c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Hoping to enter the third millennium with a clear conscience, the Roman Catholic Church is re-examining the most notorious chapters of its history.

A papal statement being prepared for Ash Wednesday in the year 2000 (March 8) is expected to ask forgiveness from Jews and other victims of the Inquisition and the Crusades.

Here are some of the most prominent mea culpas in progress:

THE HOLOCAUST: Church officials said in a March 1998 document that they”deeply regret the errors and failures”of Catholics who failed to oppose the Holocaust strenuously enough. Centuries of anti-Semitism preached from Christian pulpits laid the ideological groundwork for the Nazi terror, the commission said.

Reaction among Jewish groups was generally positive, but some said the church failed to address the actions of the church hierarchy, particularly the controversial wartime pope, Pius XII.

THE INQUISITION: A commission began meeting in Rome in October to look at the institution long considered a byword for religious intolerance. Beginning in the 13th century, traveling inquisitors sought to discover and root out heresy. Many convicts repented and were required to do relatively light penances, such as making pilgrimages. But thousands were killed, and in later centuries torture was used not only on suspects but even on innocent witnesses.

The notorious Spanish Inquisition, which particularly targeted suspected closet Jews and Muslims, endured until the 19th century.

SAVONAROLA: In the 1490s, the Dominican monk Savonarola brought the Renaissance to a halt in Florence, Italy, the city of its origin. He enthralled citizens with his apocalyptic denunciations of church corruption, Medici decadence and all wordly pleasures. He inspired the famous”bonfires of the vanities,”in which Florentines dumped jewelry, extravagant clothes and precious works of art. But after his repeated indictments of the pope, he was excommunicated, hanged and burned in 1498. This May, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Savonarola’s death, Florentine Archbishop Silvano Piovanelli said the monk’s execution resulted from”disinformation”and”the blindness of his contemporaries,”and some historians credit him with proto-democratic policies. If cleared of heresy, Savonarola may well be declared a saint on the strength of a devoted following of Italians and Dominicans worldwide.

GALILEO: In 1992, the church formally cleared the Italian astronomer of heresy for claiming the earth goes around the sun _ one of the most notorious clashes between religion and science. The Roman Inquisition forced Galileo to admit under oath that the earth does not move. Tradition says he afterward said,”But it does move!”Pope John Paul II said theologians need to keep abreast of scientific developments to ensure church officials do not”one day find ourselves facing a similar situation.” THE CRUSADES: The pope is preparing a public apology in 2000 for the victims of medieval Crusades, which include not only Muslims and Jews in the Holy Land but groups in Europe deemed to be heretics. Czech bishops, for example, have asked the church to include in its apology the 15th century military crusades against the followers of the executed religious reformer Jan Hus.

DEA END SMITH