On 17 February 1600, an Ash Wednesday, a man was burned on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome whose tongue had been clamped beforehand so that he could no longer address the crowd. He was fifty-two years old, his name was Filippo Bruno of Nola, he had taken the name Giordano as a Dominican friar, he had wandered through Europe for years — Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, Wittenberg, Prague, Frankfurt — and everywhere he arrived he had in the end broken with the authorities of the place. He spent eight years in the custody of the Roman Inquisition, seven of them under interrogation. The chief prosecutor, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, later canonised, is said to have been troubled by the execution all his life. The content of the charges is disputed to this day, because central trial records have disappeared or are kept under lock by the Church.
Modern memory has canonised Bruno as a martyr of science. Since 1889 his monument has stood on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome, a dark, hooded monk looking out over the square, which is now a market. The monument was erected by anticlericals, in anger at a papacy that had just lost its Papal State. Since then the story has run along a certain track: Bruno burned because he taught the infinite number of inhabited worlds; the Church burned the scientist; the Enlightenment won in the end anyway.
This story is not entirely wrong, but it misses the essential point. Bruno was not a scientist in the modern sense. He was a Renaissance philosopher, a hermetic thinker, a late Platonist with cabbalistic admixtures, a teacher of the art of memory, probably at times a spy in English service. What brought him before the Inquisition was indeed also his doctrine of the infinity of worlds — but the central charges lay elsewhere. Bruno had denied the Trinity. He had denied the divinity of Christ — Jesus had not been God but, in one of the formulations of the charges, a skilful magician. He had rejected the virginity of Mary. He had declared transubstantiation impossible. He had rejected eternal damnation. He had taught the transmigration of souls between worlds.
These are the charges preserved in the Sommario del Processo, rediscovered in 1940. They concern what theology calls the depositum fidei — the Church’s treasury of faith, its dogmatic core. Bruno was not burned primarily because he held the stars to be distant suns. He was burned because he had disputed the dogmatic centre.
This precise state of the facts does not exonerate the Church. It aggravates the case. Whoever holds a man captive for eight years, interrogates him and finally burns him because he disputes the Trinity has a different problem from someone who burns him over a cosmology. The first is the defence of a doctrine by means of death. The second would be the confusion of theology with natural philosophy. The Church did the first, and in the year 2000 — four hundred years later — it expressly confirmed it.
I. The Statement of 2000
On 17 February 2000, four hundred years after the execution, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, then Cardinal Secretary of State and the second man in the Vatican, issued a statement. He called the execution a sad episode and a terrible death. He expressed deep regret about the method. And then he added that the inquisitors had had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good, and had done everything possible to save his life.
In the same year Cardinal Paul Poupard, then President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, spoke at a Bruno symposium organised by the Jesuits. His words are precise and deserve quotation: Bruno’s thought was incompatible with Christian thought. Therefore one cannot and should not speak of a rehabilitation, for in the case of Giordano Bruno there is no basis for such a hypothetical operation, as took place for example in the cases of Jan Hus and Galileo Galilei.
These two statements are not accidental. They are the official position of the Church to this day. What they say has a double structure. First: we regret the method. Second: we do not regret the verdict. This is no slip of the tongue — it is a carefully calibrated double statement. The method is given up because the method can be given up; the verdict is upheld because the verdict is tied to the doctrine that is still defended today.
This puts the matter in a position where the usual historical distancing no longer works. It is not those were other times, we cannot judge. The Church of 2000 judged the matter, and in substance it judged as the Church of 1600 did. It only changed the form in which it judges. The verdict itself — Bruno was rightly condemned — stands. What falls away is the execution. What remains is the confirmation of the guilty verdict.
This is the point at which all evasions end. The Church that speaks today is exactly the same Church that burned in 1600. It is not a different institution with the same name. It is the same institution with different means. Whoever does not see this has not read the point of the Sodano and Poupard statements.
II. Why Galileo, but Not Bruno
In 1992 — after 359 years — Pope John Paul II declared in a formal address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that the theologians of the time had made an error in the Galileo case. The declaration was restrained, but it was a rehabilitation. Galileo, who was never burned but died under house arrest, was acquitted after centuries.
