Secret Files of the Inquisition

The judicial process used by the Roman Church to discover and punish heresy is the focus of this PBS-aired miniseries, narrated by actor Colm Feore, which combines dramatic re-enactments, archival artwork, and scholarly commentary, while also drawing on documents from the Vatican archives—opened for the first time ever to researchers in 1998—to examine four phases of the so-called Inquisition. The first episode deals with the famous case of the isolated southern French village of Montaillou, where a pocket of the old dualist Cathar (or Albigensian) movement were prosecuted and punished during the early 13th century. The second centers on the notorious Spanish Inquisition (15th-16th centuries), which is rightly characterized as more of a government enterprise directed against Jewish converts than an independent ecclesiastical operation. The third program concentrates on the career of Giovanni Pietro Carafa (1476-1559), later Pope Paul IV, who employed the most severe methods to stifle heterodox opinion (including the creation of the Index of Forbidden Books). The final episode concerns Napoleon's efforts to undermine papal authority by revealing inquisitorial records, as well as the notorious case in which a Jewish boy—allegedly secretly baptized—was taken from his family and made a ward of Pope Pius IX. The scripts betray a tendency to oversimplification and aren't completely accurate (Montaillou, for example, wasn't in the “Holy Roman Empire”), but overall this is an intelligent series that personalizes the larger subject with individual case studies, and will serve well as a starting point for further study. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (F. Swietek)