Abstract

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

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.

Confession and Punishment

As far as procedure was concerned, the Spanish Inquisition followed the precedent established in the thirteenth century Inquisition and the secular tribunals, but Mary Ann Collins, a former nun, says the Inquisition used procedures which were banned in regular secular courts. Sworn denunciation of an individual, or even a particular village, started the legal machinery. Notionally, once accused, a defendant was provided the services of a lawyer, and he could not be examined by the officers of the court without the presence of two “disinterested priests,” though in what manner they were supposed to be disinterested is unclear.

The offices of the Inquisition were fine palaces, with courts and salons and apartments for visiting grandees, including nobility and monarchs who visted for the executions. The “apartments” for the victims were less salubrious. Each palace block had hundreds of tiny cells or dungeons, “dark, damp and small.” Each cell had a rough bed, a wash basin and two pitchers, a urinal and a plate. Prisoners had poor and insufficient food, and were punished for breaking the gaol’s rules, including not being allowed to make the least sound. One description by a contemporary, cited by Scott, was that the cells were “the dirtiest, darkest and most horrible, into which the rays of the sun never penetrate… the prisoners live in a common privy.”

Prisoners might be kept in these cells for months without trial to break their spirit, then unexpectedly would be brought before the court. The accused had to swear to speak the truth and never to reveal the secrets of the Holy Office. Refusal meant a return to the dungeons and torture. Agreement meant that the president of the Tribunal asked some questions, and the answers were dutifully recorded by the clerk.

After this modest and harmless preliminary hearing, often played up by apologists as the main hearing, the prisoner was returned to the dungeons before being brought again before the Tribunal. This time the examining judge would imply that the Inquisition had evidence and witnesses to testify to the crime, and the prisoner was urged to confess. The victim, however was told nothing so could not make a defence. The courts rarely considered any defence offered as adequate, and denial was taken to be an admission of guilt.

The Inquisition used anonymous informers and witnesses. The accused man or woman was not allowed to know who accused them, and so could not confront them. People could accuse their personal enemies. Again, notionally false accusations were severely punished, though revisionists do not seem to find many examples. In practice, they were often not allowed to have anybody to defend them. The Spanish Inquisition combined the functions of investigation, prosecution, and judgment.

Anyone arrested by the Inquisition was presumed guilty until proven innocent. Once a person was accused, some kind of punishment was inevitable. If secular officials were reluctant to punish the victims, they were likely to become victims themselves. If enough witnesses testified that the accused person was guilty, then he or she was considered to be guilty. At that point the accused person had to choose between confessing and renouncing their errors or else being burned. If they confessed, then they would stay in prison for the rest of their life, but they would be spared being burned at the stake.

Torture, a commonplace with secular jurisdictions, had notionally been forbidden in the old Roman Inquisition, but Pope Innocent IV issued his Papal Bull in 1252 allowing heretics to be tortured. So, the inquisitors used torture to get accused people to “confess.” Even revisionists do not try to deny that it was widely used, though it was supposed to have been used only once and was not to threaten life or limb! Sixtus IV, deluged with complaints, protested to the Spanish government that the Inquisition was employing torture too freely, but the government and the inquisitors took no notice. Few revisionists deny this either.

After a while the reputation of the torturers was such that the threat of torture was sufficient to bring a confession. If not, the prisoner was taken to see the torture chamber in use. It was a large windowless chamber built underground, and lit by a few candles and hot braziers. The sight of it would bring tough minded people to dread and despair. The torturer was dressed entirely in black. His head and face were covered except for eye holes, and over his head he wore a black cowl. If no confession was yet coming the prisoner was stripped, often naked, and was bound by the wrists. No sensibilities were spared for anyone, male or female, villains or virgins. The victim was again asked the questions, and, if the desired answers were not given the torture, began.

The main tortures were the pulley, the rack and the fire. Flogging was also used but mainly as a minor punishment for breaking the prison rules. The prisoner was stripped and held face down by several men, while another flogged the prisoner mercilessly with a lash hardened by being dipped into molten pitch. Every stroke removed a strip of flesh. Some people had the flesh flogged from their ribs, and the whole of their back was a massive open ulcer.

