrests mounted by late April, the jail became hopelesslyovercrowded, and Uighur political prisoners were selected for daily executions.On April 24, Bahtiyar’s colleagues witnessed the killing of eight politicalprisoners; what struck them was the presence of doctors in “special vansfor harvesting organs.”

In Europe I spoke with a nurse who worked in a major Ghuljahospital following the incident. Nervously requesting that I provide nopersonal details, she told me that the hospitals were forbidden to treatUighur protesters. A doctor who bandaged an arm received a 15-year sentence,while another got 20 years, and hospital staff were told, “If you treatsomeone, you will get the same result.” The separation between the Uighurand Chinese medical personnel deepened: Chinese doctors would stockpileprescriptions rather than allow Uighur medical staff a key to the pharmacy,while Uighur patients were receiving 50 percent of their usual doses. Ifa Uighur couple had a second child, even if the birth was legally sanctioned,Chinese maternity doctors, she observed, administered an injection (describedas an antibiotic) to the infant. The nurse could not recall a single instanceof the same injection given to a Chinese baby. Within three days the infantwould turn blue and die. Chinese staffers offered a rote explanation toUighur mothers: Your baby was too weak, your baby could not handle thedrug.

Shortly after the Ghulja incident, a young Uighur protester’sbody returned home from a military hospital. Perhaps the fact that theabdomen was stitched up was just evidence of an autopsy, but it sparkedanother round of riots. After that, the corpses were wrapped, buried atgunpoint, and Chinese soldiers patrolled the cemeteries (one is not farfrom the current Urumqi airport). By June, the nurse was pulled into anew case: A young Uighur protester had been arrested and beaten severely.His family paid for his release, only to discover that their son had kidneydamage. The family was told to visit a Chinese military hospital in Urumqiwhere the hospital staff laid it out: One kidney, 30,000 RMB (roughly $4,700).The kidney will be healthy, they were assured, because the transplant wasto come from a 21-year-old Uighur male—the same profile as their son.The nurse learned that the “donor” was, in fact, a protester.

In the early autumn of 1997, fresh out of a blood-worktour in rural Xinjiang, a young Uighur doctor—let’s call him Murat—waspursuing a promising medical career in a large Urumqi hospital. Two yearslater he was planning his escape to Europe, where I met him some yearsafter.

One day Murat’s instructor quietly informed him that fiveChinese government officials—big guys, party members—had checked intothe hospital with organ problems. Now he had a job for Murat: “Go to theUrumqi prison. The political wing, not the criminal side. Take blood samples.Small ones. Just to map out the different blood types. That’s all youhave to do.”

“What about tissue matching?”

“Don’t worry about any of that, Murat. We’ll handlethat later. Just map out the blood types.”

Clutching the authorization, and accompanied by an assistantfrom the hospital, Murat, slight and bookish, found himself facing approximately15 prisoners, mostly tough-guy Uighurs in their late twenties. As the firstprisoner sat down and saw the needle, the pleading began.

“You are a Uighur like me. Why are you going to hurt me?”

“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just taking blood.”

At the word “blood,” everything collapsed. The men howledand stampeded, the guards screaming and shoving them back into line. Theprisoner shrieked that he was innocent. The Chinese guards grabbed hisneck and squeezed it hard.

“It’s just for your health,” Murat said evenly, suddenlyaware the hospital functionary was probably watching to make sure thatMurat wasn’t too sympathetic. “It’s just for your health,” Murat saidagain and again as he drew blood.

When Murat returned to the hospital, he asked the instructor,“Were all those prisoners sentenced to death?”

“That’s right, Murat, that’s right. Yes. Just don’task any more questions. They are bad people—enemies of the country.”

But Murat kept asking questions, and over time, he learnedthe drill. Once they found a matching blood type, they would move to tissuematching. Then the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right sideof the chest. Murat’s instructor would visit the execution site to matchup blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from theirbeds, and check out.

Six months later, around the first anniversary of Ghulja,five new officials checked in. The instructor told Murat to go back tothe political wing for fresh blood. This time, Murat was told that harvestingpolitical prisoners was normal. A growing export. High volume. The militaryhospitals are leading the way.

By early 1999, Murat stopped hearing about harvesting politicalprisoners. Perhaps it was over, he thought.

