the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt one)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The Holy Office had been responsible for many of the Vatican’s worst historical embarrassments, including the imprisonment of the great Italian scientist Galileo in the seventeenth century because he rejected the church’s view that the sun rotated around the earth. The congregation played an important role for centuries in maintaining the Index of Prohibited Books, a list of works banned as blasphemous. The writers whose books appeared on the Index included Voltaire, Hugo, Descartes, Milton, and Copernicus. In the twentieth century, the French thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gide were added for works that won them the Nobel Prize. In 1906, in an obvious effort to distance itself from its past, the congregation removed the word “inquisition” from its name. Whatever it called itself, Küng wrote in his memoirs, it was clear to him as a student that the spirit of the Inquisition had never died: “They may no longer be able to burn dissidents at the stake, but they can burn them psychologically.”

As a young theologian, Ratzinger shared the harsh criticism of the Holy Office. The Vatican under Pius XII, he wrote in the early 1960s, was a place of small-minded “baroque princes” who believed that they alone should decide how Catholics lived. He was reminded of the Curia’s indifference to the faithful every time he went to church and watched parishioners struggle with the Latin liturgy. Since the fourth century, the Vatican had insisted that the Mass be offered throughout the world only in Latin, the formal language of the faith since the Roman Empire. In the twentieth century, many theologians urged the church to allow the Mass to be said in the vernacular—in local languages—so everyone could appreciate a ceremony meant to re-create the poignancy of the Last Supper. But Pius, while open to other liturgical reforms, would not abandon Latin. Ratzinger thought the Vatican’s insistence on the ancient language had always exaggerated its importance, since Latin was not the language of Jesus and his apostles. The Savior addressed his disciples in Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew. After Aramaic fell into disuse, the principal language of the church for nearly three hundred years was Greek. In writings early in his career, Ratzinger blamed Latin—“a language in which the living choices of the human spirit no longer found a place”—for the “sterility to which Catholic theology and philosophy has in many ways been doomed.”