Few failed to confess to the main tortures, although some passed out and were returned to the cells for a few days to recover. Some confessed under torture then recanted when it ceased. Each time they were brought again to the tribunal, and each time sent again for torture when they did not confess. Confession meant either death or life imprisonment in the foul cells, being equivalent to death unless the sentence was commuted.

Some examples of torture were:

• Tomas de Leon at Valladolid in 1638 was racked until his left arm broke.
• Florencia de Leon was tortured with the balestilla, the mancuerda and the potro but still would not speak.
• Engracia Rodrigues at sixty years old had an arm broken and a toe torn off in the balestilla but would not confess.
• Rochus was burnt alive for heretically despoiling an image of the Virgin. He was a wood carver, and refused to give an inquisitor a fine carving of the Virgin for a trifling sum. Expecting to have it stolen, he spoiled his own carving.
• A dungeon keeper at Triano, Spain, was sentenced to 200 lashes and six years as a galley slave for being too kind to prisoners.
• A maid of the Inquisition was also too kind to prisoners, so she was publicly flogged.
• A Protestant writing master of Toledo decorated his room with the Ten Commandments written in full, even though the Catholic cardinals omitted the part of the second commandment that forbade the worship of graven images. He was burnt alive for it in 1676.
• Protestants were invariably burnt alive unless they recanted, when they were burnt dead, having been strangled.

The walls of the chamber were lined with quilts to deaden the screams. Every examination was by an inquisitor or by a commisioner and only the judges, the registrar and the torturers were allowed into the torture chamber in use. All confessions given under torture were recorded by the registrar and had to be confirmed later when the prisoner was not being tortured. This was when some retracted their confession, and were sent for torture again. Torquemada, in the code issued to the Spanish Inquisition in 1484 approved repeated torture in these cases, and similar approvals were issued to other national inquisitions. Notionally, no other circumstances allowed repeated torture, but no one but the inquisitors had jurisdiction in the centers of the Holy Office, and they used the sophistry that the torture was a continuation of the previous torture, not a repetition of it.

Maria de Coccicas, a young woman of Lisbon, was charged with heresy and tortured on the rack, eventually confessing. She refused to ratify the confession and was again racked, again confessing. Again she refused to sign the confession, and declared that she would not sign any confession forced out of her by torture. Again she was racked, but this time she did not confess, and would not even answer the inquisitors. In this case, the inquisitors gave in. She was flogged through the streets and exiled for ten years. Revisionists claim that stories told by people who escaped the Inquisition with their lives are propaganda by the enemies of the Catholic Church. That the whole of Christianity is propaganda never occurs to them.

The duration of torture varied. Philip III of Spain (1598-1621) limited it to one hour, but regulations like this could not be enforced if the Inquisitors chose to ignore them. If any guilt was felt about it, they absolved each other. When a victim passed out, a doctor was called in to check that the faint was genuine. If the doctor decided the prisoner was faking unconsciousness, the torture continued. H C Lea, in A History of the Inquisition in Spain (1906), says it could go on for three hours. In 1648, at Valladolid, Antonio Lopez was tortured from eight until eleven, leaving him with a crippled arm. He later tried to strangle himself to death. He died in prison within a month.

When a confession was ratified, the sentence was passed. In cases considered minor, it might be a longer term of imprisonment, whipping, banishment or being made to serve forced labour in the galleys. Serious cases meant death either by strangulation of burning at the stake. An immediate confession did not always let the suspect escape torture, the sentence possibly including torture.

The executions were held at the Auto da Fé at times specified by the Holy Office, sometimes several years apart, so that condemned prisoners might be on Death Row for all this time, and those who were to be punished otherwise, had to suffer the imprisonment, unless they knew someone to stand bail, and that might put the benefactor under suspicion. To announce the occasion, the Officers of the Inquisition, preceded by drums, bugles and the banner of the Holy Office marched in cavalcade to proclaim the Auto da Fé in the following month. The ceremony was held without fail on a Sunday, and the whole population were expected to turn out. Spies would note any absences and that would be considered suspicious.