Why could that happen, and why not in Bruno’s case? The answer Poupard gave in 2000 — that Bruno’s thought was incompatible with Christian thought — is the honest answer, and it deserves analysis. It says that what Galileo claimed was compatible with today’s Catholic teaching, or could be made compatible; and that what Bruno claimed is not.
This answer is correct. Galileo claimed that the earth revolves around the sun. This statement touches the cosmology of the Bible — which in several places presupposes a geocentric world — but it does not touch the dogmatic core of the teaching. In the Galileo case the Bible became hermeneutically reinterpretable. The cosmology could be given up because it was no dogmatic centre.
With Bruno it is different. Whoever acquits Bruno implicitly declares that in the doctrine of the Trinity, in Christology, in the doctrine of the Eucharist, in eschatology, several truths may stand alongside the Catholic one. Catholic theology cannot do that without abandoning itself. The Trinity cannot be reinterpreted like the solar system. It stands at the centre of what the Church calls revealed truth.
This is the core of the problem — and it is not a problem between an old and a new Church. It is the condition of the institution’s continuity. Bruno cannot be rehabilitated because his heresies strike what the Church still teaches today. The verdict of 1600 must be confirmed, even if the method is regretted — otherwise the identity of the institution falls.
III. The Brachium Saeculare — How to Kill without Lifting a Hand
There is a feature of Catholic inquisitorial practice that modern memory almost always passes over, and it is central to understanding the institution. In its self-understanding the Church never, in its entire history, executed anyone itself. It passed judgement. It handed the execution over to the brachium saeculare, the secular arm.
This construction is not harmless. Nor was it a necessity; it was a choice. The Church could have executed like other courts of its time. It did not, because canon law forbade clerics to shed blood — Ecclesia non sitit sanguinem, the Church does not thirst for blood. Instead the Inquisition condemned the heretic, excommunicated him, handed him over to the secular court and, in the formula of transfer, expressly asked the secular arm to show mercy and spare the life of the condemned.
This request was legal code. It meant the opposite of what it said. A secular court that had treated an excommunicated heretic with mercy — that is, had not executed him — would itself have become suspect of heresy. The request for leniency was the formal demand for execution. Everyone knew it. The formula served solely to keep the Church’s hands clean while the pyre burned.
This is no modern insinuation. It is the open statement of contemporary theorists of the Inquisition. Francisco Peña (1540–1612), the most important canonist commentator on Nicolau Eymerich’s standard inquisitors’ handbook, the Directorium Inquisitorum, expressly recorded in his commented edition, published by 1578 at the latest, that the request for leniency was a pure formality — it served, in Peña’s own words, solely so that the inquisitors should not appear to consent to the shedding of blood and thereby incur canonical irregularity, which would have had consequences for their careers in the Church. Peña was no anti-Catholic critic. He worked for the Roman Inquisition. He explained the mechanism in an insider’s text written not for the public but for the inquisitors themselves.
This formula was applied to Bruno. The sentence of 8 February 1600 handed him over to the secular authority with the customary request that the punishment be carried out as mildly as possible and without the shedding of blood. What was carried out was burning alive. The formula alone would not have required it — hanging would also have been bloodless and would have respected the canonical rule. That it was nevertheless burning followed not from the wording of the formula of transfer but from a theological logic of its own running in the background. Heretics were burned for three reasons that had nothing to do with the ban on shedding blood. First: the obliteration of the body. The Church taught bodily resurrection; a heretic was not to be able to rise again, and his body had to be destroyed so completely that no relics remained that might later be venerated as a martyr’s relics. Second: the anticipation of hell. Burning was a didactic spectacle — the onlookers were to see what awaited the deviant in eternity. Third: the maximisation of agony and deterrence. Burning alive was the most protracted form of execution, visible from afar, loud, pungent.
The executioners knew this logic. There was a practice of strangling a repentant convict before burning — this was considered an act of mercy that spared him the longer agony. For unrepentant heretics this mercy was precisely not intended. For Bruno explicitly not — the bound tongue that prevented him from speaking to the crowd is the historical evidence that he was to go into the fire fully conscious. Whoever is strangled before burning needs no bound tongue. The executioner too knew what he had to do — and what he was precisely not to do. The architecture of killing was arranged so that Church, governor and executioner each did his part without any one of them having to feel responsible for the whole. This is the perfection of outsourcing: even within the execution, responsibility was distributed so that nobody had to bear it.
