CHAPTER EIGHT
The “Enlightenment” Pope Benedict XIV and the Blood Accusation
DESPITE ITALIAN courts’ acquittals of Jews from blood accusations, Rome’s refusal to address Polish Jews’ request for a condemnation of such accusations in 1743 after the blood libel in Zasław was a sign of a shift in policies toward Jewry under the new pope, Benedict XIV, elected in August 1740, the year the trial of Jews in Poznań ended. His pontificate coincided with a particularly bloody wave of accusations in Poland, during which Polish Jews were desperately seeking an official statement from Rome in their defense, but in vain. Not only did Benedict XIV decline to defend Jews but he also became the first pope since Sixtus V to authorize an office and mass in honor of a purported child victim of Jews. Although admittedly he never validated the blood accusations, the pope explicitly discussed the veneration of such child victims, thereby lending a hand to accusers of Jews who saw in his statements a general substantiation of anti-Jewish accusations.
Modern scholars have lauded Pope Benedict XIV as a man of the Enlightenment who condemned slavery and installed a woman as a professor of sciences at the University of Bologna; he has been praised as a jurist and a theologian who took a scientific and critical approach to evidence even as he deliberated about miracles.1 But Benedict’s legacy as an “enlightened” pope has been tarnished by his actions—and inactions—toward Jews: his views on their social and legal status, their conversions to Christianity, and especially anti-Jewish accusations, which he expressed both in his magnum opus and in his 1755 bull Beatus Andreas.2 For all his engagement with contemporary sciences and arts, Prospero Lambertini, the future Benedict XIV, was also a product of the legal and cultural heritage on which Church teachings were based. That powerful legacy was palpable in his treatment of Jews.
Prospero Lambertini on the Martyrdom of Children
In 1734, the first volume of Prospero Lambertini’s massive opus on the beatification of “servants of God” and canonization of the beati was published in Bologna. At more than five hundred pages, this volume was only the first of four additional thick tomes, the last appearing in 1738.3 The whole four-volume work, fully titled De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione, became one of the most influential—and still used—books on the subject, its importance no doubt amplified after its author Prospero Lambertini became Pope Benedict XIV. The work was heavily influenced by Lambertini’s two decades of experience with the Congregation of the Rites, where he served as Promotor Fidei, popularly known as the “Devil’s advocate,” responsible for vetting cases slated for beatification and canonization. He left the post in 1728 to become the archbishop of Bologna.
The approval of cults for public veneration was a serious matter; a lot was at stake, for “true sanctity and true miracles,” Lambertini noted, could only be found in “our Roman Catholic Church,”4 and false miracles threatened the edifice of faith. The gravity of the matter required strict procedures. Lambertini thus devoted a significant portion of his work to those procedures, the evaluation of sources, and the officials responsible for them—notaries, archivists, and, of course, the Promotor Fidei. The multivolume book addressed, it seems, all potential questions and issues that could arise about the candidates for beatification or canonization; even details about expenses related to the process. It was bursting with historical precedents from antiquity to the most recent years, some coming from Lambertini’s own experience as the Promotor Fidei, who was responsible, as he wrote, for “raising objections” to the cases brought before the Congregation of the Rites. De servorum Dei’s goal was to assure that the evidence was solid and no false cults were authorized.5
Lambertini divided candidates for beatification or canonization into two categories: confessors and martyrs. Confessors were those whose heroic deeds in the name of faith and God earned them devotion, but “who died in peace,” not as a result of persecution and hatred.6 Martyrs were those “who died in defense of the true faith,” though some argued that also “those who suffered most atrocious torments for the faith, even if they survived and died in peace,” deserved to be regarded as martyrs.7 Martyrdom raised many questions about both the martyr and the persecutor, such as consent and age of the martyr, circumstances of martyrdom, and the identity and intention of the persecutor.8 Child martyrs presented a particular problem.
According to canon law, as articulated by Lambertini, “all those who suffer martyrdom for Christ, and after death were distinguished by signs and miracles; all those who, after praiseworthy performance of heroic virtue died a precious death in the presence of the Lord, and after death flourished in glory of miracles are subject to canonization.”9 But could children who had not reached the age of reason be canonized? No, Lambertini answered. Before reaching the age of reason, children could not be “distinguished by heroic virtues.” Accepting children as saints would have meant that “the pope would have to canonize all children who were baptized and died soon after baptism. This is absurd.”10 But what about children baptized not by water but by blood—“that is those killed in hatred of Christ and his faith,” such as the “innocent children killed by Herod in place of Christ.” Lambertini admitted that their eligibility for sainthood was subject to debate, because these children not only died before reaching the age of reason, a condition for canonization regarding martyrs, but also they were not baptized as Christians. Still, some scholars agreed that children “killed in hatred of Christian faith” were “true martyrs,” because the intention of the persecutor played a role as well, even though the children themselves could not have expressed their willingness to die for Christ. Hatred was in fact a necessary condition of martyrdom.11 And this was an interpretation often invoked by medieval writers, such as Thomas Monmouth, in regard to children said to have been killed by Jews.
Lambertini too noted that the Holy Innocents were not the only children “killed in hatred of Christ and his faith.” Other examples could be found in Martyrologium romanum, among them Urbano, Prilidiano, and Epolonio venerated on January 24, the feast of San Babila. None of these examples related to Jews.12 But then there was “Simon, a boy from Trent, who had just completed twenty-nine months of life when he was killed in 1472 [sic] by Jews in hatred of Lord Christ.”13 Lambertini observed that “the body of the killed infant” had been examined by the physician Giovanni Mattia Tiberino, who then wrote “the story of his martyrdom,” which was then “published by Surius under March 24.” After Simon’s death, Lambertini continued, miracles followed, and soon a public cult emerged. But Lambertini did not shy away from doubts. He noted that Pope Sixtus IV had warned officials and prohibited Simon’s veneration until “the truth of the deeds” could be ascertained by an apostolic commissary. Lambertini then reprinted Pope Sixtus IV’s letter from October 10, 1475, which prohibited, under the penalty of excommunication, the veneration of Simon as beatus and martyr until the martyrdom and miracles could be verified. But once the nature of Simon’s martyrdom and miracles was verified, the cult was approved “by apostolic authority”—at the request of Pope Gregory XIII, Simon was inserted into the Martyrologium romanum and finally granted the office and mass, as well as indulgences by Pope Sixtus V. Lambertini’s main sources for Simon’s story were Surius and the Bollandists, though he did occasionally mention others. The Bollandists, Lambertini cared to add, had also mentioned other children “killed by Jews in hatred of Christ” and venerated—Ioannetto of Cologne, Richard of Paris, and “in England, boy William”—but the Jesuit scholars did not see the “original” documentation about them to suggest that a proper process of beatification had been followed. Still, some scholars had argued that these cases provided sufficient evidence that “children killed in hatred of the faith,” with or without “baptism of water,” could be canonized. Lambertini disagreed.14 In his objection, he again turned to Simon of Trent. Simon could not be used as a precedent for canonization of children; his cult was recognized more through “equipollent beatification” than “canonization,” that is through beatification without a formal process. In fact, Simon’s veneration was authorized by the pontiffs, but only “in one particular church.” Since there was no “formal” or even “equipollent” papal recognition that Simon “should be venerated as a martyr of the universal Church,” Simon was never canonized.