A high scaffold was erected in the main square, and victims of both sexes were dealt with there in a continuous procession lasting all day. The victims were led out with a rope around their necks and holding a yellow wax candle. They wore a “san benito,” a penitential tunic of yellow cloth down to the knees pained with a picture of the victim being burnt, with devils cavorting around fanning the flames. This victim was to be burnt at the stake. When someone intended for the stake confessed at the last minute, the picture was inverted to become a “fuego resuelto.” The victim was then not burnt alive but was first strangled, then burnt.

Those who were to be punished otherwise wore the same garment decorated with a cross. Garments like these were kept on display in churches as warnings. The victims also wore a “coroza,” a pasteboard hat three feet high ending in a point—the sinister hat still seen in Spanish ceremonies, and used by the KKK. It too was painted with crosses, flames and devils. If anyone tried to curse the tribunal or the Church, or praise some heretical sect, they instantly had a gag stuffed in their mouth, the soldiers being ready with them.

At the appointed place, usually the town square, a church service was held with a sermon in which the heresies were condemned, and the Inquisition justified. The prisoner could confess and ask to die in the Catholic faith until the last minutes, in which case they were strangled before the furze and faggots were ignited. Those who insisted in dying in their own faith were roasted alive.

The records of one such occasion in Madrid show that 20 heretics and one Moslem were burnt. Fifty Jews and Jewesses were sentenced to long imprisonments, and to wear a yellow cap. Ten others indicted for witchcraft and bigamy were flogged or sent to the galleys. The whole of the Spanish royal court was present, but the Grand Inquisitor’s chair had pride of place. Some of the nobles had the ceremonial duty of leading out the victims to be burnt alive.

As many stakes as there were victims had been fixed in the ground. They were 13 feet high and had a wooden cross beam as a seat about two feet from the top. Piled around the stake and reaching up to the seat was a mass of dry tinderwood. The victims, attended by two priests, ascended a ladder to sit on a beam where they were regaled before the crowd by the two priests urging them to be reconciled with the Church. On refusal, the priests descended and the executioner chained the victim tightly to the stake. The priests then returned for a final attempt at “reconcilation.” On failing, they declared:

We leave thee to the Devil, who is standing at thine elbow ready to receive thy soul to carry it with him to the flames of hell fire, as soon as it is out of thy body.

The crowd of the faithful cheered and cried:

Let the dog’s beards be made!

These were flaming brands that were thrust into the victim’s faces with long poles. Accompanied by shouts of glee and approval from the faithful dressed in their Sunday best clothes, the singeing of the faces continued until their faces were blackened. Then the pyre was lit. Similar acts occurred all over Europe.

A Dr Geddes who described the Auto da Fé in Madrid on 30 June 1682 was amazed at the behaviour of the victims who all yielded to their fate with such resolution that evven the spectators were silenced, and murmured to each other that it was a pity that such heroic people had chosen not to be faithful! The victims deliberately held their hands and feet into the flames. The king was so near to the pyres that he could not have failed to hear the distressed screams, but the occasion was, for the Church and the state, a religious one so the king’s attendance was obligatory. His coronation vows obliged him to sanction the acts of the tribunal with his presence.

The Holy Garduna

Spanish Christians believed that Christ himself approved his mother, the Holy Virgin Mary, called the Virgin of Cordoba, to appoint an hermit to found the Holy Garduna, to kill anyone who stood in the way of the Spanish driving out the Moors and Jews. The Virgin required everyone on the Spanish side to wear copies of a holy button taken from Christ's own robe, to protect the wearer from death at the hands of the Moors and heretics.