Yet the Xinjiang procedure spread. By the end of 1999,the Uighur crackdown would be eclipsed by Chinese security’s largest-scaleaction since Mao: the elimination of Falun Gong. By my estimate up to threemillion Falun Gong practitioners would pass through the Chinese correctionssystem. Approximately 65,000 would be harvested, hearts still beating,before the 2008 Olympics. An unspecified, significantly smaller, numberof House Christians and Tibetans likely met the same fate.

By Holocaust standards these are piddling numbers, so let’sbe clear: China is not the land of the final solution. But it is the landof the expedient solution. Some will point to recent statements from theChinese medical establishment admitting the obvious—China’s medical environmentis not fully ethical—and see progress. Foreign investors suspect thateventually the Chinese might someday—or perhaps have already—abandon organ harvesting in favor of the much more lucrative pharmaceutical and clinical testing industries. The problem with these soothing narratives is that reports, some as recent as one year ago, suggest that the Chinese have not abandoned the Xinjiang procedure.

In July 2009, Urumqi exploded in bloody street riots between Uighurs and Han Chinese. The authorities massed troops in the regional capital, kicked out the Western journalists, shut down the Internet, and, over the next six months, quietly, mostly at night, rounded up Uighur males by the thousands. According to information leaked by Uighurs held in captivity, some prisoners were given physical examinations aimed solely at assessing the health of their retail organs. The signals may be faint, but they are consistent, and the conclusion is inescapable: China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status, has not just committed human rights abuses—that’s old news—but has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group.

Yet Nijat sits in refugee limbo in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, waiting for a country to offer him asylum. He confessed to me. He confessed to others. But in a world eager not to offend China, no state wants his confession. Enver made his way to an obscure seminar hosted by the House of Commons on Chinese human rights. When the MPs opened the floor to questions, Enver found himself standing up and speaking, for the first time, of killing a man. I took notes, but no British MP or their staffers could be bothered to take Enver’s number.

The implications are clear enough. Nothing but self-determination for the Uighurs can suffice. The Uighurs, numbering 13 million, are few, but they are also desperate. They may fight. War may come. On that day, as diplomats across the globe call for dialogue with Beijing, may every nation look to its origins and its conscience. For my part, if my Jewish-sounding name tells me anything, it is this: The dead may never be fully avenged, but no people can accept being fatally exploited forever.

Ethan Gutmann, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wishes to thank Jaya Gibson for research assistance and the Peder Wallenberg family for research support.

Copyright 2010 Weekly Standard LLC.

Source URL:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/xinjiang-procedure_610145.html

Dated on the anniversary itself, December 4, Pope John Paul II in 1988 issued an apostolic letter commemorating the twenty-fifth year since the Second Vatican Council’s document on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium.^[1]  Perhaps that letter went somewhat unnoticed, but students of the liturgy did take livelier interest when the real “insider’s story” finally came out two years later in the translation of Annibale Bugnini’s The Reform of the Liturgy, 1948-1975.^[2]  This was a more detailed account from the administrative viewpoint of some of the warm reminiscences sketched earlier by Dom Bernard Botte and translated under the title From Silence to Participation: An Insider’s View of Liturgical Renewal.^[3]

Both Bugnini the curial prefect and Botte the scholar and consultant give us rich anecdotes and documentary evidence about how the conciliar liturgical reform was actually carried out, how the books were revised by compromise and even intrigue, and how the antecedents of the liturgical movement before the council were converted into these revised rites. Conventional church historians such as Roger Aubert identify the roots of our century’s reform in the efforts that began with Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875) in the nineteenth century. Aubert says:

“All things considered, the liturgical movement of the interwar period, despite its efforts to reach out to the steadily increasing masses, kept to the ideal of ‘restoration’ that had inspired Dom Guéranger, in other words it attempted to  satisfy a nostalgia by retracing its steps back beyond the Counter-Reformation to an imago primitivae Ecclesiae. Pius X, it is true, had tried to do more and embark on reform, but his two successors did little to follow his lead, and outside Rome his work was felt by pioneers of the liturgical movement to be more in the nature of ‘a successful restoration, analogous to the architectural restorations executed by the Romantics’.” ^[4]

The Romantic movement had given great impetus to the Catholic revival after the devastation of the French Revolution.^[5]  But when it came to things liturgical, the most it could engender was a reconstruction, perhaps artificial, based on love of the ancient church and the ages of faith. The liturgical aestheticism of some Anglo-Catholics after the Oxford Movement in this regard too frequently illustrates a Romanticism with not enough real depth.