The citra sanguinis effusionem formula was thus not the reason for the burning. It was the legal camouflage that made a theologically motivated choice appear as a mere canonical detail. The Church did not want the heretic only dead — it wanted to see him burn, because the fire carried a theological content of its own. The formula of transfer veiled this choice in a plea for mildness that every participant understood as its opposite.
Bruno was not burned by the Church — formally, at least. He was burned by the Roman governor after the Inquisition had handed him over to secular jurisdiction. The Church can claim with complete legal correctness that it killed no one. It only pronounced the verdict and dictated the theologically grounded manner of execution in a formula of transfer that seemed to say the opposite. Its hands stayed clean. That holds for Bruno, it holds for the many others who were executed over the centuries after verdicts of church courts, and it would hold for all who would still be executed if the Church still had the secular arm at its disposal.
In the Papal State itself, however, even this legal outsourcing fell away. There the Pope was at once spiritual shepherd and secular monarch. There was no independent secular arm to which the Inquisition could have handed heretics over. The executioner was on the papal payroll. Executions took place on the squares of the papal capital, Rome, in the name of the Pope as secular sovereign. The actors who in the morning, as inquisitors, handed the heretic over to the secular arm were in the afternoon, in another role, themselves the secular arm — as Cardinal Secretary of State, as governor of Rome, as member of the judicial commission. The same persons in two robes. In the Papal State the brachium saeculare was no outsourcing but self-reference. The Church handed the heretic over to itself and had him executed by its own executioner on its own squares. Bruno was burned in 1600 on the Campo de' Fiori, which belonged to the city of Rome, which belonged to the Papal State, whose sovereign was the Pope, on whose behalf the Inquisition had judged. A clearer self-reference can hardly be constructed.
This is not a historical detail. It is the architecture of the institutional lie. An institution that in its self-presentation never kills, but for centuries gives the orders that lead to death, can later claim that it never killed. It can attribute the burnings to secular rulers. For the bishops and inquisitors involved it reduces their guilt to participation and certifies in the year 2000: “…they had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good, and did everything possible to save the life of Giordano Bruno.”
And at the end of the twentieth century the Church, in its infinite goodness and wisdom, can in a perfidious mea culpa staging ask forgiveness for what “sons and daughters of the Church” had done — as if the hierarchy had not pronounced the verdicts. The Church as institution is and remains holy, pure and innocent. The guilt is played down in an intolerable way and becomes the personal guilt of the inquisitors. It is interesting that in this attribution of guilt the “daughters” of the Church are, by way of exception, expressly named too. What is their guilt supposed to have consisted in? There were no female inquisitors. There were no female bishops. There were no female popes. The hierarchy that pronounced the verdicts was exclusively male. Women appear in the history of the Inquisition in two roles: as servants of the inquisitors, who cooked, washed and kept silent — and as victims, above all in the witch hunts, in which the overwhelming majority of those executed were women. When the Church in the year 2000 speaks of “daughters” who are to be forgiven, it ranks precisely these two groups among the accomplices — the marginally involved alongside the real victims. The witches become accomplices in their own burning. That is no confession of guilt. It is a second burning, in words.
In the Papal State this self-presentation was a constructed fiction without legal foundation; in the other European territories it was a legally effective construction of outsourcing. In both cases the result was always the same: a dead man and an institution that claimed it had done nothing.
IV. Adaptation to a Changed Balance of Power
The only thing the Church lacks today is the possibility of having its verdicts carried out. That is the sober balance. The humanitarian manner, the regret, the mea culpa appearances are not moral progress of the institution. They are adaptation to a world in which the secular arms no longer respond to a nod from the bishops.
This observation is not cynical. It follows from a simple test. When did the Church stop burning heretics? In 1826 — the last official execution by the Spanish Inquisition, the teacher Cayetano Ripoll, hanged for deism in Valencia, because burning was by then considered barbaric. Why did it stop? Not because in the course of the Enlightenment the Church had recognised that killing dissenters is wrong. It stopped because the liberal constitutions of the nineteenth century withdrew from the Church the right to set the secular arm in motion. In the states where it kept power — Spain, Portugal, parts of Italy — the Inquisition remained active longer. In the states where it lost power, it stopped.