The Moors, and the Jews who came with them, had civilized Spain and founded its universities. A large number of Jews and Moors professed the Catholic faith under the intolerant Christian king and queen, but they were suspected of secretly practising their old religion. The Garduna was dedicated to the extermination or deportation of every non-Catholic. Anyone who might harbour heretical thoughts was to be murdered. Garduna bandits had been active before Ferdinand and Isabela ruled Spain. Ferdinand found them a valuable ally to help in the Inquisition he had invited from Rome. So, the Garduna became an unofficial weapon of the Holy Spanish Inquisition. They looted and burnt heretics and their houses, taking over their land and property.

But, once the Moors and Jews had been expelled, the Garduna became an embarrassment to the King. The gang would not turn over property they had robbed, and they would not give up the fight, beginning to accuse some of Ferdinand's trusted Christian royalists of heresy. Opposed now by the king, the divers Garduna bands federated into one body, still enjoying the favour of the Inquisition. Seville became the headquarters of the movement, and the band reconstituted itself as a secret society.

In 1821, a book was seized from the house of the Grand Master Francisco Cortina. It showed there were branches in most large cities and many towns and villages, including Toledo, Barcelona, and Cordoba. The society was brought before the courts. In the 147 years of co-operation with the Inquisition between 1520 and 1667, it entrusted almost two thousand dubious enterprises to the Garduna, the profits of which were nearly 200,000 gold francs. Garduna activities on behalf of the Holy Office were roughly equally divided into murder, abduction of women, and robbery, perjury and miscellaneous deeds. They covered kidnapping, deportation, false witness, selling enemies as slaves, and falsifying documents, much of it in connivance with the priesthood. If the Garduna promised to murder a man under specific circumstances, he was murdered exactly as promised. One-third of all money earned through “commissions” went straight to the general funds of the Holy Garduna, a similar amount went to running expenses, the rest was shared among the agents of the deed. They had friends in high places and bought off judges and state officials.

On 25 November 1822, the Grand Master and sixteen of his chief officers were publicly hanged in the market of Seville, but the organization did not die with them. South American branches were flourishing in 1846, and later references appear until 1949. It continues to operate under a different guise still.

Neither Praise nor Exaggeration

The Spanish Inquisition’s reign of terror was abolished by King Joseph Bonaparte in 1808. Reintroduced by Ferdinand VII (1813-1833) in 1814 and approved by Pius VII (1800-1823), it was finally abolished by the revolution of 1820. Its last executions are said to have been a Jew burnt at the stake in 1826, and a Spanish Quaker schoolmaster hanged because he substituted the phrase “Praise be to God” for “Ave Maria” (Hail Mary) during school prayers.

Most people know nothing about the horrors of the Inquisition except in connexion with Torquemada and the Spanish tribunals. Christian apologists claim it was a Spanish state institution that the popes earnestly protested about, but even Catholic priests sometimes reject this subterfuge of its political and secular character with disgust. “The Inquisition originated not so much in political as in religious motives,” Canon Dalton said, and “no contemporary authority asserts the contrary.” Spanish writers represent it as a purely religious tribunal.

That the institution was ecclesiastical is certain and revisionists are just ignoring the evidence to pretend it was secular. The Holy See authorised the institution with its sacred approval (sanction), and accorded to the Grand Inquisitor judicial authority concerning matters of faith, and jurisdiction over subsidiary tribunals. No clergyman until Joseph de Maistre in the mid-nineteenth century questioned the ecclesiastical nature of the Spanish Inquisition. The pope was its highest appeal judge, could intervene in the legislation, could commandeer entire trials at any stage of the proceedings, could depose grand inquisitors, and could exempt whomever he liked from its jurisdiction.

The confusion arises from the division of the spoils. Sixtus IV and his successors greatly disliked the Spanish Inquisition because all the confiscated wealth remained in Spain. The popes raised a little by receiving at Rome appeals from the sentences of the Spanish inquisitors, and remitting penances for a payment. But the Spaniards retorted by refusing to recognize the pope’s dispensations, and there was an unholy struggle.