That was a crucial distinction Lambertini made between saints and beati, and between canonization and beatification more generally. “In the canonization of the saints,” he argued, “Christian religion grows, because when saints multiply, so does the cult of saints,” making their lives and virtues known to the public, increasing devotion, and inspiring acts of Christian virtue.15 But children, although they could be considered “true martyrs,” could not be considered saints, in part because canonized saints provided inspiration for others to follow and imitate and one could not imitate the death of children.16 Even Simon of Trent, whose acta requesting formal canonization did exist in “the secret archive of Castel Sant’Angelo,” about which even the Bollandists did not know, could not be considered for canonization.17 Indeed, Simon’s case could not even be referred to “as formal beatification and even less as solemn canonization, but [only] as equipollent beatification.”18
Although the recognition of saints through canonization was final and infallible, beatification was not, and of the two types of beatifications, equipollent beatification was weaker, even revocable.19 In formal beatification one had to prove “virtues or martyrdom, as well as signs and miracles,” before the pontiff permitted “the servant of God [to] be called beatus and be venerated in a particular place.” In contrast, equipollent beatification is based on “the renown [fama] of the virtues, or martyrdom, or of the signs or miracles.” And in this process one also had to ascertain either that the cult had been active from “immemorial times,” “with the knowledge and tolerance of the Apostolic See or the bishop,” or that it was introduced or continued “with the permission of preceding pontiffs, or the Congregation of the Sacred Rites.” In such a case the pontiff confirmed the bishop’s decree and approved the cult. With equipollent beatification, then, Lambertini continued, “it is certainly probable” that the “judgment of the pope is not infallible, nor that it affects the Faith.” There is some fear that “the pontiff might have erred in this or that case” and that he might later reject a cult he had approved. That is because in equipollent beatification there was not the same process of approval of virtues or martyrdom or miracles. The “judgment, in one word,” is based on the fama and “antiquity,” rather than being considered “judiciously.” Because equipollent beatification is not definitive, it cannot be prescriptive, but only permissive. Yet, even though the judgment in formal beatifications is “certainly more weighty,” still such beatification is nonetheless still only permissive, because at most it permits veneration in “a particular region or to a single pious family.” In contrast, when it comes to canonization, papal judgment is infallible and irrevocable. The cult of Simon of Trent was, then, approved by the least rigorous method—equipollent beatification. While Lambertini did not challenge the cult—indeed, he affirmed it—this point would bear fruit when the cult was repealed in the twentieth century.
For Catholic jurists like Lambertini, Simon of Trent constituted both an uneasy legal problem and an important precedent. Although Simon was not, as Lambertini repeatedly stressed, recognized formally as a canonized saint—his veneration only approved for a specific church—he was inserted in the Martyrologium romanum, a universal liturgical calendar, leading some to interpret the insertion as equipollent canonization. When Lambertini returned to this issue in his discussion of the liturgical calendar, he conceded that Simon was a special case inserted there at the request of Pope Gregory XIII.20
As with the discussion of papal infallibility in the context of beatifications, the issue of children “killed in hatred of faith”—not all of whom were said to have been killed by Jews—gave Lambertini an opportunity to emphasize papal authority in authorizing such cults—a major theme in his De servorum Dei, and very much in line with the argument about centralizing papal power and the Church that was being increasingly articulated in the eighteenth century.21 Lambertini emphasized the role of the papacy in his discussion of Simon of Trent, while stressing that in all such cases of child martyrs, the pope had to make a judgment whether to authorize the veneration of “children killed in hatred of faith.”22
Strikingly, Lambertini used the examples of “children killed by Jews in hatred of Christ and the faith” not to focus on Jews but to highlight specific problems related to the Church’s approval of veneration of “the servants of God” through beatification or canonization. Werner of Oberwesel, for example, who is said to have died in 1287, was noted for the fact that the formal acta focused not on his martyrdom—though “without doubt,” Lambertini wrote, “he suffered the bitterest death, since his martyrdom lasted three days”—but on miracles.23 Still, that examples of the supposed child victims of Jews, known from chronicles and Acta Sanctorum, were cited as precedents in his general discussion of canonization procedures signaled an acceptance of charges that Jews in fact killed Christian children “in hatred of Christ.”
When Lambertini became Pope Benedict XIV, his earlier recognition of these stories, as Nicola Cusumano has argued, elevated them even higher.24 For the first time since 1588, when Pope Sixtus V granted office and mass to Simon of Trent, a pope—by citing these stories as precedents in canon law—validated the accusations that Jews killed Christian children “in hatred of Christ and the faith.” True, the examples did not affirm blood accusations and stressed only equipollent beatifications, the weakest in the scale of proof and potentially revocable. Still, as precedents in church law, these examples now reinforced through a papal voice what previously was only a matter of chronicles and histories, however authoritative they may have been.