The sharpest test is provided by the Papal State itself. There the Church could kill as long as it wished — it was the sovereign that paid the executioners. From 1796 to 1864 Giovanni Battista Bugatti, known in Rome as Mastro Titta, served the popes. According to his own records he carried out five hundred and sixteen executions in sixty-eight years, on behalf of six successive popes — Pius VI, Pius VII, Leo XII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX. Executions with axe, rope, hammer and guillotine. On the Piazza del Popolo, the Piazza di Ponte, in provincial towns of the Papal State. The victims were robbers, murderers — and in the Restoration period after Napoleon above all political opponents: Carbonari, followers of Mazzini, Italian patriots who fought for a united, secular Italy and thus against the temporal rule of the Pope. Pius IX — the same Pope who in 1854 made the Immaculate Conception and in 1870 papal infallibility into dogmas — retired Bugatti in 1864 with a pension. Bugatti’s successor continued the work. The last execution in the Papal State took place on 9 July 1870 in Palestrina. Seven weeks later, on 20 September 1870, Italian troops broke through the Porta Pia and took Rome. With that the Papal State ended. With that the papal practice of execution ended too. Both on the same day, because the one was the precondition of the other.
This is not a story from the Middle Ages. These are dates from the late nineteenth century. In 1870 Bismarck was on the verge of founding the German Empire, the United States had been free of slavery for five years, Italy had unified politically. While all of Europe was conducting the Enlightenment debates on penal reform, the Catholic Church went on beheading. It did not stop out of insight. It stopped because its executioner was taken away from it, together with the state in which he worked.
That is not reform out of insight. It is adaptation out of weakness. An institution that in five hundred years of systematic persecution never voluntarily renounced the means of killing — that gave it up only when the means was taken out of its hands — has no argument that it is mild today for reasons of its own ethical development. It is mild because it has to be. Its representatives issue statements that articulate regret, and they do so in a world in which any other statement would isolate them immediately. What they do not do is what a truly transformed institution would have to do — detach itself from the verdicts of its predecessors and declare them what they were: an injustice crying to heaven. The Church would have to declare this as an institution and not make individuals responsible for the injustice.
V. The Church as the Oldest Living Component of the Megamachine
In The Myth of the Machine Lewis Mumford described how the megamachine — the large-scale, hierarchical system aimed at the total mobilisation of people and resources — first became visible some five thousand years ago in the building of the Egyptian pyramids. It consisted of five constituent elements that he called the pentagon of power: power, productivity, profit, prestige, publicity. It required a priesthood that legitimised the whole as cosmic order, a king who formed the head of command, a scribal bureau that ran the administration, an army that broke resistance, and a myth that brought those involved to voluntary submission.
It is no accident that the Catholic Church can be recognised in this scheme. It is the oldest still-functioning variant of the priesthood element of the megamachine, in European adaptation. Since the late fourth century it has fulfilled the function of supplying the religious legitimation of a total claim to rule — first in symbiosis with the Roman emperorship, then with the Frankish one, then with the European monarchies, then in competition with the emerging nation states, and today in a complex mix with global structures. It is a power of its own, with its own diplomacy, its own bank, its own state, its own law. It is not one religion among others. It is an institutional large-scale structure in religious packaging.
In The End of the Megamachine Fabian Scheidler described the history of the last five hundred years of this large-scale structure. He shows how in the early modern period the European megamachine developed its characteristic tyrannies — the economic tyranny of accumulation, the ideological tyranny of apocalypticism, the military tyranny of permanent war, the political tyranny of state power. In all four of these tyrannies the Catholic Church played a constitutive role.
It was and is a large landowner and a taker of interest — the latter under carefully chosen names, because taking interest was considered a mortal sin under biblical law (Deuteronomy 23:20–21) and under several medieval councils — Lateran II 1139, Vienne 1311. The Church itself did not give up the forbidden business; it renamed it. What was legally called census was economically interest. What was labelled damnum emergens or lucrum cessans — compensation for lost profit — was also interest. What the Montes Pietatis, the ecclesiastical pawnshops, collected as an administrative fee was interest. And what could not be relabelled in this way was left to the Jews, whom the Church released from the ban on interest between co-religionists on the grounds that they were not Christians — and to whom at the same time it closed most other ways of earning a living, thus making them permanent outsiders in their surroundings. This is the economic variant of the same architecture that worked for killing in the brachium saeculare: the forbidden is outsourced, the hands stay clean, afterwards one points to those who carried it out.
