Abstract

Fear is always the first incentive to religious worship.

Paul Carus, History of the Devil (1900)

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 12 December 2002; Friday, 19 December 2003

History and Religion

History is a science as incompatible with religion as evolution. It eliminates the supernatural from the chronicle of human development. Religion should too, because whenever a supernatural intervention would be beneficial in the affairs of humanity, it never happens. Indeed, supernatural interventions never happen for good or for ill—they just never happen, which is why historians, as opposed to theologions or religious apologists, deny them.

The science of history means making a record of past events based on a critical use of the evidence, particularly when it is documentary evidence, not gullibly accepting it because a tradition has been fostered that it is God’s own word. Even historians are still blinded by society’s intoxication with the lies called the “holy bible”. It purports to be history and many historians accept that it is, though it mainly is not, and it does not stand up to the scrutiny of normal historical standards.

Our age is a liberal one, and even skeptical historians bend over backwards not to offend religious people. It is time this unwarranted respect ended, whatever the religion is, because all of the patriarchal religions are equally bad. When Christians defend the indefensible, no historians will cross swords with them, though Christians heap lies upon lies. The convention is to be silent—out of “respect”. Someone might be offended. In the UK with the religions of immigrants, the brand of racism is added. Against these timid conventions of history, wherever religion is concerned, these pages are protesting.

Critical historians excite the rancour of theologians almost as much as do scientists. The discoveries of science are hard to decry even by Christians, but history does not have the same consequences, and is more readily rejected by theologians. Many people do not like it, are not interested in it, will not read it and have nothing to learn from it. They could not even begin to understand George Santayana’s chilling dictum:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

But lack of interest in history suits the clergy down to the hilt. Christianity’s dependence on the people’s ignorance and dislike of history allows it to pretend it beneficially transformed Europe when Paganism was suppressed. Christians certainly think this and few of the non-committed care about anything other than the present day, so they accept school history, which is Christian history, and it is false. Christianity transformed Europe from the practical, natural civilization of Paganism into dense ignorance, indifferent brutality and social disorder. The Christian apologist, faced with evidence that Europe did not immediately benefit from Christianity, blames the initial collapse of society on to the barbarians, but insists that the benefits of Christianity emerged later.

Yet, the barbarians were already Christian when they invaded, though not Catholics, and why did Europe continue to decline for centuries after the barbarians had converted to Catholicism? New and appalling evils were being created even into the Middle Ages.

Few people, least of all Christians know any history, and Christians know nothing about the history of Christianity. If they do, how can genuinely pious Christians accept that their religion promoted the most awful tortures—the Inquisition? Christians say that heresy was a crime in European law. It was a secular crime against the state not a religious crime and was punished accordingly. Do they really think that their own God does not notice that this juggling with words is actually lying? Christians think their own God is a dolt and does not notice them blatantly lying as long as it is meant to be in defence of the Church. The leaders of the Church used people’s belief in their control of the destiny of their souls to oblige rulers and peoples to make heresy a crime! The church introduced the Inquisition.

Apologizing for the Inquisition

Professor J Hitchcock has another defence of the Inquisition in that the Committees of Public Safety during the French Revolution were worse. They really did condemn people wholesale without regard for guilt or innocence, and if they had gone on for as long as the Inquisition—Hitchcock admitting to 1230-1530—their death tolls would have been greater. But they only lasted for a decade whereas the Inquisition lasted for 500 years. Indeed, few people realise it has never been officially disbanded.

Blötzer says a kind of iron law disposes mankind to religious intolerance. If that is the case, the best thing to do is to abolish religion. But atheism is the worst “heresy” according to the Christians. They cite Plato who made it the duty of the government of his ideal state to show no toleration towards the “godless”, even though they were content to live quietly and without proselytizing. Doubtless this is one of the reasons why Christians admired Plato so much they were willing to preserve his books. Revisionists use this as evidence that the attitude of the Church in the Middle Ages was not unusual.

The revisionist apologetic claim is that the principal teachers of the Church held back from accepting the practice of the civil rulers. Some did, but in the end the Church did not. The Catholic Church became dominant in the West. That was its aim, and it had succeeded. It taught everyone that the welfare of society depended on the welfare of Christianity, and people believed it mainly because there was no other possible option. King Peter of Aragon, voiced the universal conviction:

The enemies of the Cross of Christ and violators of the Christian law are likewise our enemies and the enemies of our kingdom, and ought therefore to be dealt with as such.

It meant, of course, that not everyone had accepted the rule of the Church in religious matters. The original Christians, who took their lines more from the original Essene Christianity of Jesus, and had evidently survived in the east, began to spread west. It scared the pampered prelates of the fabulously rich Church. People behaving like Jesus?—Heresy!

More excuses. The representatives of the Church were children of their time, and in their conflict with heresy accepted the help they could get. It was the help of the mob, and the secular princes, all Christians, all taught by the Church, but apparently none the wiser in terms of following the teaching of the humble Galilean. They imposed laws based on the old Roman system and enforced them. The Church learned its habits from the princes, we are told, not the other way round.

Yet, S Thomas Aquinas, the Medieval Church’s answer to Augustine, demonstrates that the sin of heresy separates man from God more than all other sins, and, as the worst of sins, is to be punished more severely. Bishop Lucas thought the worst sin becomes holy in comparison with the depravity of heresy. Stephen Palecz of Prague declared before the Council of Constance that a belief false in one point in a thousand was heretical. The dualistic system found a point of agreement in one of the doctrines of the Church—that of the dogma of the devil and his kingdom. The exclusive salvation enforced by Catholicism meant a Catholic had to believe it was merciful to sweep away the catechumens of Satan with fire and sword. They would be saved by the Catholics Christians whether they wanted to be or not. Later, Protestant Christians were the same. God had raised His Churches to fight such battles against those who wanted to reject them.

The schoolmen proved that persecution was a work of charity, for the benefit of the persecuted. So, they and the bishops advocated capital punishment for heresy. The capital punishment was taken to be death by fire, based on heresy being called high treason (crimen laesae majestatis) against God. The Jewish law was remembered and cited as biblical precedent with concomitant citations of Jesus:

I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

Matthew 5:17

If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.

John 15:6

Yet another apology is that the Church was not stifling belief but imposing discipline! And any judgement made on the Inquisition has no bearing on the correctness of the Church’s dogmas. The Church still, the apologists claim, must make laws and uphold them with penalties. Heresy violates ecclesiastical law and strikes at the Christian communion. But it does not suffice to expel a member not conforming. That is why heresy was and is a lie. It is not heresy it is mind control. People who were never baptised as Catholic Christians cannot be Catholic heretics. Even those who were baptised were baptised before they had the chance to dissent, and when they did as adults, they were deemed heretics and murdered. Protestants wanted to secede from the Church of images and luxury and return to the ways of the Essenes. They were therefore heretics and had to be burnt alive.