Debates over Child Murders and Blood Accusations in Lambertini’s Lifetime
Important as they were as precedents in canon law, Lambertini’s discussion and examples of child martyrs might have also been colored by lively pan-European debates about child murders and blood accusations against Jews during his lifetime. In 1694, the year Prospero Lambertini graduated from Rome’s Collegium Clementinum with degrees in theology and canon law, a Jewish boy named Simon Abeles died in Prague. Simon was buried the next day, in accordance with Jewish custom, in the Jewish cemetery.25 His death would have been unremarkable, except that apparently he had earlier expressed a keen interest to convert to Catholicism. Simon Abeles’s sudden death led to suspicion that his father Lazar killed his own son to prevent his “apostasy,” though Lazar denied the charge, claiming Simon died of illness. Five days after the boy’s burial, his body was exhumed and examined by the medical faculty of the university in Prague, who concluded that Simon did not die of illness but of a violent blow to his head. Without doubt he had been violently murdered.26 By the fall of 1694, Simon’s father was dead from an apparent suicide in prison, and another Jew, Löbl (Levi) Kurtzhandel, implicated in the affair was publicly executed, and, according to Jesuit accounts, many Jews apparently accepted Christianity. According to two accounts, one by Johannes Eder and the Jesuit report sent to Rome on October 20, 1694, three days after his execution, Löbl had converted moments before his death.27 In contrast, in a Jewish commemorative song in Yiddish, he is presented as a martyr who “did not want to break from God” and died “happy as if he had been saved.”28
Simon Abeles’s death and the subsequent trial became a cause célèbre, captivating Catholics, Protestants, and Jews across Europe. Illustrated broadsheets, books, pamphlets, plays, and even musical dramas telling the story of an “innocent” Jewish boy wishing to convert to Christianity, but cruelly murdered by his father, were disseminated in several languages and continued to attract attention even decades later.29 One such narrative was structured around court records, lending it credibility; another offered a story of Simon’s “martyrdom,” connecting it to the story of his namesake, Simon of Trent.30 In these many formats, the story became a propagandistic tool not only for Jewish conversions but also in the Catholic–Protestant polemic. For example, the Christian scholar and Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil responded to the Abeles affair in 1699 and used it to polemicize against Catholics.31
Jews, too, responded with their own counternarrative, quite typically packaged as a Yiddish song that was also disseminated through print. The song, “sung to the tune of Rabi Rabi Shimon,” praised Lazar Abeles and Löbl Kurtzhandel as martyrs and holy men not only because they died as Jews but also because “his father resolved to bring the youth to death” for his “heresy.”32 The Yiddish song, although no doubt drawing from medieval tropes of Jewish parents sacrificing their children to prevent apostasy, seemed to be aimed at directly countering the ostensible epidemic of conversions of Jews in Prague and the aggressive conversionary efforts by Prague Jesuits.33 Simon Abeles was a “bad youngster,” his wayward ways were deemed calamitous for the Jewish community, and his death was thus justified.
As the literature about Simon Abeles circulated across Europe, in 1699, an accusation that Jews killed a Christian girl erupted in Sulzbach; in response, the printed booklet Fructus maximi monitum was produced, defending Jews against blood accusations, and later used in the 1710–1713 trial in Sandomierz.34 In 1700, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger published his Endecktes Judentums, in which he expressed ambivalence about these anti-Jewish accusations, but nonetheless included several sources that proved useful in refuting the Jews’ need for blood.35 Both Fructus maximi monitum and Endecktes Judentums were known to the Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil, who used arguments from both in his most extensive defense of Jews against these accusations, Benachrichtigungen wegen einiger die Judenschafft angehenden wichtigen Sachen (Notifications of Important Things in the History of the Jews), published in 1705. (Since Wagenseil praised the count of Sulzbach for defending Jews against these accusations, which led to the publication of Fructus maximi monitum, it is not implausible that Wagenseil himself was the anonymous author of the 1699 booklet.36)
Wagenseil’s lengthy refutation of blood accusations against Jews in the Benachrichtigungen is found in part two of this work, titled “Reflections on the Untruth that Jews Need to Have Christian Blood.”37 It is sandwiched between a section devoted to the Jews’ conversion and one devoted to questions of usury. In his refutation, Wagenseil relied on his own knowledge of Jewish customs and Jewish texts based on his reading of Jewish sources and conversations with Jews and Jewish converts. As did Fructus maximi monitum, Wagenseil also provided references to papal and imperial decrees in defense of Jews, reprinting in full the 1475 decree by Doge Pietro Mocenigo of Venice, from which he singled out a sentence that raised doubts about the verity of the charge that Jews killed Christian children.38
Wagenseil’s discussion of Mocenigo’s decree was in the longest section in part two—a section devoted to Simon of Trent.39 Wagenseil had visited Trent and seen Simon’s body. The visit made him question the accuracy of the representation of Simon on the Brückenturm in Frankfurt, whose likeness was reproduced at the beginning of Wagenseil’s book. But more importantly, Wagenseil raised doubts about and refuted the arguably most important version of Simon’s story by Giovanni Mattia Tiberino, which had served as the main source for many authoritative chronicles and shaped the narratives of the trial in Trent. Wagenseil’s refutation emphasized the many contradictions in the story and its subsequent retellings in chronicles, martyrologia, and travel books. He also noted the fact that the Jews’ confessions were extracted under torture.40 Indeed, these contradictions, Wagenseil suggested, prevented Simon’s canonization, despite the fervent efforts of the Church officials in Trent.41 Yet Wagenseil’s polemic against blood accusations and Simon’s story was not based on humanitarian grounds; rather, his refutation was part of his conversionary efforts. For Wagenseil, blood accusations were one of the main obstacles to Jewish conversions, an argument in line with objections to blood libels expressed in earlier German polemical works.