The Spanish people, every historian tells us, were tolerant and disinclined to quarrel, but the preachers lashed them, especially against the Jews, and from the fourteenth century onward there were frequent pogroms. In 1391, four thousand Jews were killed in Seville alone. But Jews, unless they had once embraced Christianity, did not come under the cognizance of the Inquisition. The final expulsion of the Jews in 1492, when two hundred thousand were driven abroad with every circumstance of brutality and impoverishment, must be added separately to the ghastly account of the Christian religion. It is an ironic comment on the supposed “anti-social” doctrines of heretics that these 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.

Until the second half of the fifteenth century, the Inquisition set up there by Gregory IX had comparatively little broad influence, even though it was savage where it was important. Neither people nor rulers wanted its bloody work. With the accession of the fanatical Ferdinand and Isabella, however, and the fall of the last great Moorish city, Granada, a new era opened. Even in the case of Isabella it is an historical fact that the priests compelled her to act. For a long time she refused the solicitation of the Dominican monks, but she yielded at last to the grim and overbearing Torquemada.

The Spanish Inquisition deserves neither praise nor exaggeration. G R Scott writes:

So wide was the interpretation of the word heresy that the free expression of opinion in all Catholic countries, for the 500 years of the Inquisition’s tyranny, may be said to have been inexistent.

Blötzer (CE), says the number of victims cannot be calculated with even approximate accuracy. What we get from the estimates made by the revisionists are effectively the absolute minimum. It began with a zealous violence which did not last at the same level. Its bloody reputation—though it formally existed for more than three centuries—was earned during its first decade and a half. In this time, the revised figure is that 2000 people were burnt as heretics. Llorente had said 8000, so Christians feel a lot better about it.

Almost all those executed were conversos or New Christians, converts, that is, from Judaism who were convicted of secretly practicing their former religion. The Inquisition, as a church-court, had no legal jurisdiction over Moors and Jews as such, but did once they accepted baptism. The early savagery of the Spanish Inquisition was anti-Semitic. Far from constituting a danger to the nation, the Jewish conversos of previous decades had been admirably blended into the larger community.

The Inquisition respected neither rank nor station, rich or poor, peasant or noble. Don Carlos was the eldest son of Philip II of Spain, himself son of Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V (1519-1558, Carlos I of Spain, 1516-1556), and heir to the throne. Don Carlos expressed to his friends his revulsion at the excesses of the Holy Office. He was arrested! Unfortunately for the prince, his own father was not fond enough of him to make any protestation, not that it would necessarily have made any difference. Don Carlos was condemned to death on the advice of the aging blind Grand Inquisitor, but, as a concession to his rank, a vein was opened and he was allowed to bleed to death. The BBC film apparently claims this is a myth too. Even so, the legend of Don Carlos is sung in the opera by Verdi. Catholics presumably must not see it, just as they must not see the film Angela’s Ashes.

Later in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on average less than three people a year were executed by the Spanish Inquisition, which was formally constituted in Spanish colonies as well as at home. It should be no comfort to any Christian. Nevertheless, the Inquisition could have anyone arrested on charges lodged by unknown people, as happened to both S Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), the granddaughter of a New Christian penanced by the Inquisition, and S Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556).

The record of Christianity from the days when it first obtained the power to persecute is one of the most monstrous in history. The total number of Manichaeans, Arians, Priscillianists, Paulicians, Bogomiles, Cathari, Waldensians, Albigensians, witches, Lollards, Hussites, Jews, Protestants and Catholics killed because of their rebellion against Rome clearly runs to millions and beyond these actual executions or massacres is the enormously larger number of those who were tortured, imprisoned and impoverished. In almost every century, many people have tried to reject the Christian religion, and it would have disappeared but for Christian intimidation, and the lack of the freedom we have today.

George B Vetter, in Magic and Religion, asks what kind of causal sequences are suggested by the prevalence of Christianity professing inquisitors, dictators and demigogues. “Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Hitler, Peron and most Latin-American dictators were brought up as Roman Catholics.” Stalin was training in a seminary to be a priest, and Robert Service describes how an elderly Christian woman of Stalin’s era came up to him at a lecture he had given in Russia to explain that Stalin was “a deeply spiritual person”. The corrupt and brutalized leadership of the parties of Northern Ireland and the Balkans are the same, and the evangelical Pastor-Politicians of the USA are crooked and morally corrupt. The other patriarchal religions match the Christians.