The Church’s most lucrative source of income, however, was not the relabelled interest business. It was the eagerly stoked fear of hell and the unhindered access of priests to the dying in their anguish of soul. The theological stage for this was built in the High Middle Ages: the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 made the doctrine of purgatory binding, beside it stood the doctrine of eternal damnation, beside that the monopolistic administration of the sacraments, which were considered the only way to salvation. This set in motion a business model without historical parallel — and it ran on two levels.
On the first level the grieving survivors paid. Whoever had a dead relative who was not to end up in hell could shorten the time in purgatory through masses for the dead, indulgences, alms and endowments. The Church was the sole administrator of these otherworldly accounts. Whoever did not pay left his own father, mother or child in an indefinitely long state of pain — so at least ran the teaching the survivors had to believe. The indulgence trade of the late Middle Ages, which ignited the Reformation, was only the loudest form of this first business.
The more perfidious level lay at the deathbed itself. Here it was not the survivors who paid for the dead. Here the dying signed their wealth over directly to the Church — and thereby withdrew it from their own living. The priest was legally and sacramentally privileged in the room of the dying. He heard confession, gave the Eucharist, anointed the dying person. In exactly this hour, when fear of hell was greatest and the will weakest, wills were drawn up, bequests formulated, land signed over to the Church. Medievalists estimate that a considerable part of the Church’s landed property in Europe — some say up to a third — came from such deathbed bequests. That was no accident. It was the result of a system in which the Church produced the teaching (hell), provided the personnel (the priest in the room of the dying), monopolised the sacraments (the only means of salvation) and handled the contract (the will). Four functions in one hand, at the most sensitive moment of a human life.
The point is that this business was not given up when the Church lost power. It is still in operation today, only less visible. The German dioceses, the Catholic orders, the Vatican, Caritas and other church-related organisations actively advertise provision through a will, run their own legacy advisory services, and train priests in dealing with the dying. What has changed is the language — medieval fear of hell has become the late-modern concern with meaning at the end of life, with leaving behind a good cause, with spirituality in dying. What has not changed is the architecture. The priest or the pastoral carer still has privileged access to the room of the dying. The institution still inherits through these accesses. Fortunes are still rewritten at the deathbed, at a moment when the survivors are often not present and do not learn what is happening. The core business has only changed its packaging.
This is not a side effect of a religious institution. It is structure. Through its teaching the Church produces the fear that no one can resolve alone; it monopolises the only way out; and it collects the fortunes that are rewritten under the pressure of this fear. In the Middle Ages the fear was hell; in the twenty-first century it is the emptiness of meaning at the end of life, but the mechanism is the same. It has been the institution’s core business since the High Middle Ages, without interruption.
It was the ideological source of the apocalyptic thinking without which the dynamic of conquest and annihilation of the modern age would be unthinkable. It was a military co-organiser of the Crusades and of the intra-European wars of religion. It was the political ally of practically all the absolutist monarchies of Europe.
Whoever takes the Catholic Church out of the picture of the megamachine has not understood the picture. It is not an outsider that critically accompanies the megamachine. It is its oldest living component. What Mumford’s pentagon of power captures as priesthood took the form of the Roman Church in Europe. It has filled this function without interruption from the late fourth century to the present — from the Edict of Thessalonica, by which Nicene Christianity became the only permitted religion of the Roman Empire in 380, to the global mix of the twenty-first century. The role of Protestant and Calvinist religion as components of the megamachine is a story of its own that would go beyond the scope of this essay.
From this classification follows something that becomes visible in the Bruno case. The Church’s inability to lift the verdict of 1600 is not a character trait of a single religious institution. It is a constitutive feature of every component of the megamachine that grounds its own legitimacy in a revealed or sanctified truth. Whoever administers the truth cannot admit errors in the truth without losing the licence to administer it. Whoever decrees death in the name of truth cannot withdraw the death sentence without withdrawing the doctrine defined as truth.
VI. The Institutional Lie par Excellence
What makes the Catholic Church a particularly clear case is the combination of the length of its history, the sharpness of its doctrine, and the refined architecture of the brachium saeculare, which enabled it to carry out the crime without formally laying a hand on anyone.