In France, too, the Protestant historian Jacques Basnage devoted sections of his monumental History of the Jews to refuting anti-Jewish accusations.42 Drawing from Isaac Cardoso’s Las exelencias de los hebreos, Basnage shared arguments advanced by Jews—in “all the facts”—against “this calumny,” explaining the mechanisms of the accusation: bodies are deposited in Jewish homes “to have a pretext to accuse Jews,” and the deaths of children drowned in ditches or lost in forests and mauled “by the beasts” are then ascribed to Jews.43 Basnage asserted that Jews certainly did not consume blood, and even the accusations of ritual crucifixions were absurd. “Indeed, what is the point of the Jews crucifying a Christian as their fathers did Jesus Christ? Do they believe to be insulting us? But an insult that so obviously shocks humanity, and which is accompanied by so many perils, must seldom rise in the human spirit.”44 Among these perils was a strict enforcement of severe laws against murders of children. According to Basnage, “these crucifixions of young Christians have often been very much pretexts used to animate populace and kings against them.”45
As Basnage attacked the logic of the charges, he enumerated reasons that made these accusations suspect, despite being repeated so often:
First of all, we only find them in recent centuries: The Jews are not accused of having done anything of the kind in the first days, when the multiplication and prosperity of the Church, which established itself on the ruin of the Synagogue, rendered their jealousy and hatred more piquant. Why did they think of crucifying Christians in the last centuries, where they could not hope for impunity; and did they not do it under the government of the pagan emperors, where this crime would not have appeared so enormous, and where it would not have been punished so severely? It is only, for example, since the middle of the thirteenth century, that we see children slaughtered.46
Second, Basnage argued, there was a clear pattern in the anti-Jewish accusations: “these accusations are always followed by an act of cruelty and injustice on the part of Christians.” It was “these popular emotions” that stirred doubts in Basnage.47 Third, miracles always accompanied the death of the child. The crimes of which Jews were accused brought them no benefit—but they did benefit Christians.48
Although Lambertini might not have read books published in German or French, this heated discussion about Jews did reach the Italian peninsula. In 1705, when he was thirty years old and had just been appointed to the position of a consistorial advocate in the Roman Curia, three linked events took place: Paolo Medici, the prolific Jewish convert and a professor of Hebrew in Florence, published his Italian translation of Johannes Eder’s story of Simon Abeles; in Venice, a large painting of Simon of Trent was displayed on the Rialto; and in Viterbo, the trial of the Jews accused of trying to kill a Christian boy began, ultimately leading to the involvement of both the Holy Office of the Inquisition and then the office of Sacra Consulta in Rome.49 As an official in the Roman Curia, Lambertini must have at the very least heard about the Viterbo case. And, in 1736, two years after Lambertini had published the first volume of his opus magnum on beatifications and canonizations, Paolo Medici published Riti e costumi degli ebrei confutati (Jewish Ceremonies and Customs Refuted), a hostile refutation of Leone Modena’s apologetic work about Jewish ceremonies written for a Christian audience, which had first appeared in 1637 and then was frequently republished. Medici’s book became a veritable bestseller, going through some ten editions in Lambertini’s lifetime and nearly twenty overall. The goal of the work was not only to refute the customs of the Jews but also to pursue traditional theological arguments demonstrating the proofs of Jesus’s messiahship in order to encourage Jews’ voluntary, or even forced, conversions. The hostility of Medici toward Jews is palpable throughout his work, particularly when he projected his own feelings onto his descriptions of Jews’ hostility toward Christians and Christianity. Simon Abeles came in as a handy example of that hostility.50
Medici largely avoided the topic of blood accusations, except for a paragraph in his lengthy chapter XXXIII—titled “Of the punishment that the Synagogue presently suffers because it did not want to accept the Messiah. Of the obstinacy, blindness, and hatred that it professes toward the Christians and especially toward the neophytes”—that would leave a mark on subsequent discussions of the topics. In this chapter, in which Medici enumerated false messiahs and discussed what he saw as Jews’ blindness and obstinacy, the convert returned to the topic of Jews’ “hatred” toward Christians and Jewish converts to Christianity, like himself. It was in this context that he touched upon the anti-Jewish accusations. “The hatred,” he wrote, “Jews profess toward Christians cannot be represented adequately with words. We will infer it from their evil deeds and the frequent killings of Christian children, abuses of the crucifix and other images in the Kingdom of Spain and Portugal from which they were driven out by a royal edict.”51 Medici was not the first convert to accept the stories presented in Christian chronicles as true. Indeed another Italian Jewish convert, Giulio Morosini, had devoted a long section of his massive book on Jewish customs to such accusations, including Simon of Trent, solely because they appeared in so many chronicles.52 But whereas Morosini’s book remained relatively obscure, with only one edition in 1683, Paolo Medici’s popular work and this paragraph in particular were cited by many others seeking to prove blood accusations against Jews, all the way to the modern era.53
Medici’s work was also read by Benedetto Bonelli, an erudite Franciscan historian from Trent, who decided to write a defense of the cult of Simon of Trent to counter attacks by Basnage and Wagenseil.54 Although Basnage’s attacks could have been dismissed by pointing to their glaring errors, Wagenseil’s attack on Simon of Trent struck a particularly raw nerve.55 Given Wagenseil’s reputation as a renowned scholar, Bonelli spent years, if not decades, conducting research in the archives and tracing the earliest mentions of Simon in printed works and in works of art.56 The result was a monumental work, bursting with footnotes to numerous sources, that methodically defended the cult and refuted Wagenseil’s arguments, one by one. That Bonelli embraced the dominant narrative of Simon’s death is not surprising. He used Bishop Hinderbach’s archive and the printed records, including the earliest ones, most of which had been financed by the bishop.