The answer is most likely a reliance on a dogmatic attitude, on unquestionable authority, and complete intolerance of contradiction. The patriarchal religions of the world are alike in preferring these authoritarian ways of thinking. The Protestant Reformation had nothing to do with freethought or liberality. The Protestant leaders were all just as bigoted as the Roman prelates, perhaps more so. It is not the brand of Christianity you choose that is at fault. It is the whole noxious religion itself and its cognates!

The Reformers followed for a time in the bloody footsteps of the popes. But when Catholic apologists eagerly quote the sentiments of Reformers and the executions of Catholics by Protestants, they betray the usual lack of sense of proportion. A twelve century old tradition of religious persecution is not likely to be abandoned in a few decades. This particular kind of savagery, the infliction of a horrible death for opinions, had been introduced into Europe by the Christian leaders—ancient Rome never persecuted for opinion or had any standard of orthodoxy—and it had got into the blood. The killing of men for their beliefs by the early Protestants was murder just as was the killing of men by the Inquisition. It is a mockery to ask us to detect any divine interest in Churches during those fourteen centuries of devilish injustice and inhumanity.

Protestant Churches have abandoned the principle that you may slay a man for heresy. The English law De Haeretico Comburendo, framed and inspired by Roman Catholicism, was abandoned three centuries ago, though the English Church retained absolute power in the land. One may speculate as to whether a Protestant Church might at some time revert to the old ideal, if it had the old power.

Dignitatis Humanae

Faced with counter scholarship, the revisionists often have to back-pedal. Henry Kamen himself, in a review of The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain by B Netanyahu, writes:

No institution in Western history has so fearful a reputation as the Spanish Inquisition. In the sixteenth century a Jewish writer referred to it as “a wild monster of such terrible mien that all of Europe trembles at the mere mention of its name.” Every nation opposed it during the period of its greatest influence.

The Jewish writer mentioned was writing within decades of the Spanish Inquisition being at its worst, so there is little reason to think he was too wrong in his assessment. Plainly Kamen does not dissent. It is possible to accept with the revisionists that the numbers of victims have been exaggerated, but the various inquisitions were not merely a question of numbers. As the Jewish writer says, it was so monstrous that the exact numbers, given that no one denies they are large, are irrelevant. A lot of people were treated so horribly it cannot now be imagined.

Apologists tell us the Spanish Inquisition, still being run by Dominicans, “ignored Rome’s protests.” These Spanish monarchs, often granted the epithet, “the Catholic,” for their piety were actually, the revisionists tell us, so impious that they ignored what the popes said. Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, suffered eight years of imprisonment under the rule of the Spanish inquisitors but eventually was released and sent to Rome when the pope threatened the Spanish king with excommunication. It shows that the pope had only to threaten any monarch with excommunication and they generally came to heel. Why then did it take eight years? Whatever the reason, that it happened belies the whole foul excuse that the pope was subject to the whims of monarchs.

Also contradictory in the revisionist litany of excuses is that S Theresa of Avila was denounced but she was rescued by the personal influence of Philip II. So, here the monarch defies the Spanish Inquisition. If we are to believe all this then the Inquisition was a law unto itself, but was too useful to the Church and the state to be disbanded.

The pope is infallible except when he is fallible is the final distorted cry of revisionists. He is morally infallible but is not qualified in his infallibility to run a proper system of justice. The ultimate pathetic justification of these supposed Christian apologists is that Protestants have killed more Catholics! No doubt Catholics still do not regard Protestants as anything other than heretics, and Protestants think exactly the same about Catholics. Both claim to be Christians, so what happened to Christ in all this?

Death for heresy is the law of the Roman Catholic Church today. Rome is painted as penitent like every other Church. It has not sacrificed one syllable of its teaching about heretics. Joseph McCabe, the dissident priest, was under sentence of death in the Canon Law of the Roman Church.