Catholics still argue that unity of faith is essential, and every Protestant sect agrees, as long as it is their sect around which unity is built. The Church taught that a united religion was essential to civil society, then when kings and princes took them at their word, as the wise and the sage, and insisted on unity of religion rigidly, the Church pretended it was not their fault. That is how they still argue.

The same people had taught the ordinary poor, illiterate and ignorant people everything that they should think. Then they tell us popular hatred of heresy caused summary justice and cruel punishments that the Church then had no choice but to continue. Catholics absolve themselves by pointing to the worse crimes of the Protestant Reformers. Neither consider it a problem of a terrible and unjust religion that appears in different but equally bad forms.

Revisionist, Edward O’Brien, is not content to revise the Roman Inquisition, he wants to revise the trial of Galileo. Galileo was a believer in Copernicus—the Earth revolves around the Sun. The Church took the earth to be the center of the universe, but Galileo said truth cannot contradict truth. Scripture could not teach contrary to nature, so there had been an error of interpretation of scripture. Galileo had to answer for his views before the Inquisition in 1616, and that same year, the Inquisition ordered the text of Copernicus must no longer be published until it was “corrected”. On 24 February, 1616, the Inquisition decided that Galileo was heretical because his theories were contrary to scripture. The Roman tribunal did not torture Galileo but just ordered him to desist from saying such things. He did not, and in 1632 published a book, The Dialogue, expounding the differences between science and the Church. O’Brien just tells us the Inquisition did nothing more than put him under house arrest, and he later died in his own bed, after enjoying a papal pension! He does not say:

• all this took place in 1633, when already the Inquisition was waning in power before the new secularism that was growing, but he was threatened with torture and burning alive,
• Galileo knew that only a few decades before Bruno had been burnt at the stake, so still had reason to think the Church would carry out its threats,
• Galileo was already an old man of seventy but was forced to kneel and make a public confession with his hand on the gospels, and had to do penances for three years as part of his recantation,
• he was refused burial in consecrated ground, when he did die, even though he had complied with the requirements of the Church.

The Dialogue remained on the papal Index until 1822 by which time everyone except Catholics agreed the earth moved round the sun. The conviction stood until John Paul II overturned it. This is the nature of historical revisionism. No need to lie, just miss out the unacceptable bits. The sin is omission, but no less a lie.

Biased Scholarship?

A word of caution about the literature of these matters. No historian, even Catholic, questions that the pope summoned the Albigensian “crusade” and nearly annihilated one of the finest bodies of men and women of the time. But were there really forty thousand killed at Beziers, or was it only ten thousand men, women, and children, especially women and children, who had their throats cut when the fighting was over? And did not the Albigensians hold opinions which were socially mischievous?

Indifferent to the memory of hundreds of thousands of butchered innocents and unflinching in their lies, modern Christian apologists can proclaim that they were “dangerous to society”. How? They advocated voluntary poverty and virginity! Is that not what Christ advocated? We know this from their bitterest enemies, so can accept it as the truth. Rome murdered myriads of “heretics” because they were true Christians.

”Oh dear”, says the money grubbing modern Christian, “That is all very well but how could society persist if there were no private property, no soldiers [they opposed war] no procreation of children?” The answer then as now was that these counsels of Christ were for the elect few, the “Perfect”, but ordinary “Believers” could own property, could marry and raise families, even if marriage was discouraged, and must bear arms in defence of their Lords and their Church.

Apologists throw dust in the eyes of Christians, so that they will not see clearly. “Improvements” to history have entered works from which the public expects truth not lies. Joseph McCabe has declared there is not a wholly unbiased Catholic scholar in the world, and he should know as a former teacher of many of them.

In one article on the tribunal of the Inquisition in the well known Catholic Encyclopaedia, a Catholic scholar, Canon E Vacandard, began by declaring that the Spanish Inquisition was outside the scope of his article, even though it was not treated anywhere else in the encyclopedia. Then he said:

From the twelfth century onward the repression of heresy was the great business of Church and State. The distress caused, particularly in the north of Italy and the south of France, by the Cathari or Manichaeans, whose doctrine wrought destruction to society as well as to faith, appalled the leaders of Christianity. On several occasions, in various places, people and rulers at first sought justice in summary conviction and execution, culprits were either outlawed or put to death. The Church for a long time opposed these rigorous measures… The death-penalty was never included in any system of repressions.

This Catholic apologist is lying through his teeth. The death-penalty was introduced at the dictation of Christian bishops and made a part of European law by the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries. For many countries, it remained the law, as it had been for more than eight hundred years. Canon lawyers dispute how far the old law applied in the Middle Ages, but apply it did.

So, the “people and rulers” did these monstrous things while the Church supposedly tried to restrain them. The Church has always expected its followers to be fools. The ruler and people never moved against heretics without the impulsion or example of the Church, and the Papacy complained every decade at this time that it could not get rulers to apply its own “rigorous measures”—exile, infamy, confiscation and destruction of the heretics’ homes. Innocent III demanded the death sentence and launched his crusade of murder and theft precisely because he could not get “people and rulers” to proceed otherwise.

Those apologists who speak of the Cathari believing in eternal damnation are just using the words of Catholic critics. The Cathari had no hellish place other than the material world of the Devil. Sex was evil because it was a bodily pleasure, and good people did not want to pander to the demands of their earthly bodies, but they accepted that not everyone was good or could resist bodily temptation. Perfection was a state to be achieved by choice not by force, precisely the opposite message of Catholic Christianity. Marriage was an approval of sexual activity, so could not be right. People were better having sex feeling it was not approved, and therefore aware of its sinfulness. The last sacrament or consolamentum could only be given those who renounced sexual relations. There were severe penalties of fasting for a man who merely accidentally touched a woman after this solemn sacrament.

Apologists claim that Catharans refused to accept important feudal laws, which, if true, would have been sufficient to allow them to be brought to order without enforcing any laws of heresy, merely the laws of the land. They supposedly repudiated the oath of fealty and refused all taxes to the king. Why then was the Languedoc the most prosperous part of Europe by far? Catholics claimed that they murdered the terminally ill. That seems amazingly modern, if it were true, but it is merely Catholic calumny. Ill and elderly people who had taken the consolamentum then refused to eat in a terminal fast called the endura. Apologists for Catholic Christianity have the nerve to say that the Cathari Perfects made money out of the endura. They are, of course, projecting the vile scams of Catholic priests on to their opponents.