However, though the Church may be governed in Rome, it was also long accustomed to have its thinking done in France. Guéranger was a personal favorite of Pius IX who had taken special care to invite him to the deliberations of Vatican I.^[6] And Guéranger’s well-known “romanizing” tendencies made him particularly hostile to the original and positive contribution available from the small but important Jansenist liturgical movement.^[7]  In 1853 Pius IX wrote Inter multiplices which strongly approved the adoption of the Roman liturgy throughout France, recommending it in preference to local gallican liturgical rites.^[8]

An American scholar, F. Ellen Weaver, has analyzed the relevant documents, especially the ceremonial books and ritual books with their own notes, which pertain to this Jansenist interest in the reform of the liturgy.^[9] Nearly all the themes familiar in our own day after Sacrosanctum concilium were pursued by the Jansenist reformers–introduction of the vernacular, a greater role for the laity in worship, active participation by all, recovery of the notion of the eucharistic meal and the community, communion under both kinds, emphasis on biblical and also patristic formation, clearer preaching and teaching, less cluttered calendars and fewer devotions which might distract from the centrality of the Eucharist. Even the “kiss of peace” was practiced at Port-Royal, and a sort of offertory procession was found there and elsewhere among Jansenist liturgical reformers.^[10]

One of the few Jansenist reforms which would be unfamiliar to us today would be their use of public penance. But this insistence was not confined to the Jansenists, since it had been called for by the council of Trent as a return to an ancient rite. The Jansenists, on this point, just took Trent more literally and more seriously than anybody else.^[11]

Some Jansenist bishops wished to abolish priestly celibacy. Two of the more famous in Italy were Giovanni Andrea Serrao of Potenza, during the period of the French occupation, and Giuseppi Capecelatro, archbishop of Taranto early in the restoration era.^[12]  We should not be led to believe, however, that they acted upon their opinion, any more than bishops today who hold the same opinion.

Moreover, in the middle of the eighteenth century the Jansenists were even accused by the Jesuit polemicist, Henri Michel Sauvage, of having women priests.^[13]  While there is as yet no real evidence for his charge, it does illustrate how their enemies perceived them as a people whose liturgical reputation was suspect. Sauvage may have been exaggerating, but even this shows the form of the conceivable.

On the question of the vernacular, both the protestants and the gallicans used it in their liturgy in the seventeenth century in France. As Joseph Andreas Jungmann says when writing of the Liturgical Movement, breviaries and missals in French appeared as early as 1680,^[14] before being suppressed. Even the Jesuits sought indults from Rome for the use of the vernacular in mission lands, notably for China and Quebec. However, these missionaries would have been content with their Latin liturgical books had there been no real need to address the non-European mentality of the new converts. This was not the thoroughgoing and more systematic Catholic reform envisioned by the Jansenists which Weaver calls their “lex docendi, lex orandi”. The whole of their reform program was to seek its expression liturgically.

Even the Italian Jansenists of Tuscany and Pistoia centered their reform on liturgy:

The most obvious reason why the Jansenists got opposition to their liturgical ideas, of course, is that such were understood to be protestant.^[16]  Even today the same ideas are still rejected in some circles on these grounds. Despite Paul VI’s deliberate insertion of ##6-9 into the General Instruction on the Roman Missal of 1969, an assortment of tridentinists, traditionalists, lefebvrists, and sedevacantists continue to claim the reform was a protestant conspiracy. They think the missal of 1570 is an immutable bulwark against protestant influence, even though J.D. Crichton has rightly pointed out that this edition is nearly identical to the first printed one of 1474,^[17] several years before the birth of Luther.

Weaver tells us that Dom Guéranger had a personal antipathy toward the Jansenist reform. In speaking of the innovations of Jacques Jubé of Asnières, she cites Guéranger as saying “it was an example of the deviations to which liturgy was liable when the Roman Mass books were not adopted”.^[18]

Neither Pope John Paul II, nor Archbishop Bugnini, nor Dom Botte, nor the Second Vatican Council, nor Dom Prosper Guéranger give the Jansenist liturgical reform movement any notice at all for being ahead of its time–it is never mentioned either for its catholicity or its importance as an orthodox, or mostly orthodox, alternative to the mandated liturgical reforms of Trent. Since the canons of Trent were introduced very late in France, it had been up to individuals and small groups to conduct the Counter-Reformation by themselves in what now looks to us to have been an often unsystematic way. Were it not for unfortunate political entanglements which are notorious, Jansenism might have been integrated into the mainstream of the church, not expelled from it altogether. Though their liturgical ideas did not die, but resurfaced in Europe in different contexts, they were always tainted until well into the twentieth century.^[19]  Jansenists have often been misunderstood or falsely blamed. Currently, though, church historians are re-evaluating the sources and are able to show that specific liturgical ideas congenial to us were flourishing inFrance andItaly during the early modern period when the Jansenists tried, but failed, to introduce them as reforms into the actual life of the Catholic church. Credit should be given where credit is due. We can recognize ourselves in the Jansenist liturgical reform.