An institutional lie is not the lie of a person. A person who lies can recant. An institutional lie is a system of statements in which untruth belongs to the structure. The person who works in the institution does not lie personally; he repeats what the structure instructs him to say. The lie is thus depersonalised, hard to attribute, and it becomes stable because it does not depend on the sincerity of individuals.
The Catholic Church is the institutional lie par excellence because it fulfils all the conditions of such a lie to the highest degree. It has a two-thousand-year tradition in which the lie has hardened. It has a doctrine that cannot be reformed without dissolving the institution itself. It has a legal architecture — the brachium saeculare — that enables it to organise the crime without formally appearing as the perpetrator. And it has a language that can combine regret for the method with defence of the verdict without the combination becoming immediately visible as a contradiction.
The institutional crime par excellence is not the single crime. It is the structural device through which the crime becomes possible, is protected from prosecution by other authorities, and afterwards is brought into a form that leaves the institution undamaged in its spotless self-image. The burning of Bruno is only one example. The same pattern appears today in the abuse cases: individual perpetrators act in their own interest, but their actions also have structural causes that the Church does not tackle — and cannot tackle without calling itself into question as an institution. The structural mechanism that made the burning of 1600 possible, justified it for four hundred years and today half-withdraws it without really lifting it is the structural, continuing crime. It is not only the crime of 1600. It is the crime of 2026, of which the crime of 1600 is only the historically most visible manifestation. The Church has manoeuvred itself into a position from which it can no longer find a way out — because regardless of what it does, it is and remains questionable.
Whoever finds it hard to say this has a reason. In Western culture the Church has enjoyed a special protection not granted to other institutions with a comparable record. Whoever denounces crimes of states — Stalinism, National Socialism, colonial history — is heard. Whoever denounces crimes of the Church quickly falls under suspicion of hostility to religion, of anticlericalism, of one-sided cultural criticism. This protective formation is part of the institutional lie. It ensures that the question cannot be asked as it would have to be asked without those asking being pushed into an ideological corner.
VII. The Balance, in Summary
Bruno is not the only one. He is the particularly well-documented single case, because his trial can be reconstructed through the rediscovered Sommario and his statue on the Campo de' Fiori keeps the memory alive. But the diagnosis of this essay — crime without dirty hands, defence of doctrine at the price of human lives, half-withdrawn regret without lifting the verdict — applies to a much larger complex. A complete reckoning would go beyond this essay. What follows is a summary list in which each case is outlined in a few sentences and the structural point named.
The witch burnings, 15th to 18th centuries. In the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) of the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and in the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (Innocent VIII, 1484), the Catholic Church laid the theoretical foundation for the European witch hunt. Estimates speak of forty to sixty thousand executed, the vast majority women. In fairness: most of these verdicts were passed by secular courts, in Protestant territories as well as Catholic ones, and the Roman Inquisition itself judged witchcraft cases comparatively cautiously. But the theoretical foundation came from the Church, and it has never officially apologised for these killings. The pattern resembles that of Bruno: the verdict was pronounced, the hands were kept clean, the regret was dissolved centuries later in the general mea culpa gesture, without a single case being rehabilitated.
The Crusades, 11th to 13th centuries. Eight officially numbered crusades, plus children’s crusades and Reconquista campaigns, with hundreds of thousands dead — Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Christians, heretics — and the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204 and thereby decisively weakened the Byzantine Empire. In 2001, under John Paul II, the Church issued a general apology to the Orthodox world, but it has never rejected the concept of the crusade as such, never withdrawn a single call to armed violence, never returned the money from the plundered riches.
The wars against heretics, 12th to 14th centuries. The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) against the Cathars in southern France, with the destruction of an entire culture and the killing of tens of thousands, according to some, admittedly uncertain, estimates hundreds of thousands of people. The order Kill them all, God will know his own, attributed to the papal legate Arnaud Amaury at the storming of Béziers (1209), may be apocryphal, but what it describes — the indiscriminate killing of Catholics and Cathars, because separating them could not be expected of the soldiers — is historically established. No rehabilitation, no admission of guilt.
The persecution of the Jews in the Lateran IV complex. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 — the same that made the doctrine of purgatory binding — also decreed a dress code for Jews, their exclusion from public office, and their legal treatment as a special group. This created the theological and canonical template for seven centuries of anti-Jewish practice in Europe. In 1965, with the declaration Nostra aetate, the Church revised its attitude to Judaism. But it has not admitted that its own teaching between 1215 and 1965 was a constitutive element of European antisemitism, without which the dynamic of persecution of the modern age, including the Shoah, would be unthinkable.