Over the long centuries, some of the most powerful Jewish defenses against these libels were past imperial and papal decrees. They were so powerful because Jews’ accusers could not easily dismiss them, even though they tried. In Poland, Mojecki, Żuchowski, and other writers took pains to undermine their validity. And Bonelli’s instinct might have been similar, but during his research he uncovered some archival evidence that troubled him. In a letter written in August 1740 to Abbot Girolamo Trattarotti, he confided that he had found in the Trent archives “two manuscript copies, produced at the time of martyrdom of the Blessed Simon,” of the papal bulls, “in which they excommunicate those Christians who falsely accuse to Jews of having kidnapped and killed Christian children.… They made me think.”57 A few weeks later, Trattarotti, who was a learned Church leader from the nearby town of Rovereto and who would later become famous by addressing the question of witchcraft, gave Bonelli a plausible explanation for the policy of excommunication. “Regarding [the bulls], issued against those who falsely accused Jews of having killed Christian children,” Trattarotii wrote, “it’s possible that they are most authentic [verissime].”58 Given the number of such incidents, it was possible that sometimes Jews were accused “falsely.” This is what the bull would have sought to correct, threatening the punishment only of those accusing Jews “falsely.” In his book, published in 1747, Bonelli pushed the argument further, focusing on several key phrases in Innocent IV’s bull. The bull stated that some Christians “unjustly deprived” Jews of their property” by “falsely charging them with dividing up among themselves on the Passover the heart of a murdered boy,” “maliciously” throwing dead bodies near Jews, and because of these “imaginary crimes” they raged against Jews, even though “Jews are not accused of these crimes, nor do they confess to these crimes, nor are they convicted of them.”59 This was a bull, Bonelli argued, about the proper “administration” of justice; it was against condemning the innocent, who were not “accused, did not confess, and were not convicted.” This was not a blanket protection of Jews, as other pronouncements by the same pope concerning them demonstrated. The pontiffs, thus, Bonelli stressed, “rigorously prohibit” the condemnation of people solely on the basis of “vain suspicions and popular rumors,” without an appropriate “judicial procedure.” The imperial decrees were not blanket defenses, either, Bonelli claimed, making a conscious effort to historicize them. They were issued in specific times and places and were not intended to apply to every accusation.60
Bonelli, perceiving himself as a serious scholar following new “scientific” methods, did not accept all the claims presented by others as true. In fact, he disagreed with many other writers, by decisively arguing that Simon was not a saint, but only beatus, who had been beatified equipollently.61 Bonelli marshaled historical evidence that Simon had not been regarded as a saint—neither in the earliest printed sources nor in the Simonine iconography.62 Indeed, he cited De servorum Dei by then-pope Benedict XIV to show that Simon was never formally canonized and therefore, contrary to Wagenseil’s assertions, “canonizations are not performed in the Catholic church as lightly as the sectarians would want us to believe.”63 Bonelli thus transformed Wagenseil’s attack on Simon into an affirmation of Church practices regarding venerated figures. If Bonelli turned to Lambertini’s De servorum Dei in his work, Lambertini would, in turn, use Bonelli’s Dissertazione in another formal statement he would make, as a pope, about children said to have been killed by Jews. In the early 1750s, Pope Benedict XIV would have to respond to repeated requests to beatify and then canonize a two-and-a-half-year-old boy named Andreas Oxner, venerated in a small village near Innsbruck as a victim of five unnamed Jews.
Beatus Andreas
The story of Andreas Oxner of Rinn, who supposedly died in 1462, remained undocumented and perhaps even unknown until 1621, when a play narrating his “martyrdom” written by Hippolytus Guarinoni, a physician originally from Trent but educated by Jesuits in Prague, and working near Innsbruck in Tirol, was performed in a Jesuit College in Hall, just under a three-hour walk from Judenstein where Andreas was said to have been killed, with the emperor’s brother Leopold and Prince Radziwiłł of Poland in attendance. A manuscript copy of the play contains a map of the area, visually connecting local sites with the story of Andreas.64 In 1642, a seventy-three-verse vernacular poem by Guarinoni was published. Andreas’s story eventually made it to the Bollandists, who received a manuscript from the Jesuit Ernest Bidermann (d. 1688) with Andreas’s story, thereby opening the way for the boy to be included in Acta Sanctorum. Yet, modern scholars have argued that Guarinoni, inspired by the story of Simon of Trent, invented the story about Andreas and all its historical details.65
But it was in the eighteenth century that the propagation of the cult gained momentum. In 1724, Ignatius Zach published “a detailed description of the martyrdom of the holy and innocent child Andreas of Rinn” amounting to more than 250 pages and 50 chapters, with 26 copperplate engravings, among them a map of the area based on the drawing in the manuscript of Guarinoni’s poem.66 Still, it was perhaps the brief mention of “Blessed Andreas a boy killed by Jews in hatred of the faith” in Lambertini’s opus magnum that spurred more decisive local efforts to have the cult authorized.67 Around 1740, the church in Rinn was adorned with four new ceiling frescos by the painter Josef Ignaz Mildorfer depicting the story of Andreas: the sale of Andreas to Jews, his killing, the miracle of blood appearing on Andreas’s mother’s hands, and the apotheosis—Andreas in glory.68 Four years later, a procession took place on the occasion of moving what were believed to be Andreas’s bones to a high altar in the church in Judenstein; a year later, in 1745, Hadrian Kembter published the Acta “concerning the truth of the martyrdom” of the boy Andreas.69 The work was carefully structured to comply with the requirements for beatification and canonization articulated in De servorum Dei by Lambertini, then Pope Benedict XIV.
Although Lambertini mentioned Andreas of Rinn only in passing in his De servorum Dei,70 as pope he was forced to address his veneration more formally when proponents of the cult of Andreas in Tyrol began to seek its formal recognition in Rome. After their request reached Rome, the pope rejected it, in September 1751, on the grounds that a proper process needed to be followed before a concession of office and mass could be granted.71 The Tyrolean postulators were unhappy by this response, but they were not unprepared. After all, Kembter’s Acta had been published a few years earlier. The pope accepted the materials, and on December 15,1752, he conceded the mass and office for Andreas72 (Fig. 8.1). The plenary indulgence came just over a year later, on January 14, 1754. Anyone who visited the church in Judenstein, where the supposed relics of Andreas were deposited, participated in confession, and took communion would thus benefit from the removal of temporal punishment for those forgiven sins that would otherwise have to be faced in purgatory.
FIG. 8.1 Andreas of Rinn, an early twentieth-century devotional card. The inscription in the middle reads “The holy Andreas of Rinn in Judenstein.”
Still not “content,” the abbot of Wilten, near Judenstein, insisted that the boy be formally canonized. It was in response to these indefatigable efforts that Benedict XIV issued a letter, Beatus Andreas, in which he considered formally the question of “children cruelly killed by Jews in hatred of Christian faith.”73 Beatus Andreas was addressed to Benedetto Veterani, then the Promotor Fidei in the Congregation of Rites. In twenty-nine paragraphs Benedict reiterated much of what he had already articulated in his De servorum Dei about the distinction between those who deserved to be beatified and those who deserved to be canonized, and the particularities of children who, like Andreas, had not reached the age of making a conscious decision about martyrdom.
The case of Andreas, Benedict argued, should follow the precedent of Simon of Trent, who was also beatified equipollently and subsequently received a mass, office, and indulgences from Pope Sixtus V, but who was never canonized. Still, there was one distinction between the two cases. Because of Pope Urban VIII’s stricter rules for approval of cults and who might be admitted to the Martyrologium romanum, Andreas would not be inducted into this liturgical calendar.