***Notes***

So there.

An ecclesiastical inquisition in Europe was a court system adapted from Roman law. It was an institutional tribunal charged with protecting orthodox religious doctrine and church discipline. Jurists keep good records, clean records, and abundant records. Curialists write neatly. Scribes are taught to be legible. Because of this legal dimension, we can study the inquisitions today, unlike many other institutions which are lost to us due to a lack of documentation. Luckily, too, inquisition material survived European war. We should also use the plural and speak of “inquisitions” since there were a number of them in different times and places. We now use the capital letter “I” to refer to a specific historical inquisition such as the Venetian or Spanish, or even the earliest one during the Albigensian era in southern France. For the Inquisition and its procedures in Italyduring Galileo’s time, we have John Tedeschi’s The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (1991).

Due to the work of newer historians, such as Edward Peters in his Inquisition (1988), we have begun to use The Inquisition to speak of the mythology surrounding these institutions which has come down to us as folklore, largely the result of successful Protestant anti-Roman propaganda, particularly in the Spanish Netherlands.

When medieval Europeans used the word “inquisition,” they were referring first to a judicial technique, not an organization or body. There was, in fact, no such thing as “the inquisition” in the sense of an impersonal bureaucracy with a chain of command overseeing it. Instead there were those individuals appointed as “inquisitors of heretical depravity,” assigned by the pope or locally by the bishop, to inquire into heresy in specific areas. They were called such because they applied a procedure known as inquisitio, which could be translated as “inquiry” or “inquest”. In this process, which was already widely used by secular rulers (Henry II used it extensively in England in the twelfth century), an official inquirer called upon the public for information on a specific subject from anyone who felt he or she had something to submit. Normally, this information was treated as very confidential. The official inquirer, aided by competent consultants, then weighed the evidence and determined whether there was reason for further action. This procedure stood in contrast to the Roman law practice typically used in other ecclesiastical courts. Here, unless the judge could proceed on clear, personal knowledge that the defendant was guilty, the judicial process had to be based on an accusation by a third party who was punishable if the accusation was not proved, and in which the defendant could confront witnesses.

By the end of the thirteenth century many areas of continental Europe had been assigned inquisitors. The majority were members of the Franciscan or Dominican Orders, since these two Orders were seen as pious, educated and mobile. Inquisitors, when appointed by Rome, worked in cooperation with the local bishops. Sentence for offenders was often passed in the name of both. By far most sentences seem to have consisted of uncomfortable penances such as wearing a cross sewn onto one’s clothes or going on a long pilgrimage. The inquisitor’s goal was not primarily to punish the guilty but to identify them, get them to confess their sins and repent, and restore them to the fold of the ecclesial community. Perhaps ten percent or fewer of the more serious cases resulted in execution, a punishment reserved for obstinate heretics (those who refused to repent and be reconciled) and lapsed heretics (those who repented and were reconciled at one time but then returned to serious and voluntary error).

Recent studies with greater scientific rigor have been better able to separate the inquisitions of history from The Inquisitions of legend and myth. This is a happy circumstance as we enter the new millennium. While Pope John Paul II and thus the official Catholic Church have seen fit to apologize for the failures of the past (especially in March 2000), secular historians now tend to speak of how fair the system actually was, of how many people were released because of technicalities, or how the law was not abused because it was not whimsical but the law, and of how many opportunities the accused persons really had to avoid further prosecution. It was not an outrageous ecclesiastical court system, given the times, and when compared to the parallel civil court system. Spain, the object of much scorn by England, was a relatively enlightened country, given the times, as Henry Arthur Francis Kamen points out in his books.

Ever since the sixteenth century, the Inquisition has been held synonymous with terror, bigotry and persecution, and distorted views of its activities persist today. Henry Kamen’s first study of the Inquisition, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, published in 1965, quickly became established as the best introduction to one of the most notorious institutions in Western history. Later this book was revised and rewritten, and it is currently the most up-to-date and comprehensive re-evaluation of the subject. Helen Rawlings in her The Spanish Inquisition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) credits Kamen with launching a movement to set straight the historical record.

