The Legal Culture of the Catholic Ecclesiastical Courts

Abstract

Purpose of Research. The purpose of the research is to study the peculiarities of the legal culture of Catholic ecclesiastical courts by the example of the historical essence and cultural image of the Inquisition. Methodology. In the article, historical (the consideration of the history of the Inquisition as a tribunal of the Church), the hermeneutic (scientific analysis of certain documents and materials on the research topic), as well as the system analysis in cultural studies (cultural references of the Catholic judicial procedure on the example of the interpretation of the Inquisition in the general context of the culture of law) are taken as a methodological basis. Scientific Novelty. For the first time, the author analyses the legal culture in the ecclesiastical legal proceedings of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular the example of the Holy Inquisition – tribunal of past centuries, and inquisitors, which are endowed with particularly broad cultural connotations, ranging from journalism to modern performances of Western mass culture. They have separated from historical reality and turned into metahistorical symbols of anti-freedom, intolerance and the negative that is present in the Christian Church. Conclusions. There are broad cultural intertexts in the space of the legal culture of the ecclesiastical courts of the Roman Catholic Church. They have a historical basis, whereas the most part of the artistic references is the authorial fantasy and sociocultural stereotypes of the autonomous existence. One of the most expressive of such phenomena is the Holy Inquisition and the image of the Grand Inquisitor, the connotation of his figure was formed in the context of the totalitarian church, which dictated the rigid social reality and destroyed any freedom. Historically truthful facts of the legal culture of church litigation of the Catholic Church are only a certain semantic core where the cultural images are forming. It can be optimally analyzed by the integrated systematic cultural research method. Cultural images of the Inquisition and the Grand Inquisitor belong to the heritage of world culture and are creatively interpreted in and out of the essential features of Catholic justice.