Leo XIII (1878-1903) published a work, written by a papal professor and printed in a papal press. It was in Latin, and few Catholics will fail to be astonished that the author states, and proves at great length, that the Church has “the right of the sword” over heretics, and only the perversity of our age prevents it from exercising that right! More recent manuals of Church Law have the same thesis. It is still the law of the Roman Church.

For Catholic Professor James Hitchcock, it is all laid to rest by the Second Vatican Council’s decree Dignitatis Humanae (1965) which once and for all put an end to the mode of thought which would revive the Inquisition, or see it as having eternal validity. Maybe for that reason it was opposed tooth and nail by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, whose position was Prefect of the Holy Office!

What seemed a complete novelty in the decree was that it recognised that the act of faith is a free act. It acknowledges for the first time that Jesus Christ, who was always meek, humble and patient, never compelled anyone to believe in him. He did not coerce people into belief. Hitchcock cannot understand, as indeed most Christians cannot, that the behaviour of the Christian churches, not merely the Catholic one, has never been Christian, if the model is the life of the man portrayed in the bible. Indeed most of the poor heretics were trying to reform Christianity to take notice of the humble carpenter’s actual life, not just his death. That man is merely a Christian symbol, and nothing more. Christianity at its root just cannot be humane. It is not rooted in reality. The attitude of people like Hitchcock shows it.

However, the principle of religious liberty that Vatican Council II proclaimed drives a coach and four through the traditions of the Church. The Syllabus of Errors (1864) affirms that:

• The Church has direct or indirect temporal power, and can use force.
• The Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.
• Freedom of worship, and giving everyone the power to hold openly and publicly any opinions and thoughts whatsoever, tends to corrupt people’s morals and minds, and makes them indifferent.

Jean-Claude Dupuis, that insane Canadian Catholic historian, says that the Church has the right to murder people as long as it does not actually commit the crime but leaves it to the secular arm because:

S Thomas Aquinas supported the use of constraint, even physical, to combat heresy. S Augustine appealed to the Imperial authority to suppress the Donatist schism by force. The Old Testament punished by death idolaters and blasphemers.

He even calls in God the Son to the side of the Christian murderers on the grounds that he was intolerant of the Pharisees!

The Inquisition adopted an attitude toward heretics comparable to that of our Lord.

He even uses the same fatuous argument:

Isn’t eternal damnation, which is the retribution for not believing (Mk 16:16), an affliction far more dreadful than the worst punishment which a human tribunal could impose?

Paul blinded Bar-Jesus and Peter killed Ananias and Sapphira, so this Catholic fascist writing in Angelus 22:11 (1999) justifies torture and murder even today from a 2000 year old book. Indeed, for him, the “true gospel” has no sign of “tolerance.”

The Church respects the freedom of conscience of individuals, but not the freedom of expression of false doctrines.

Remember it when you read these subtle, eloquent and unctuous apologists on the “blunders” of the past and the right and duty of toleration today. It was not until 1968 when the files of the Office of the Inquisition at the Vatican were closed, but even so, it still exists. In 1965 its name was changed to The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Prefect of which for twenty years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—a man who was in the Hitler youth as a boy and only failed to join the Nazi party because the war ended first—who became pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger, known as “God’s rottwiler” and to Germans as the “Panzerkardinal”, fought administrative battles against the liberation theology movement, gagging the Franciscan, Leonardo Boff in 1985, then purging Catholic universities of liberation theologians.

The Inquisition, the Holy Office, exists. The law exists. But the times have been bad for inquisitors, and the “sacred” machinery is stored away in the papal repository, awaiting the dawn of that more religious age which, some say, American Christians will inaugurate. Thank this age of skepticism that our blood remains in our veins.

More detail on some of these points can be found by searching for named people, events and features, and at:

• http://home.att.net/~gentletouch/inquisition1.html
• http://www.dimensional.com/~randl/wheeling.htm

Further Reading

• More on the Millennium, when Christ failed to return, and notions of heresy began to take hold in the West
• More on the persecution of heretics
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Inquisition

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