Catholic priests would gleefully heavily fine one believer for having sex with his wife, say, during Lent, while heavily fining another man for not having sex with his wife! Charges were made for mass, just as they are still, and Catholics happily pay it, imagining that God has clever accountants adding up their contributions to his holy institution that will determine who enters heaven and who does not.

Catholic theologians say the Albigensians were “offended by the excessive outward splendour of Catholic preachers”. Such an inhuman pope as Innocent III berated the corrupt Catholic priesthood in his own day, so we do not depend upon the statements of opponents of Catholicism to know that it was disgusting. He wrote a letter in 1204 to his legate, a scorching exposure of the clerical immorality which the Catholic scholar calls “outward splendour”. He talks of the mistresses of the priests and the monks everywhere, and says that their bishops can hunt and gamble, but are…

…dumb dogs who had forgotten how to bark, simonists who sold justice, absolving the rich and comdemning the poor, themselves regardless of the laws of the Church, accumulators of benefices in their own hands, conferring benefices on unworthy friends and illiterate lads.

Yet, liars for God think they can paint the religion that people preferred—because it was more honest—as corrupt, while Catholicism was combatting a vile perversion. It is baloney and propaganda. How do we know? Because the same Catholic scholar, Canon Vacandard in his work, The Inquisition, quotes the acts of the tribunals of the Inquisition of Toulouse and Carcassone as saying that:

The endura, voluntary or forced, put to death more victims than the stake or the Inquisition.

For the sake of argument, take it to be a true statement. The people “put to death” were already dying. The people murdered at the stake by the holy flames of God and tortured to death by the Holy Inquisition were murdered in the prime of their lives, and some even as children. Vacandard is, of course, not telling the truth, but giving Catholic justifications for the murder of people who understood Christianity better than the officials of the Church.

O Lord, I never spoke a true word in my life. I have always affirmed a lie as truth to all men, and no man contradicted me. Instead, they all gave credit to my works.

Visions of Hermas

Apologists are keen to tell us that in the first place it was more important for the judges to reconcile the heretic with the Church than to incinerate them. That might well be the case, but it was a situation that did not last long, and it was a situation that probably only lasted as long as it did because the initial judges of the Inquisition were not quite sure of the authority they had. Within a few decades, they had the hang of it and the Inquisition proper began.

The apologists for Christianity cannot evade the fact that the holy men of God used torture against people who also considered themselves to be Christians. They say: “Sometimes the authorities resorted to torture”. But it was not meant to hurt people in a cruel way because it was only meant to help the kind judges get the truth and therefore help them save the soul of the heretic! They argue like this, even in this day and age, proving that they are inquisitors at heart, still!

Moreover, the Church did not invent torture, but only approved it, after a while! The torture approved by Innocent IV in his bull Ad Exstirpanda of 1252, was not to cause the loss of a limb or to imperil life, could be applied only once, and only when the accused seemed to be lying and the evidence was of guilt. Apologists say if this law “had been followed in practice, many of the abuses which have justly aroused such resentment against the Inquisition would have been avoided”. They never think to consider that if supposed Christian principles had been applied, there would have been no abuses at all.

The rule about resorting to it only once was circumvented by the use of different instruments of torture. The Dominicans convinced themselves they were conforming with the holy law by not using any particular implement of torture more than once. On the inhuman degree of torture, the revisionists say, “it has been exaggerated”. Pressed, they will concede, “there were cases of terrible excess”. Those instances were, revisionists say, actually when the civil authorities made the Inquisitors act severely to get these criminal heretics. It is all utter nonsense. The cases are well established in history when the Church has forced kings and princes to comply with the threat of excommunication and interdict. The fear was so extreme, in those days, of burning in hell forever that even kings were not willing to risk the magic power of popes.

Another excuse is that the penalties imposed by the inquisitors were mild and spiritual. They consider it mild that people had to go on pilgrimages leaving their families destitute for months if not years. The penitent had to return with a piece of paper signed by the bishops of the churches they were obliged to visit, so they could not get away with trickery. They might have to donate an item for the Church, again impoverishing themselves. They might have to go on a crusade, yet again leaving their families destitute and risking their lives. Confiscation of their property was common, and again left people destitute. The Church has always had an interest in leaving people poor and ignorant while it collected their money and used it for the good living of its agents. The Perfecti of the Cathars were “The Poor”, and the formation of Church equivalents in the Franciscans and Dominicans proves that they were responding to the perceived goodness and sincerely held vows of poverty of these people.

The apologists call the Cathars “a black plague devastating Christendom”. The black plague by any objective judgement was Christianity itself in the form of the evil imperial hierarchy set up by Constantine and his successors which distorted any goodness originally in the religion in the interests of power politics and personal greed. The Catharan primitive Christianity, plainly directly traceable to Jesus, the Essenes and the Apostles was completely obliterated by cruel torture and mass murder. Yet, what do the apologists claim?

In spite of its shortcomings, not only Christianity but also human civilization owe no small debt to the work of the Inquisition.

Dr John A O’Brien

There are many more people calling themselves Christians who think in the same way. For sheer religious madness, Jean-Claude Dupuis, writing in The Angelus, takes some beating. This man must be clinically insane. He says:

Contrary to what we have been told, the Inquisition frequently acquitted.

Then he immediately contradicts himself by giving the figures of acquitals by Bernard Gui, Inquisitor at Toulouse, who acquitted 139 of 930 judgments, only one in seven. On torture, Dupuis says:

It was relatively mild…

No doubt it was no worse than a cross country run, or ten press ups. Perhaps he should try it. He then distinguishes morality for an individual and a person acting in a position of authority. Only in the case of the individual is murder wrong:

The duty of the public authority is not the same as that of the faithful. The duty of charity obliges the individual to pardon, even to pardon the criminal who may have killed one’s dearest relatives. But the State’s primary duty of charity is to protect the public order, to defend the physical and spiritual well-being of its subjects. If capital punishment is necessary to assure public security, the State or the Church can have recourse to it.

He also justifies execution with reference to S Thomas Aquinas who said the fear of death often facilitated the conversion of criminals, so:

The temporal punishment of death allowed the criminal to avoid the eternal death penalty which is hell. In this way, the State was practicing true charity. To restore him to freedom, as is done today on the pretense of forgiveness, is to give the criminal the occasion of relapsing back into sin and losing his soul.

