To understand or defend the Holy Office? Negationism, apologetics and uses of the inquisitorial history in Para entender a Inquisição (2009), by Felipe Aquino

Abstract

This article analyzes the book Para entender a Inquisição, written by the Catholic missionary Felipe Aquino. The book is an apologetic work that proposes a historical review about Medieval and Modern age’s inquisitorial courts, starting from the premise that there are uses of the Inquisition’s secular history against the Catholic Church, thus requiring a review for his doctrine’s defense. The aims here are to analyze the uses of history in this work, discussing its relationship with a historical writing tradition by conservative and negationist intellectuals about the Inquisitions. The hypothesis advocated is that negationism about the inquisitorial past, the central point in Aquino’s narrative, serves to further a conservatism on the present, assigning a historical meaning to it rather than a dispute for the real past.This article intends to raise a succinct discussion about the role of the professional historian in this regard.