The tone of Beatus Andreas revealed the pope’s impatience and frustration with the petitioners. Benedict would have preferred if they had accepted in humility what he had granted them in accordance with other precedents. The pope understood that the proponents of the cult of Andreas sought to make his case a precedent in canon law and he needed to resist that. But the unique precedent of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem complicated his stern stance. The Holy Innocents were the only children formally recognized as saints by the Church; other children, Benedict argued, did not merit similar honors, for reasons he had laid out in his De servorum Dei. Although the pope did not decisively foreclose the potential for canonization in the future, his demands for a rigorous process, and his concerns about the merit of the case of Andreas and of similar cases, effectively stopped the canonization efforts. Yet, by repeating numerous times the phrase that Andreas—like Simon and other children known from the chronicles—was “cruelly killed by Jews in hatred of Christian faith,” Beatus Andreas validated the charge and thus the historicity of similar stories passed on in European chronicles. Benedict’s Beatus Andreas thus became a new “authoritative” source for the proponents of anti-Jewish accusations.74 To be sure, the pope never affirmed the blood accusation—according to Benedict the murders were in odio—but that distinction would be lost on future accusers.
Back in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
While Benedict XIV was considering the cult of Andreas of Rinn, Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began to face new deadly accusations. And given that reports of those trials reached Rome around the same time, they possibly had an impact on Benedict’s response to the requests from Tyrol. Perhaps the frequently used phrase affirming the “killing in hatred” (not only in Beatus Andreas but also in De servorum Dei) and the pope’s statement that other cases might prompt requests similar to those coming from Austria also were influenced by the news about Polish Jews. What is certain is that both Jews and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were at that time on Benedict XIV’s mind.
While writings about Jews formed only a small percentage of the total oeuvre of Benedict, Jews were not as marginal to his concerns as they appear. When he became pope, he faced a grave financial crisis in Rome. Soon the Jewish community in Rome became insolvent, and the highest Church authorities had to intervene, with a settlement reached only in 1755, the year Benedict XIV issued Beatus Andreas.75 The presence of Jews epitomized the limitations of papal power and authority—as long as they existed within the body of Christendom, the Church could never fully triumph. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where Jews held a prominent and relatively privileged position. Their position stood in sharp contrast with the tiny Jewish community in Rome, subjected to harsh rules and regulations reminding them of their “place,” such as being forced to listen to sermons and being restricted in their mobility and economic activity.76 Facing what he perceived as both a fiscal and religious crisis, Pope Benedict XIV began to enact increasingly repressive, segregationist, and ultimately also conversionary policies against Jews, first in the Papal States and later in other countries as well.77
The approaching jubilee year of 1750 also likely encouraged reflections on sin, disorder, and overall reform.78 In the late 1740s, and in 1750 itself, several issues regarding Jews in Poland reached Rome. Two Polish Jewish converts to Catholicism were seeking aid and support, alleging persecution “from Jews in Poland in hatred of Christian faith.” The papal nuncio to Poland was approached by several bishops from the eastern territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with concerns about Jews, which came on the heels of other complaints about Jewish “abuses” and disregard for Catholic holidays during fairs and markets.79 Also reopened were complaints about the status of Polish Jews that had emerged during the Poznań affair and were at the time considered by the Holy Office.
Although over the centuries popes and nuncios tended to be resigned to the status of the Jews in Poland they found in violation canon law, repeatedly noting that little could be done about it, Benedict XIV took a more assertive stance, just as he did with the Roman Jewish community. During the jubilee year, the faithful were supposed to “enter … properly disposed, fortified by this most salubrious sacrament [of penance],” undertake a pilgrimage to Rome, obtain “the necessities both for bodily nourishment and spiritual refreshment with the aid of upright priests,” and return home “informed by the example of holy conduct that flourishes in Rome, firm in the faith, fervent in virtue, and confirmed in their obedience to the Holy See.”80 The preparations for the jubilee and its celebrations were thus focused on improvement, correction of sin, and repentance. In this context, the “disorder” reported from Poland could not go ignored. After extending the jubilee to other places beyond Rome, including Poland, on June 14, 1751, Benedict XIV issued the encyclical, A quo primum, which was released to the nuncio on July 17, 1751, for distribution among Polish bishops.81 The encyclical praised the “Polish nation” for its historical fidelity to the Catholic Church and for its past victories over the enemies of faith, including heretics. It urged the bishops to confront the current threat—the Jews who “multiplied” in towns and villages, dominating the trade there, living intermixed with Christians, and even displacing Christians to the detriment of parishes, which by losing the faithful also lost their revenues. Even worse, Jews had authority over Christians, compelling them to engage in excessive labor and submit to their power. Jews borrowed money from Christians, including the clergy, with synagogues as security, thereby gaining “as many defenders of their synagogues and themselves as they have creditors.”82 The pope praised synodal legislation regulating Jewish–Christian relations already in place in Poland and urged efforts to enforce it alongside earlier papal pronouncements. There was no need for any new regulations.
But the encyclical did offer something arguably quite new. After enumerating the “abuses” of Jews in Poland in violation of canon law, the pope abruptly switched gears. “The famous monk Radulph, led by excessive zeal,” Benedict wrote, traveled across German lands and France preaching against Jews “as the enemies of our holy religion,” inciting Christians to “destroy them by slaughter.”83 And many, indeed, were killed. “What would he do, if he lived today,” asked the pope rhetorically, and saw what was happening in Poland? This “excessive” zeal, Benedict conceded, was opposed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote to the clergy and people of eastern France, warning them that Jews were not “to be persecuted, they are not to be slaughtered, they are not even to be driven out.” The pope cited lengthy passages from Bernard’s letters articulating the doctrine of protecting Jews against persecution and violence: they serve a role in the Christological understanding of the world and the Church triumphs “more fully over the Jews in convicting or converting them than if once and for all she destroyed them with the edge of the sword.” The abbot of Cluny also wrote to King Louis of France against Radulph, Benedict XIV continued, urging him “not to allow the destruction of the Jews. But at the same time he encouraged him to punish their excesses and to strip them of the property they had taken from Christians or had acquired by usury.” The pope then reviewed papal pronouncements about Jews and their place within Christendom, as well as relations between Jews and Christians. Christians should not serve Jews, but rather Jews should serve Christians, Benedict wrote citing Innocent III’s Sicut Iudaeis: “Let not the sons of the free woman be servants of the sons of the handmaid; but as servants rejected by their lord for whose death they evilly conspired, let them realize that the result of this deed is to make them servants of those whom Christ’s death made free.” Nor should they be promoted to public office and have authority over Christians. Indeed, Benedict added, referring to Odorico Rinaldi’s continuation of Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici, Pope Innocent IV approved the expulsion of Jews from France, “since the Jews gave very little heed to the regulations made by the Apostolic See.” The lessons from the past were clear. Though Jews should not be attacked, if they disobey Christian law they should be punished by either being stripped of their property, as the abbot of Cluny suggested, or even expelled. This was the first, albeit veiled, papal encouragement to expel Jews from Poland.