So death is the preferred corrective for all crimes that the Christian nutcase decides might lead the criminal’s soul into hell! How alone is this man in these psychotic ideas? Is it common among Catholics? Among Christians? Dupuis sees liberals as the enemy of Catholicism, and he shows very clearly why this should be so:

After all, the only thing that the liberals can still reproach the Inquisition for is having fought against the false religions. That is normal enough, since the liberals do not believe that the Catholic Church is the one way to salvation. They cannot comprehend the supernatural finality of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition was a humanitarian work.

Those who have the Faith must convey a positive judgment on the Inquisition… Today, the Church and society would perhaps not be in such a lamentable condition if there had been, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an Inquisition to protect us from the modern heresies… Catholics have nothing to be ashamed of in the past work of this holy tribunal.

This sends a chill down your spine. People like this could argue that the death camps of the Nazis were a boon to humanity. These people are still in the medieval mode of thinking that many of us thought had long ago ended. These crazies will still kill you thinking they are doing you a favour. They are as civilized as hyenas, but they are teaching our kids! Having read this, who can say that the Churches are not asylums and Christianity is not a synonym for raving lunacy. Is it any wonder that we see on TV, immediately after the capture of Saddam, a US interrogator, Philip Geraldo, admitting from Washington that he will be made “uncomfortable”, during his questioning, by waking him up frequently, and making him sit or stand awkwardly. Torture is official, and who leads the administration that permits it. A supposedly devout Christian!

Excusing The Spanish Inquisition

The Spanish Inquisition for centuries has been depicted as a horrific tyranny imposed upon Spain by sinister Church and state officials. Bigoted, ignorant, and fanatical Dominican friars, bent on wiping out heresy, are shown zealously directing this cruel page of Spanish history. The Inquisition arrested innocent Spaniards accused of heresy and often tortured them in endless and unjust interrogations, to secure meaningless confessions. The condemned were then sent to vile prisons, there to await death by burning at the stake. Who has not heard of the fearful, macabre horrors of the dungeons of the Inquisition?

Joseph Blötzer, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, says modern critics cannot understand the Inquisition because they no longer realise that religious belief is not a choice but a gift—God’s gift. Evidently a gift that no one can refuse! Nor do they now consider the Church to be the unsullied repository of God’s revelation of this gift as faith. That is only because the Church has found it much harder, in the modern time of free communication, to pretend it is unsullied. Inquisitions are just one of the historical events that sullied its reputation, but Catholic writers are still desperate to defend the Church on indefensible things.

Finding and writing excuses for the Inquisition has always been a Christian, particularly Catholic, industry, and in the last few decades it has intensified. The Spanish Inquisition is no longer the Spanish Inquisition but “the Myth of the Spanish Inquisition”. Historian Edward Peters, who is said not to be Catholic, in Inquisition (1989), writes:

The Spanish Inquisition, in spite of wildly inflated estimates of the numbers of its victims, acted with considerable restraint in inflicting the death penalty, far more restraint than was demonstrated in secular tribunals elsewhere in Europe that dealt with the same kinds of offenses. The best estimate is that around 3000 death sentences were carried out in Spain by Inquisitorial verdict between 1550 and 1800, a far smaller number than that in comparable secular courts.

This reassessment of the Spanish branch of the Inquisition is based on reading the Inquisition’s own archives! Spanish scholars using computerized searches through the records left by the officers of the Inquisition claim the Inquisition had “neither the power nor the desire to put Spain under its control”. Henry Kamen, of the Higher Council for Scientific Research in Barcelona, started the modern practice in 1965 with his book, The Spanish Inquisition, with which he intended and succeeded in becoming famous. Yet, Henry Kamen also tells us that the prominent Jewish scholar of Cornell University, Benzion Netanyahu, completely rejects the inquisitorial documents as biased, and so, unreliable.

Why should anyone think the documents of a secret police force were honest and reliable without separate confirmation, and in the face of quite contradictory evidence? Who could be surprised that the documents the police force produced seemed to justify its existence? The answer is scholars of the Inquisition like Kamen and Peters. Almost all the Spanish Inquisition’s earlier documents refer to acts of judaizing among conversos after the Inquisition began. Before then, no evidence suggests enough judaizing to justify setting up a tribunal for it. Many of the persecuted conversos reverted in despair to Judaism. The Inquisition turned the new Christians against their new faith.

The Inquisition, Netanyahu argues, had to make a case against the conversos and fabricated evidence to do it. To get at the truth, other contemporary sources cannot be ignored. Netanyahu finds that the conversos were sincere Christians, who had converted to avoid persecution after the anti-Jewish riots at the end of the fourteenth century (1391), and three generations later they were fully Christian. The genuineness of their beliefs was confirmed by Christian leaders including a cardinal, while the rabbis of North Africa agreed that conversos were real Christians and not secret Jews. After the conversos had been persecuted under the Inquisition, Jews bitterly wrote at the time they had had their just deserts for ever converting.

The point of the Inquisition directed against them was pure racism, based on envy of conversos (aka Jewish) application and success. They were often in high political office in local and national government. Even so, the Spanish were not generally anti-Jewish. Toledo and Cuidad Real were the worst cities, but the north seemed not to be against Jews in general. Again, it was the Inquisition that stimulated anti-Jewishness.

A reviewer of Kamen’s latest revision, in the Yeshiva University Commentator (62:11) writes:

The Spanish Inquisition as we discover in The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by Henry Arthur Francis Kamen, was never really that bad… people weren’t burned at the stake nearly as often as one might have thought… the Inquisition was a bumbling corrupt and inefficient group. … Most of The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision is mainly dedicated to portraying the Inquisition as something other than the malignant evil which is its historical face. In the end it succeeds more in confusing matters than clarifying, as Kamen is clearly carefully selecting sources and materials that support this viewpoint.

Earlier documentors of the Inquisition, now disparaged, were Canon Juan Antonio Llorente (1756-1823), Secretary to the Inquisition in Madrid from 1790-92, and the American Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909). Llorente stole documents when the French occupation of Spain came to an end and he was required to take refuge in Paris. Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909) was a tireless researcher, and single-minded collector of documents, who presents evidence from papal bulls, church councils, and letters between inquisitors, bishops, cardinals and popes, but said by Catholics to have been biased against them.

The once venerable BBC broadcast a revisionist documentary in 1994 based on Kamen’s work. A more recent example of pro-Christian BBC documentaries was the pair of them by Jeremy Bowen respectively about Jesus and Moses, both of which were devoid of proper scholarship, and merely pandered to belief. The BBC often puts out Christian propaganda of one kind or another, having always had a powerful religious department run by unscrupulous Christians and Jews. Though there are now far fewer practising Christians in the UK than there are non-Christians of different kinds, the BBC remains rigidly Christian in its religious output, with little more than tokenism in other directions.

