Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition 1
The Inquisition: “an unholy alliance between the princes of the Church and the figure they claimed most to hate”.Peter Stanford, The Devil
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Abstract
The excuse for the Spanish Inquisition is that the Church and Christian kingdoms had to protect themselves from the wicked Moors and Jews who were trying to stop the spread of Christianity. Christianity thrives on ignorance and intolerance, but the Moors and Jews had civilized Spain and founded its universities. Under the Catholics, many Jews and Moors had to profess Catholicism to keep their possessions, but they were suspected of secretly practising their old religion. The Spanish people, every historian tells us, were tolerant and disinclined to quarrel, but the clergy lashed them into pogroms. The expulsions of Jews and Moors ruined the brilliant civilization they had created in Spain just as the massacre of the Albigensians ruined Languedoc and the massacre of the Hussites ruined Bohemia.
The Spanish Inquisition
Marvin R O’Connell, professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame and a priest of the Archdiocese of S Paul, says perhaps the Spanish Inquisition was indeed a wicked institution. If so, judgment should be made on an honest examination of the facts, and political, social and theological comparisons with the barbaric treatment of Catholics by such as Queen Elizabeth I of England, and the fanaticism that drove Dutch Calvinists to hang all the priests and vandalize all the churches that fell under their control. Not just Catholicism but Christianity generally ignored everything it supposedly stood for. No one can ignore this historic truth.
The Iberian peninsula as far north as the Ebro River had been occupied by the Moors in the eighth century, and Christian resistance to their occupation since had been spasmodic. The kingdom of Asturias in the north had stayed independent, and from there, the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, and Aragon had carved themselves out of the edge of the Caliphate. Spain also had a substantial Jewish community. Under the Moslems the three religions had been equally regarded, but as the Christians took over, the church and the secular rulers set out to destroy the previous harmony. After 1391, about half the Jews had converted to Catholicism. Catholics say they continued to practice Judaism in secret. Perhaps some did. The Talmud allows Jews to pretend conversion in order to avoid persecution.
The presence of the Cathars in Southern France occasioned the establishment of the Inquisition in the neighboring Kingdom of Aragon, just to the other side of the Pyrenees. In 1228, King James I outlawed the Cathars, then he asked pope Gregory IX to establish the Inquisition in Aragon, and it was started in 1232. In 1237, the Inquisition was put in the hands of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, and, in 1242, essential terms like “haereticus,” “receptor,” “fautor,” “defensor” were defined, and the penalties to be inflicted prescribed.
The excuse for the Spanish Inquisition is that the Church and Christian kingdoms had to protect themselves from the wicked Moors and Jews who were trying to stop the spread of Christianity. In a way, it was true. In those days the Spanish Moslems and Jews were liberal and tolerant, even of Christians in their midst, but they knew that the Christian kingdoms were not.
Marvin O’Connell says a consensus had grown in Europe during the Middle Ages that religious dissidents could not be tolerated if true religion and harmonious society were to endure. The trouble with this argument is that the Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain had been precisely such a tolerant and harmonious state. O’Connell meant the consensus was in Christian Europe. The reconquest drove the descendants of the invaders, the Moors, ever farther into the south until, in 1478, they had left to them only a small enclave around the city of Granada. In 1478, at the moment the Inquisition was set up, the end of Moslem Spain was in sight.
The Holy Office was founded in 1478 by a papal rescript requested by the wife and husband, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, sovereigns of a newly united Spain. Precedent was the Roman Inquisition during the thirteenth century when the popes set up special circuit courts to investigate and to root up the Albigenses (Cathari). The Holy Office has jurisdiction over all Christians and, according to Pius IV (1559-1565), even over cardinals. O’Connell says Church and state could not be distinguished during the Middle Ages. He claims that religion could not be a private matter left to the choice of each individual, and that persons of conflicting religious views or with no religious views at all could not live in fruitful harmony.
It is untrue, but the Christian Church made it true. The Church had also decided that heretics held to their objectionable opinions out of bad will. So, stringent laws were enacted throughout Christendom against those who refused to conform. To refuse was judged the worst possible crime. The penalty for it was the worst form of capital punishment imaginable—burning at the stake. The prospect of this cruel sentence acted as a deterrent, inducing all but the most stout-hearted to confess once accused before the judges. Still, the judges remained unsure that those who had recanted had not done so out of fear rather than conversion of mind, and that they continued to practice their heresies in secret.
The Albigenses in the south of France had lived amicably there for centuries until the Christian popes decided they were rich enough to be worth robbing. In a hundred years the Cathari were literally wiped out by “the cooperative efforts of Church and State,” as O’Connell calls it—the Church promised plunder to robber barons willing to do the dirty.
Ferdinand and Isabella had the same idea when they asked for the establishment of an Inquisition in Spain. They were determined to impose religious uniformity but feared the conquered Moslem and Jewish population. The Christians wanted to compel Moors and Jews to accept baptism or face expulsion from a now entirely Catholic country. It was a policy of forced conversion, something incompatible with Christian teaching, a fact pointed out by several popes and even Spanish theologians over a long period, so no one can claim the Christians were not aware of correct doctrine.
The choice of conformity and exile invited pretense and deception from those dragooned into a faith not of their own choosing. The Jews and Moors who conformed rather than depart the land in which they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, where their property and businesses were, did so reluctantly.
Granting their request for an Inquisition, Pope Sixtus IV, declared it was the first duty of kings to nurture and defend the faith of their people. He added that no society could exist without religious uniformity. The Moors that the Spanish monarchs drove out had proved it was false, but whatever the supposed charity there is in Christianity, none of them knew anything about it, including Protestants, who gave it full rein in their own persecution policies. The first task of the Inquisition was inquiry into the authenticity of the conversion of the Moors and Jews.
In the Spanish Inquisition, the Grand Inquisitor was appointed by the king, then the pope had to approve. The Inquisitor in turn appointed and presided over the five members of the High Council, which, with its swarm of consultants and clerical staff, was the ultimate power of the Inquisition. It decided all disputed questions and heard all appeals from the lower inquisitorial courts, which by 1538 numbered nineteen in Spain and three more in Mexico, Lima, and Cartagena. Without the permission of the High Council no priest or nobleman could be imprisoned. Everyone was subject to it, not excepting priests, bishops, or even the sovereign. The judges were to be at least forty years old, and of unimpeachable reputation.
The inquisitors established the juridical facts, and when someone was judged to be an unyielding heretic, the secular arm exacted punishment from that person, including death and confiscation of property. Many people at the time, including Queen Isabella’s own secretary, Hernando del Pulgar, suspected that the inquisitors singled out rich people for punishment. An “auto da fé,” the religious ceremony where convicted heretics were punished and those who recanted were reconciled, could not be held without the sanction of the High Council.
Moses and Exodus
