If looking at our own sins, as individuals, is tough, imagine when the sin is institutional and hundreds of years old. Yet, in 1998, Pope John Paul II opened the files on one of the institutional church's own sins --- sins of oppression and terror that were carefully documented over the 600 years the Inquisition was in place.
In California, documentary filmmaker David Rabinovitch saw the announcement and was immediately interested.
"I saw this news item and, like most of us, I knew very little about the Inquisition," Rabinovitch said.
Being a journalist, Rabinovitch began the arduous process that is documentary filmmaking. The result, "Secret Files of the Inquisition," a four-hour mini-series, will finally be seen in the U.S., on May 9 and May 16 (at 9 p.m. on KCET, Los Angeles; check local listings).
Rabinovitch said that while he was very intrigued by Pope John Paul's opening of the files, he first asked a priest friend of his, Salesian Father Larry Lorenzoni, who had worked in the Vatican, what he thought. "This is a man who would see the pontiff in the cafeteria for lunch," Rabinovitch said.
"There are many in our faith who will be opposed to airing our dirty laundry," Father Lornezoni reportedly answered. "But I'm with the Holy Father. We need to deal with the sins of the past."
Rabinovitch thought there might also be some issues because of his Jewish background, but Father Lorenzoni gave his blessing.
"There were a lot of things that we learned in the course of developing the series," Rabinovitch said. "The first thing is that there are a lot of popular misconceptions."
Not the least of which was the idea that the Inquisition was mostly after Jews. "The Inquisition was a kind of non-discriminatory discrimination organization," Rabinovitch said.
Any kind of heresy was targeted by the Inquisitors. Even in Spain, Jews, per se, were not the targets, but the conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity out of fear of the Christians and were going back to their Jewish traditions. Much later, there would be oppressive measures against Jews. But as Luther and other Protestant movements got started, the Roman Inquisition put its focus on Protestants.
"More than half of it was dealing with what [the Inquisition] deemed to be dissident forms of Christianity," said Rabinovitch, who decided to focus his film on four individual stories to tell the larger story.
The first hour deals with the Cathars in Southern France, the second with Spain and the community of conversos. The Protestant Reformation takes up the third hour, looking at Pope Paul IV and his obsession with exterminating heretics, and the fourth follows the story of the Inquisistion's final years in the early 19th century through the eyes of a young Jewish boy kidnapped by the Church and his father's letters to try and free him.
The film is mostly historical re-creations of the events with narrator Colm Feore and other actors giving voice to the various trial transcripts and letters. Rabinovitch said he did enormous amounts of research in the actual files kept by the Vatican, and went to tremendous lengths to make sure he got all the daily life details correct.
"In the 13th century, they used ink pens and the nib of the pen was a hollowed out goat's tooth because it would scratch into the vellum and the ink would settle there," Rabinovitch said, explaining that there are a lot of shots of people writing. But in later scenes depicting events in the 19th century, the actors are using a metal stylus. "The point is that we worked to recreate every detail in as authentic a manner as possible."
The film was shot in Spain with Spanish actors. The whole process of funding, researching, shooting and assembling the film took about eight years, with the initial premiere in Europe in February 2006. Since then, it has been seen in almost every country in Western Europe, and on Canadian TV.
"The irony is that the U.S. is about the last country in the world to see it," Rabinovitch said.
What most affected Rabinovitch and his fellow filmmakers was the common humanity of all the people affected by the Inquisition. His real hope is that the film will show that things, sadly, have not changed all that much in the past thousand years.
"We in the West," Rabinovitch said, "can look at this dark history, so that, one, it doesn't happen again, and two, so that it can bring people together." |