Based on thirty years of new research and a transformed view of the Inquisition, Henry Kamen’s new account sweeps away old misconceptions and revolutionizes Inquisition studies. He accepts that there is little evidence for the alleged Jewishness of the conversos who were the Inquisition’s first victims, and he gives a new assessment of the significance and consequences of the expulsion of the Jews. He presents a major revision of the impact of blood purity prejudices in Spanish society, revises the figures given for the execution of heretics by the tribunal, and assesses Spanish persecution in the context of executions in neighboring countries. He gives a very new picture of the notorious system of censorship, now seen to be much less effective than often presented, and he sketches the role of efficient foreign propaganda in the creation of the diabolic image of the Inquisition.

Kamen reconstructs the atmosphere of fear and oppression that typified the period, placing it within the context of fear generated by community tensions. He also demonstrates for the first time that the famous auto de fe was not a product of traditional Spanish piety, but a deliberate tool of the inquisitors, invented in the sixteenth century in order to boost their political standing.

This carefully considered study of the dreaded tribunal, based on extensive reading and archival research, is entirely accessible to the general reader, but is also destined perhaps to become the standard reference work on the subject.

Henry Kamen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a professor of the Higher Council for Scientific Research inBarcelona. Author of many standard studies on Spanish and European history, his recent works are biographies of Phillip II, and Phillip V of Spain─ “the king who reigned twice”.

Because of the nature of this subject, care must be taken in choosing authors and readings. Until recently, Protestant-inspired literature on the Inquisition tended to be hostile to the Catholic Church per se, while Catholic literature tended to be narrowly apologetic and justificatory. There was always the “black legend” and the “white legend”, both of which were legends, not history.

Even today, there are still diehard Protestants and general readers who seem unaware of the professional histories available by competent secular authors who are free of religious bias. Uncritical Protestants in the English-speaking world still naively rely on Charles Henry Lea’s A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887, 4 volumes), clearly a dated work of polemics. However, even Lea (1825-1909) is not completely without merit in the “history of this history” because he did use some original sources, something not seriously attempted before him.  Lea is not the “father” of Inquisition studies, however, and for that we have to go outside the English-speaking environment.

It must be acknowledged that the father of Inquisition studies is Juan Antonio Llorente (1756-1823). That is to say, he was more interested in the original documents than in constructing propaganda. He stole the documents when the French occupation of Spain came to an end and he was required, as a French collaborator, to take refuge in Paris. His methodology or use of the documents is not something we can build upon today, but it was a start, or rather a departure from the merely polemical. Many “histories of the Inquisition” were available before Llorente, but their reliability was always vitiated either by faulty method or a guiding apriori. Illustrating its utility, Llorente’s Histoire critique de l’Inquisition en Espagne was reprinted in a Spanish edition in 1980 in four volumes.

After Llorente, we owe much to Henry Charles Lea who was a tireless researcher. His anti-Catholic bias may have hindered him, but he was far more sensitive to documents, and single-minded in collecting them, than anyone before him. The Inquisition had been neglected, and it was almost virgin territory for him. After these pioneers, we enter our own century fully. Henri Maisonneuve published in 1942 his Études sur les origines de l’Inquisition. And after him, we find a fairly rapid succession of authors and works appearing in the second half of the twentieth century. Among other studies in the new millenium, we can count Christopher E. Black’s “The Italian Inquisition” [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009].

Perhaps this is why we are living in the “Golden Age” of Inquisition Studies─because we can finally study it with some seriousness, detached from the religious controversies of the past. Unfortunately, the public at large is unaware of the state of the scholarship on the subject.

Abridged and revised version of “Beyond the Myth of the Inquisition: Ours is ‘The Golden Age’,” Faith and Reason, vol. XVIII, no. 4, (Winter 1992) 335-358; also as “Oltre Il Mito Dell’Inquisizione,” I and II, (I.T.) in La Civiltà Cattolica (143/IV/3419 [December 5, 1992] 458-467; 143/IV/3420 [December, 19, 1992] 578-588.) Posted on Ignatius Insight 29 April 2008. Revised January 2012.

]]> http://frvanhove.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/the-inquisitions-of-history-state-of-the-question/feed/ 0 BVH