Revisionist writer, Ellen Rice, tells us historians like Kamen verify that reports of the atrocities and legal irregularities were fabricated as Spain was beginning a historic reunification of Aragon and Castile. In the sixteenth century, Catholic Spain was the great continental power. Its Protestant enemies resorted to lies to help weaken Spanish might and control. The Inquisition was fiercely attacked with gross exaggeration.

Pierre Dominique says that the Spanish Inquisition condemned 178,382 persons of whom 16,376 were burned alive. In his History of the Inquisition, Canon Juan Antonio Llorente, who had access to the archives of the tribunals, according to Kamen, estimated that in Spain alone, from its foundation down to 1808, the total number of heretics burned alive totalled 31,912. Those condemned to death sometimes had their sentence commuted to lifetime imprisonment, and they were then burnt in effigy. 17,659 were burnt in effigy, and another 291,450 were penitents, a grand total of 341,021 victims. Later commentators have confused the 341,000 for the 31,912, grossly exaggerating the apparent burnings. It turns out that “only” 3000 to 5000 people died during the Inquisition’s 350 year history, according to Rice, so the Inquisition was not really too bad(!), though she does condescend to admit that 3000 to 5000 victims were too many. Another internet apologist reduces this to 880, precise to the nearest ten! It will not be long before the Inquisition becomes the Women's Institute, making cakes for the starving poor.

The Spanish Inquisition was not the Inquisition. Rice compares apples from one country, Spain, with pears from the rest of Europe in her sly attempt to water down the horror of the Church’s deeds. Rice compares these 3000 to 5000 deaths with the 150,000 documented witch burnings elsewhere in Europe over the same centuries. Doubtless Edward Peters is doing something similar when he says the tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition were “more restrained” than those elsewhere in Europe. It seems quite likely that the hounding of witches in the rest of Europe was worse even than the Spanish Inquisition, but Christianity can take no comfort from it.

And are we to suppose that “elsewhere in Europe” is not Catholic? Europe was entirely Catholic at the beginning of this period, and much of it remains to this day Catholic. Catholic Christians were responsible for many of these “150,000 documented witch burnings”. Even those that were perpetrated by Protestants were perpetrated by Christians. Rice uses the perpetual dishonesty of Christians. Frankly, such deviousness should make everyone doubt the sincerity of these supposed revisions that make out that everyone was wrong for 400 years, and the Inquisition were really friendly old judges trying to save people’s souls. Sure.

Protestant Propaganda?

The Spanish Inquisition began in fear and jealousy of the Jews. Benzion Netanyahu’s thesis in his recent large book is that the Inquisition was a tool of a racist conspiracy against the Jews, and perhaps others. Netanyahu is the father of the ambitious Israeli politician, Benjamin, a Zionist. Plus ça change! Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, having unified Spain, thought that laws forcing Jews to convert or leave the country were being thwarted by “conversos,” synagogue-going “Catholics”. They commissioned an investigation or Inquisition!

“Inquisition” of course means merely “inquiry”, something which in itself is hardly sinister.

Catholic Professor James Hitchcock

In the revisionist history, the “Inquisition Myth” began “exactly one year after the Protestant defeat at the Battle of Muhlberg at the hands of Ferdinand’s grandson, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V”. It seems “the Protestants fought with words because they could not win on the battlefield”. Here comes the God of love again, fighting and defeating the heretical believers in… the God of Love! You can sense the glee of the author writing about this noble Catholic victory. Protestants were plainly bad losers, resorting to pieces of paper instead of cannon balls and the rack. They were, however, Christians, and were just as good at barbarity as the Catholics. God rained his goodness equally on them both.

Revisionist, Edward Peters, says what the world thought about the Spanish Inquisition came from Protestant propaganda in the Low Countries during the war against the Spanish rulers. Antonio del Corro, in 1567, writing under the pseudonym “Reginaldus Gonsalvius Montanus”, published A Discovery and Plaine Declaration of Sundry Subtill Practices of the Holy Inquisition of Spain, which appeared in Latin in Heidelberg. Within a year it was translated into Dutch, English, French, and German and was enthusiastically welcomed.

Rice says Montanus, a “supposed” Inquisition victim, started a propaganda battle. This “character” painted Spaniards as barbarians who ravished women and sodomized young boys. Did he paint all Spaniards in this way, or was it simply that the inquisitors of the Spanish Inquisition were Spaniards? The propagandists soon created “hooded fiends” who tortured their victims in horrible devices like the “knife-filled Iron Maiden which never was used in Spain”. Rice hopes to suggest that torture also was a myth, because one particular instrument was not used. No, it was used in Germany, which also was subject to the Inquisition, but it was far too swift and relatively painless a death for the inquisitors.

Professor James Hitchcock, Professor of History at St Louis University and a member of the Advisory Board of the Catholic Educator’s Resource Center, speaks of “the English-speaking hatred of the Inquisition”, as if there is something peculiar about anyone hating anything devised by the Holy Church of Christ. He blames this curious attitude of antipathy to the righteous intentions of the Church on to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which Protestants would not stop reading alongside the bible. Moreover, the English did not understand the Roman legal system that the Inquisition used. In it, judges were not neutral but were charged with ferreting out the truth. Surely that means they had all the more reason to keep neutral until the evidence was compelling. Inquisitors were not neutral! Since when were Christians of any kind neutral?

Dutch Calvinists spared no effort, aided by their German and English allies, in painting a picture of the religion of Rome in the most negative of terms. The “Black Legend” was the result of Protestant propaganda. The Jesuit revisionist historian, Reverend Fr Brian Van Hove, SJ, of the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, writes:

Even if there was a Catholic version, a sort of White Legend, have you ever heard of it?

Peters has heard about a “White Legend:”

[Luis de] Paramo created a Catholic White Legend of the Inquisition intended to offset the Protestant and anti-Spanish Black Legends. The Paramo strand remained obvious in the most conservative and ideological of Catholic historians through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Professor Bettencourt, a French scholar, has heard of it too. He does not merely rely on the documents but, like Lea, goes back to the victims and the formalities of the Inquisition—the rites themselves, the emblems and pictures which tell so much, the tapestries, the actual methods of organization, Papal intentions. Among them is the Autos da Fé (Acts of Faith), actually public punishings of heretics in town squares. This is something the apologists cannot escape from, though they try to pretend it was merely a solemn Church ritual.