To be sure, Benedict dutifully affirmed the papal policy of protecting Jews against violence, but the “dog whistle” of supporting expulsion along with the ostensibly trivial sentence about Radulph—“What would he do, if he lived today?”—was heard, and the results were soon felt by Jews. As the encyclical circulated in both Latin and Polish, with the Polish version much harsher than the original, some clergy soon felt emboldened to act against Jews and free to “enforce” canon law.84 In November 1753, the nuncio reported that a bishop contacted him on behalf of Jews who reported being persecuted and abused. Though the Jews tactfully noted that such treatment went against what the pope had intended in his encyclical, it was clear that their mistreatment was inspired by it.
But there may have been another side effect of the encyclical. Given that in light of recent trials of Jews, even those resulting in grisly executions—as in Zasław in 1747—Jews, for no want of trying, had not succeeded in obtaining a condemnation of libels against them from Rome, the encyclical’s harsh tone may have served to embolden inciters of anti-Jewish accusations.85 Moreover, although A quo primum mentioned a bull by Pope Innocent IV and cited Rinaldi’s continuation of Annales ecclesiastici as sources, it said nothing about the letter issued by the same pope in 1247 to the bishops of France condemning blood accusations, a document cited explicitly in Rinaldi’s opus.86 This silence, too, must have been heard. And in 1753, a new accusation erupted, this time with the personal and proud involvement of a bishop.
On Good Friday, April 20, 1753, a three-and-a-half-year-old Christian boy, Stefan Studziński, a son of a minor nobleman named Adam, disappeared near the village of Markowa Wolica, seventy-five miles west of Kiev. On Easter Sunday, Stefan’s “worried” father went to pray in front of an image of Mary Virgin, prostrating in a cross-like position in front of it. The next day the boy’s naked and mutilated body was found in the brambles near the village, his clothes scattered on the nearby bushes.87 Since Easter coincided that year with Passover, Jews were soon blamed for the boy’s death—the accusers claimed that, when the body was being carried into the village and its church, it bled when it passed by a Jewish inn. At the time, the coadjutor bishop of the Kiev diocese, Kajetan Sołtyk, happened to be within six miles of the village and immediately became involved, seeing it as “a cause pertaining to faith and God’s honor.” Bishop Sołtyk made every effort to get the secular authorities to arrest Jews, but he appeared to face resistance. So he took matters into his own hands and decided to make the arrests himself.88 All in all, the bishop arrested more than thirty Jewish men and women, “the most respected and the wealthiest,” from eight nearby towns and villages, including the innkeepers in Markowa Wolica, and soon began extrajudicial interrogations. In his defense Sołtyk later noted that he had planned to transfer the case and the testimonies he obtained to a secular court. He also claimed that when local Christians were aroused, attacking Jews and wanting “to destroy them entirely,” he sought to protect Jews as “valuable” witnesses.89
While interrogations under Sołtyk’s supervision were taking place, the bishop ordered Stefan’s body to be examined and then deposited in a church, where “after two weeks it is incorruptum, and does not stink; in fact, a fragrance of something can be smelled.”90 In his letter printed after the trial together with the court sentencing decree, Bishop Sołtyk reported that he had planned to move “the holy body of the innocent martyr” to the cathedral “in all solemnity” and even ordered a tombstone ad perpetuam rei memoriam to assure that the case be remembered for posterity.
The prisoners were eventually transferred to a secular court in Żytomierz, a royal town, the capital of the Kiev Voievodship (palatinate) and the seat of the bishopric of Kiev, forty miles west of the village of Markowa Wolica. In Żytomierz, Jews were subjected to interrogations both without and with torture. Some seem to have confessed to committing the crime—though trial records have not survived and the details recorded in the sentencing decree from May 1753 and disseminated in print soon after are confusing and incoherent, because they only address, and misinterpret, certain aspects of the Jewish tradition to make the accusation believable to Christians. For example, apparently Jews found the boy on Good Friday while looking for lost horses in the forest near Markowa Wolica. They then stayed with the boy in the woods until late Friday night, when one of the Jews finally returned to the inn in Markowa Wolica with the horses—all in clear violation of the Sabbath. When they brought the boy to the inn, they fed him bread soaked in vodka and then matzah, also served with vodka and honey. Since Passover had begun three days earlier, the use of bread made no sense, because bread was not allowed in Jewish households for the duration of the holiday. Moreover, according to the published narrative, the Jews waited until the Sabbath was over before cruelly killing the boy in the inn, as if to avoid violating the Sabbath. The decree noted, casually, that the boy’s parents lived right next to the inn, and yet, unbelievably, they heard or saw nothing. But logic had never been a strong point in anti-Jewish trials: the belief in Jews’ guilt was stronger than any evidence to the contrary.
No matter how contradictory, incoherent, or incomprehensive the recorded testimonies, thirteen of the thirty-one arrested Jews were sentenced to tormenting deaths, designed not to fulfill the law but to create a spectacle. Six Jews were to be led from the main market square to the execution site, their hands wrapped in hemp, dipped in tar, and then lit. At the execution site they were to be flayed and then quartered, with their heads and body parts then displayed in public. Five other Jews were to be executed at another site by quartering. One of these Jews, since he converted to Christianity with his wife and children, was to be spared the brutality of the execution and beheaded to ensure a quick death. Two remaining Jews were sentenced in absentia to live quartering, but they remained fugitives.91
The actual executions differed from what was specified in the sentencing decree.92 On the day that the first six Jews were scheduled to be executed, Ela, who ran the inn in Markowa Wolica, converted with his wife, hoping for an easier death, whereupon Bishop Sołtyk vouched for him and saved his life. Three Jews in the second group to be executed, among them “the richest in these lands,” David Chodorkowski, decided to accept baptism, perhaps hoping that the bishop would save their lives as he did with Ela. But they were executed by simple beheading the following day; their bodies, instead of being quartered and displayed in public, were put in coffins and carried with great pomp to the cathedral in Żytomierz before being solemnly buried. One of the Jews, sentenced earlier to beheading, also converted together with his wife, and he too was spared by the bishop. The day of executions, baptisms of the accused, and burials ended with a ceremony of conversion of another thirteen Jewish men and women, administered by Sołtyk himself.