Colonial history, 16th to 20th centuries. With the papal bull Inter caetera (Alexander VI, 1493) the Church divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal. With the encomienda doctrine and the theological dispute over the souls of the Indians (Valladolid 1550–1551) it supplied the justifying figures for the conquest of Latin America, which went hand in hand with millions of dead among the indigenous population. In Africa and Asia it played analogous roles. In 1992 the Church accompanied the Columbus year with a mea culpa gesture, but it has never formally revoked Inter caetera.
The Vatican Bank, 20th century to the present. The Istituto per le Opere di Religione, founded in 1942, has for decades been entangled in money laundering, Mafia and corruption affairs. The death of the banker Roberto Calvi in 1982 under Blackfriars Bridge in London, the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, the involvement of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the first-ever conviction of a cardinal — Angelo Becciu, sentenced in 2023 to five and a half years for embezzlement, appeal pending — are not a series of isolated cases but the practice, stable over decades, of a financial institution that evades ordinary supervision through its special statute.
Sexual abuse and its cover-up, 20th and 21st centuries. Tens of thousands of documented cases worldwide and, according to extrapolations such as that of the French commission CIASE in 2021, hundreds of thousands of victims, in the USA, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Belgium, Chile, in most Catholic countries. The structural cover-up — the transfer of perpetrators, the intimidation of victims, the confidentiality obligations — has been shown to be systemic in several state inquiries (Ireland: Ryan Report 2009, Murphy Report 2009; Germany: MHG study 2018). The Church has paid compensation in individual dioceses, but it has not touched the system of the special priestly status that made the architecture of abuse possible in the first place — celibacy, hierarchical closure, special canonical jurisdiction, the seal of confession as protection for perpetrators. The finding is exactly the same as with Bruno: method regretted, structure defended.
These seven complexes are not exhaustive. They are a selection showing that the diagnosis of this essay does not rest on a single case. It applies to a pattern. In each of these cases we find the same architecture: the doctrine that legitimises the crime; the outsourcing of execution to third parties or concealment through institutional secrecy; half-regret decades or centuries later without fundamental revision; and the protection of the institution by a culture that attacks other great perpetrators more harshly than this one. The Church is not an institution that has made mistakes. It is an institution whose mechanics of error is the structural precondition of its existence.
VIII. What Remains
It would be a misunderstanding to conclude from this diagnosis that the Catholic Church should be abolished by force or that its members should be despised. The members are, in the overwhelming majority, people who have nothing to do with the institutional structure described here. They live their faith for reasons that have nothing to do with Bruno, the brachium saeculare or the pentagon of power. The diagnosis concerns the structure, not the people who live in it.
But the diagnosis also concerns no less than the structure. It says that this structure cannot give an honest answer to a question it raised itself — the question of the Bruno verdict. It says that the failure of the answer is not accidental but structural, and that what is structural about it is the real crime. It says that today’s representatives of the institution are not mild for moral reasons but for lack of power. And it says that this institution is part of a larger construction, the megamachine, which has been at work for five thousand years and whose oldest living religious component is the Church.
The statue on the Campo de' Fiori, erected by anticlericals in the nineteenth century, is today less an anti-Catholic monument than a memorial to something more general. It stands for the possibility that an institution kills a person in the name of a teaching that, four hundred and twenty-five years later, it is not prepared to relax on this question. It stands for the memory that such institutions exist, that they cannot find their way out of this position by their own strength, and that the regret they express today is another form of the same crime.
And it stands for a question not carved into the statue but contained in the matter: which of our institutions today will, four hundred years from now, stand in the same position — having done something it would have to regret but cannot lift, because the verdict is tied to the core of its doctrine? Whoever takes this question seriously has understood the Bruno case without having to reduce it to the religious. And whoever answers honestly sees that the megamachine is not an old story but the form in which we live.
In its entire history the Church never killed anyone itself. It passed judgement. It organised the burning without lighting the fire. It never dirtied its hands. The only thing it lacks today is the possibility of continuing the procedure. What it expresses as regret is not transformation. It is adaptation to the changed situation.