The public attended all right. Spectators were invited to participate by “shaving the new Christians”—setting fire to the hair or beards of those waiting at the stake to be burnt using burning brands on poles. The proceedings were written about and illustrated by contemporary artists including painters. Now we have to believe it was all fraudulent, according to the archival evidence! Those who wish to believe the revisionists uncritically will do so, like many Catholics unable to conceive of such monstrous behaviour by their holy Church. Bettencourt writes in a passage cited in his polemics by Van Hove:

In the first place, we do not share the idea according to which one should separate the “black legend” from “positive” research, that is, from the facts. The expression “black legend” was fashioned seventy years ago to devalue the critical tradition in circles opposed to the Spanish Inquisition practically from the time it began to function. In effect the chief arguments against the inquisitions in Spain, Portugal and Italy were restored to the two or three centuries prior to the appearance of liberal historiography and the conflict becomes part of the history and dynamic of the inquisitions. On the other hand, one can speak of the “white legend” constructed by the inquisitors themselves and whose arguments have been repeated—notably by a certain number of historians—even to our own day. The deeds of the inquisitors and of their adversaries are therefore tied to a conflict of representations… On this fundamental point we disagree with the work of Edward Peters.

Apparently Van Hove thought no one would notice that he was aiming to add to the “white legend”—the whitewashing of the Inquisition by Catholic apologists like himself! He wrote an article published in Rome, which was ridiculed by seventeen Italian newspapers. They said he was “whitewashing this ugly chapter”. Journalists insinuated irresponsible revisionism, placing the Inquisition alongside the Holocaust. Of course, revisionists, to retain any pretence of humanity, have no choice but to say Catholics should never whitewash the Inquisition. Yet, that is precisely what they are doing.

Catholic Professor James Hitchcock is utterly unrepentent about the Inquisition, illustrating the mentality that led to it. He shows no sign of any horror or concern that the Church should have acted as it did for 500 years. He admits that the image of the ecclesiatical court of the Inquisition was that often psychotic fanatics operated it. They tortured innocent people to obtain false confessions, then sent them off to be burnt at the stake. His reaction is to ask:

Were the defendants innocent of the charges against them, hence victims of malign hysteria, or were they heroes of free thought, hence in a legal sense guilty as charged?

He thinks the charges, and therefore the punishments, had some sort of Christian validity. Hitchcock believes it is possible to be guilty of the charge of thinking what you wish. Those who did this were “guilty as charged”, those who did not were innocent of the charges against them.

Hitchcock ignores the image and instead tries to give the usual impression that it was all propaganda, that modern historians, “mostly non-Catholics”, have exposed. They have shown the Inquisition was careful, precise, and on the whole rather moderate. The revisionist case is made out carefully:

• The inquisitors tended to be lawyers and bureaucrats keen to apply rules and procedures rather than express their personal feelings.
• Those rules and procedures were not in themselves unjust. Evidence had to be presented, the accused were allowed to defend themselves, and dubious evidence was discarded.
• Mostly the verdict was a “just” one in that it followed from the evidence.
• Cases were sometimes dismissed or the proceedings terminated at some point, when the inquisitors thought the evidence was unreliable.
• Torture was only used in a small minority of cases and was allowed only when there was strong evidence that the defendant was lying. In some instances (like the Italian district of Friulia), there is no evidence of torture at all.
• Only two to three percent of those convicted were executed. Many were sentenced to life in prison, but this was often commuted after a few years. The most common punishment was some form of public penance.
• The Spanish Inquisition did not persecute millions of people, as is often claimed, but approximately 44,000 between 1540 and 1700, of whom less than two per cent were executed.
• Joan of Arc was an irregular inquisitorial case rigged by her political enemies, the English. The Inquisition exonerated her posthumously.
• The Inquisition did prosecute witchcraft, as did almost every secular government, but the Roman inquisitors were beginning to get suspicious by the later sixteenth century.

Here then is the origin of the 880 figure mentioned above. Another excuse that Hitchcock found was that “Catholics were not alone in inflicting religious persecution”. So that makes it all right then! Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and James I (1603-1625) burned heretics, and most Protestant countries in Europe also did until the middle of the seventeenth century. Because “Protestant persecution of heresy tended to be spasmodic and dependent mainly on local conditions”, the Inquisition had a greater impact being “it was well organized” and universal throughout the Church. He is actually bragging about its efficiency!

So, the Inquisitions left an abundance of documents in many countries and places. They show the legal framework of the Inquisitions was Roman law. The revisionist take is that the Inquisition was a court system, and jurists keep good, clean, and abundant records, neatly written. Curialists were taught to be legible. The revisionist authors speak of how fair the system was, of how many people were released because of technicalities, or how the law was not abused because it was the law, and of how many opportunities the accused had of avoiding further prosecution.

It is quite fatuous for anyone to argue that the recorders of the courts of the Inquisition were going to record meticulously every mean thought and unpleasant deed of the inquisitors. They recorded what they had to, according to the law, not what happened in fact, knowing they had to maintian the appearance of legality. Depending on the Inquisitors’ own records is obvuiously a flawed methodology—one that is no more acceptable than believing the propaganda of the enemies of Spain and Rome, and one that no honest historian could accept.

Secular?

A popular revisionist excuse is that none of it had anything to do with the Church. Or alternatively, government and church were united, there was no difference among heretics, religious rebels, and traitors. They were considered all the same. It was not an unfair system, given the times. So, it was all the framework of the time. Hitchcock writes:

Religious uniformity and orthodoxy, and obedience to authority, were enforced by almost all political and religious institutions, considered essential for the very survival of society.

Fr Van Hove, SJ, wants us to believe that what led to the Inquisition was just the way people thought at the time. Everybody thought in black and white. He writes:

To criticize the Inquisition is to criticize every other institution and every other human enterprise. They were just people running it, and their consciousness was the one that prevailed everywhere.

When we read anything that a Jesuit says we would do well to remember the recommendation of Ignatius Loyola:

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

S Ignition of Loyola, Exercitia Spiritualia

Indeed, it is a fundamental principle of all Christian apologetics. Lactantius, a Christian apologist of the fourth century, wrote:

Among those who seek power and gain from religion, there will never be wanting an inclination to forge and lie for it.

cited by Conyers Middleton, Miscellaneous Works (1752)

Rice claims the Inquisition had a “secular character”, even repeating it in case you missed it the first time. Professor James Hitchcock contradicts Rice. The Church was responsible. The state of each country sanctioned the deaths through their legal systems, but the Church had urged the state to do so, and the Church was so powerful, even kings could not dissent. Never expect Christian apologists to agree. Disagreement on questions of fact is a sure sign that someone is lying.