Before long, printed versions of the decree were disseminated, art commemorating the boy’s death was commissioned, and copies of paintings, resembling the iconography of Simon of Trent, were reproduced as broadsides.93 Coming so soon after Zasław and Dunajgród, the Żytomierz trial, notable for the active involvement of a bishop, sent shock waves among Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the trial would remain a point of reference for years also among non-Jews.94
Alarmed by the accusation and the trial proceedings in Żytomierz, Jewish leaders in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth mobilized to act. Their approach was multipronged. Soon after the executions, leaders of the increasingly influential community of Brody sent a letter to the Ashkenazi Jewish community in Amsterdam, asking for help and describing “the calumny made against the [Jewish] Nation, accused of using Christian blood for Easter, which was followed by so much violence and harshness.”95 Their strategy seems to have been to approach “all the kehillot [communities], begging for their help and requesting by all possible means letters of protection that will demonstrate that this is a false accusation, that in past times on various occasions Jews were blamed [for such crimes], and that every time they were proven innocent.”96 The Amsterdam Ashkenazi Jewish community in turn approached their Sephardic coreligionists in that city, who then wrote letters to the Jewish communities on the Italian peninsula, including one dated July 16, 1753, to the Sephardic Jewish community in Ferrara, requesting that it “obtain as soon as possible an authentic copy of a certain sentence rendered in Senigalia dated 14 July 1721, in which the innocence [of the Jews] was proclaimed following a similar calumny, and that it be sent without delay to Rome, so that the Pope may suppress and annul this sentence.”97 The strategy was intended to marshal evidence demonstrating that other courts, notably those in Papal States, such as in Senigalia, invalidated similar accusations and, with this evidence, to appeal to the pope for help in this particular instance. The letter also referred to a previous papal condemnation of such “false accusations,” requesting “an authentic copy so that we may use it and show it to those who may be of service to us in this case.”
Just twelve days after the Jews of Amsterdam dispatched their letter to Ferrara, the secretary of the state in Rome on July 28, 1753, wrote to the papal nuncio in Poland, who was then residing in Dresden, notifying him that he received a memoriale from the Jews in Rome on behalf of the Polish Jews addressed to “Our Holiness Pope Benedict XIV.”98 The letter from the Jews in Rome focused on the charge that Jews were using Christian blood for Passover matzah, a “calumny,” they wrote, long condemned by the popes.99 They reminded the pontiff that Jews were prohibited from consuming blood and implored him to intervene. The Jews noted that just a few years earlier, in Poznań, the nuncio intervened in a similar accusation and justice was ultimately done—not without suffering and torments—as Jews were found innocent. The secretary requested from the nuncio more information about the affair. That the secretary of the state in Rome sent this request a mere twelve days after the letter was dispatched from Amsterdam to Ferrara suggests that Polish Jews may have first reached Rome through other channels. Given travel time and the realities of Roman bureaucracy, it would have been impossible for the letter from Amsterdam to reach Ferrara, then for the Jews of Ferrara to reach the Jewish community in Rome, then for the Roman Jews to prepare the memoriale, and then for the memoriale to reach the curia and elicit a response from the secretary of state—all in twelve days.
On August 15, the nuncio from Dresden forwarded a copy of the memoriale with his letter to the papal auditor, who was performing the nuncio’s duties in Warsaw. He requested more information about the affair, so he would know whether to intervene on the Jews’ behalf.100 On August 22, the auditor responded, summarizing what seems to have happened: Jews were accused of killing a Christian child, and though the initial accusation was handled by the bishop of Kiev, in the end the whole trial was transferred to a secular court, where the accused confessed under torture and were condemned to death.101 The auditor also clarified that “in this case, the question whether Jews need Christian blood for their superstition [was not addressed] but rather the question whether or not the mentioned crime was committed.” This clarification was for the Church officials of crucial importance. If the accusation had indeed been based on the claim that Jews required Christian blood, then intervention from Rome would have been warranted. But the shift away from this “superstitious” accusation to a murder made the crime more plausible, requiring, according to Church officials, further investigation.102
A week later, on August 29, the nuncio sent his report to Rome, deeming the judicial process proper.103 With this information in hand, the secretary of state concluded that since “according to the legal and judicial proof, [the Jews] were found guilty of this abominable infanticide of a Christian boy,” the Church authorities should now work with secular authorities “to punish crimes committed in spite of Christ and hate of those who believe in Him.”104 This formal redefinition of the accusations Jews were facing in Poland on the part of the highest Church authorities—from blood libels to “crimes committed in spite of Christ and hate of those who believe in Him”—echoed the wording frequently used even in Lambertini’s works: it made clear that Jews would not obtain a papal condemnation of accusations against them. Indeed, just a few months earlier, on December 15, 1752, Pope Benedict XIV, the addressee of the memoriale on behalf of Polish Jews, had granted a plenary indulgence sanctioning a cult of Andreas of Rinn, described as a victim of Jews, killed “out of hatred toward the Christian Faith.”105
But the issue would not go away. On January 26, 1754, Samuel Szmulko Naftolowicz and Israel Iser Juzefowicz appeared before an apostolic notary, Joseph Augustynowicz, in the royal city of Lwów and filed a formal complaint against Bishop Kajetan Sołtyk for his treatment of the Jews in Żytomierz, for financial misconduct (accepting money from Jews and executing them later), and for the conversion of two young Jews.106 To demonstrate the preposterousness of the accusations launched by the bishop against the Jews, they included a decree from the court of Krzemieniec from April 1753, exonerating Jews accused there of killing a Christian girl, who, it turned out, was fatally wounded by her own father, who then tried to frame the Jews. Whereas the case from Krzemieniec remained hidden in the archives, the decree from Żytomierz, where Jews were executed, was republished numerous times, widening the published paper trail against Jews.
There is no evidence that this formal complaint against Sołtyk was forwarded to Rome in 1754. But the documents submitted by Jews became evidence in 1756 when, after another trial, a delegation of Jews made its way to Rome to seek intervention. And this time church officials in Rome decided to act.