The revisionists tell us inquisitors had a hard job. Inquisitors had to journey to the country to question people about heresy. Rice argues the Holy Office was understaffed(!) in country areas where one or two inquisitors had to cover a “thousand-mile territory”. Is she talking about Spain or Mexico? The full dimensions of Spain do not exceed this figure—Spain being about 600 miles square—so she has one or two inquisitors for the whole of Spain. And four out of five Spaniards were out of the reach of the inquisitors, living in a countryside that was inaccessible. Revisionist historians have discovered that the roads were bad in winter, and the summers were too hot for the urban prelates who were the inquisitors to make the journey. They want to add idleness to their sadism.

Even when they got there, no one liked them. “No one cared and no one spoke to them”. Is it surprising? Spanish peasants were concerned with survival. Correct religious belief was not uppermost in their minds. The revisionists say that heresy would not arise, and the village priest would tell his flock not to accuse anyone, and say nothing. Apparently the proof is that “it rings true”, always an excuse for the absence of evidence. Rice hopes to show the clerics as terribly hard done by. Good Catholics trying their best to do a difficult job. They could have done with a lot more help!

Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be lawyers. Nevertheless, the crime was heresy, and so it was plainly a religious offence. Heresy means to doubt or deny obstinately any of the Church’s doctrines. Doctrines which have often been disputed include the authority of the pope, purgatory, indulgences, the veneration of Mary and the saints, and transubstantiation—the doctrine that the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ are fully present in every fragment of consecrated bread.

The believer has to accept the whole deposit of the faith as proposed by the Church. The heretic accepts only such parts of it as commend themselves to their own approval. The heretical tenets may be involuntary or the will may freely incline the intellect to tenets declared false by the Church. Heresy thus willed is voluntary and imputable to the subject and carries with it a varying degree of guilt. It is called formal. Pertinacity, obstinate adhesion to a particular tenet is also required to make heresy formal. Anyone willing to submit to the Church’s decision remains a Catholic Christian at heart and his wrong beliefs are only transient errors and fleeting opinions.

Canon 751 says heresy applies only to people who have been baptized, but most Catholics, guided by the schemes of Augustine, are baptized as infants, when they cannot object to the doctrines they are being obliged to accept. Nor does the law say it only applies to baptized Catholics. Protestants are baptized and could be regarded as having been baptized into heresy. During the Protestant Reformation, people who had been born and raised Protestant were killed as heretics. For centuries, the Waldensians and other puritanical Christians, never baptized as Catholics, were persecuted as heretics. In Spain, Jews and Moslems were treated as heretics.

And how many of these lawyers were only lawyers and not clerics trained as lawyers? Education in those days was invariably a religious education, and functions like law were speciality subjects for clerics. Meticulous clerics were not going to record the whole caboozle as being legalized sadism and robbery. The documents of the Inquisition were bound to put every case in the fairest possible light. It is more foolish to believe official records uncritically than opposition propaganda. Any good historian does not seek to uphold one side or the other but to find the truth. Christians are never interested in finding the truth because they already know it.

These revisionists cannot seem to relate any of their findings to the rule of Christianity, the rule of the agents of the God of love, and His suffering Son on the cross. They expect you to forget the claims of the church. It claims moral authority. It has the authority of God Himself, and had been teaching everyone this moral way of thinking for 800 years when the Inquisition began. The basis of the Inquisition was S Augustine’s vision of an ideal society, with the Roman Catholic Church at its center, governing all aspects of human life. It required conformity in belief and practice, and so Augustine thought it was right the Catholic Church should force people to comply.

The institutions of the time were all Christian institutions, whether political or religious. Yet everyone thought in black and white terms. Everything was good or evil. No doubt, but they thought like that because the Church taught them to think like that, and encouraged them to continue to do so for another 500 years on pain of death by torture or incineration. The US leadership still thinks in the same simplistic way, and they are Protestants not Catholics. The Church can have its excuse, if it wants it, but it admits no moral right to expound to others.

The worst sort of Christian apology is to attempt to justify Christian horror by claiming other places were worse. Other nations had worse reputations than Spain in dealing with heretics. English Catholics suffered horribly under Protestant regimes. Irish Protestants suffered horribly at Catholic hands. They do not seem to notice that they were all Christians, supposedly motivated by the same bible that we still have. Is the torturing of God Himself, or His Son, the excuse for torturing anyone else?

The BBC documentary says torture was used, but it could not last more than 15 minutes and could never be used twice on the same person. Even if this were true, 15 minutes of torture is still torture and it can lead to permanent maiming and horrific pain. Could any one of these revisionist historians put up with being burnt for 15 seconds let alone 15 minutes. These excuses are exactly that, but these people called themselves Christians and claim moral authority. Nothing can excuse it. Nothing can reduce it or minimise it.

A Jesuit Apology?

Fr Van Hove, from Kamen, tells us that the “frequency of burnings in the earlier years disappeared in the eighteenth century, and in the twenty-nine years of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only four people were burnt”. These two kings reigned around the year 1800, when modern Europe was emerging, and the Inquisition was looking like a spent anachronism. So, the good Jesusit tries to make out that it never was much from its final exhausted years. It is pathetic.

He adds that “the execution rate over the period 1540-1700 was 1.83 per cent for relaxations in person and 1.65 per cent for relaxations in effigy… during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less than three people a year were executed by the Inquisition in the whole of the Spanish monarchy”. The two figures add up to 3.48 per cent—most of those killed in effigy dying in fact but in prison—and it tells us nothing about those who died under other circumstances, nor does it allow for the misery and destitution created among the families of those who were tortured and murdered. Hove blandly concedes that “although the death rate was low it was also heavily weighted against people of Jewish and Moorish origin”. He means that the victims were almost all Jews and Moors, the purpose of the Inquisition, at the outset, at any rate being to evict or kill off Jews and Moors, not Catholic Spaniards. It is all right then.

Spain for centuries had enjoyed “convivencia”, a pluralistic and harmonious coexistence of the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities. Hove ingenuously says:

Gradually, Spain moved away from harmony to a conflict society.

He passes over the fact that this happened because of the Christian destruction of “convivencia”—of which the Inquisition was the main tool—because Catholic Christianity insisted on being the only allowed belief. He plainly talks in his Jesuit inquisitor's manner when he speaks as if it was all utterly acceptable and quite understandable!

Some of the “conversos” were indeed only feigning Christianity, sometimes because they had never been taught much about it, or because they belonged to “underground” communities that were scattered around the peninsula.

Why should they do this? Because the Inquisition had obliged them to convert or get out penniless. To keep the possessions that they had they had no choice but to convert, so why should the process have been necessarily sincere? Many did sincerely convert, and indeed, many had converted long ago, but the inquisitors were not bothered about sincerity. Hove freely admits the “hidden issue was in effect racial, not doctrinal at all, because the Old Christian elite sometimes felt outdone by the New Christian elite. This whole topic was called limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”)”.

Frankly the converted Jews and Moors were more successful than the idle “old” Christians, who, therefore, wanted to get rid of anyone with Moorish and Jewish blood. They did it with the worst cruelty and intimidation. As in all these matters that the Church pretends innocence over, it need only have threatened excommunication and interdict and the situation could have been utterly different. The Spanish Inquisition was a dual responsibility of king and Church, and there is no way the Church can escape its responsibility. Hove tells us that the popes did question the kings of Spain, but the questioning was about the sharing of the loot taken in confiscated property, not about love or justice:

In 1546 the pope intervened and decreed that for a minimum period of ten years the Inquisition should not confiscate any property from the Moriscos.

Having got rid of them, which they did quickly enough in a frenzy of terror, the Inquisition had to find other targets. Kamen affirms that the Inquisition's authority was never defined:

The truth is that the Inquisition itself always refused to define its own jurisdiction clearly, since that would have been to set clear limits to its power.

The appearance of Protestantism outside Spain gave the Inquisition the new purpose of rooting out Erasmianism, Lutheranism, and any other Protestant tendencies. Hove also tells us that “many rural and mountainous areas of the country were only superficially Christianized anyway, and gross ignorance was the norm for clergy and people”. It meant there were always sufficient ignorant and unchristianized people for them to find, and they soon realized that there was a pecuniary advantage in picking on rich people to accuse. Hove admits the greed of the inquisitors, and that ought to alert him to what people with absolute power will to to gratify their greed. Hove tells us that the Inquisition in Spain was never given a regular budget for its work, making its vile practices even more necessary for its own survival.

The inquisitors, forever in search of revenue, were usually paid out of their confiscations, not by a salary meted out by the crown from other sources or taxation.

An anonymous converso of Toledo in 1538 directed a memorial to Charles V:

Your Majesty should above all provide that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the property of the condemned, because it is a repugnant thing if inquisitors cannot eat unless they burn.

Hove thinks it is natural to seize foreigners who do not share your own views and burn them to a cinder. The spirit of the Inquisition is not dead among Jesuits at least:

Foreign heretics appeared from time to time in autos held in Spain. The burning of Protestants at Seville in the mid-1500s shows a gradual increase in the number of foreigners seized, a natural phenomenon in an international seaport.

Hove, in astonishing denial like an alcoholic or any addict of something that they know is wrong or damaging, says “honest students of history” regard allegations of torture and the extraction of confessions by coercion “as mere propaganda”. He tries to make the Autos da Fé seem perfectly acceptable with the words:

Auto pageantry (remember how much Spaniards like bullfights!) was designed to instruct, impress, and inspire the crowds in the direction of religious orthodoxy. This was a form of popular education, in other words.

It turns out then for this Jesuit in denial that burning people publicly was simply to educate them. Naturally, it was, but this Jesuit plainly agrees with education like this. He wants us to think that the pageantry was all there was to it and the blackened corpses on the stakes were propaganda, but cannot, so he again tries dilution by telling us that sometimes no fires were lit.

Hove quotes Kamen as writing that “the Inquisition was actually a marginal phenomenon in the evolution of Spain, and that it touched the lives of relatively few ordinary Spaniards”. The same could be said of the persecution of any minority, thus justifying it by its unimportance. He might as well have written, the Jewish Holocaust was actually a marginal phenomenon in the evolution of twentieth century Europe, and touched the lives of relatively few ordinary Europeans. Kamen and Hove seems to be arguing that the Inquisition had to kill a majority of the Spanish to be really bad. Kamen writes:

What did Spaniards themselves think of the Inquisition? There can be no doubt that the people as a whole gave their ready support to its existence.

He seems here to be speaking in general. An initial welcome for the novelty might be true, but did the same people still welcome it after a century, two centuries, three centuries? After three centuries, they plainly did not because it ended with little uproar from all the Spaniards who ought to have been defending it. By then, “few had any notion of its history or any knowledge of its actual operation”, wrote Peters. Even so, at the outset, Kamen says public authorities were pressurized to conform and the protests of individuals stilled, and “some prominent Spaniards called for evangelization, not Inquisition”. Then the Toledo writer introduced above wrote, only 50 years after its institution, that “if the Catholic kings were still alive, they would have reformed it twenty years ago, given the change in conditions”. He adds there is also evidence that some of the most sophisticated people of Spain condemned the Inquisition and its practices. It hardly sounds to have been overwhelmingly popular even in the beginning. Hove again cites Kamen:

In the early years of the Inquisition, considerable evidence came to light not simply of judaizing but also of messianism on one hand and irreligious scepticism on the other. Many conversos were ironically condemned for beliefs that orthodox Judaism would have regarded as heretical, such as denying the immortality of the soul. Dissent among the conversos did not necessarily imply any drift towards Judaism… the environment was the comfortable patronage afforded by Old Christian nobility.

The fact is that the Christians whether in the Church or the nobility were not acting according to the tenets of their own God. Did they ever? Yet despite their sorry record, they continue to claim to be good!

Peters writes:

The distinguishing feature of the Inquisition—its absolute secrecy—was the one which made it more open to abuses than any public tribunal.

It seems that secrecy was not in the original remit but it was by the beginning of the sixteenth century, in other words within about twenty years of its inception. Even the Instructions of the Inquisition, although set down in print, were for restricted circulation only and not for the public eye. Even prisoners upon leaving were bound to secrecy:

On finally leaving the gaol they were obliged to take an oath not to reveal anything they had seen or experienced in the cells: small wonder if this absolute secrecy gave rise to the most blood-curdling legends about what went on inside.

It does not seem to occur to these apologists for Christianity that there must have been good reasons for this secrecy, and the best of them is that the “blood curdling legends” were true. Anyway, the general public were ignorant of the methods and procedure of the Inquisition. Peters says this helped the tribunal by creating reverential fear in the minds of evildoers, but later led to the rise of fear and hatred based on “a highly imaginative idea” of how the tribunal worked. Unless, of course, it was a true idea.

Moral Authority

These Inquisition revisers are in a permanent state of denial. Hitchcock shows his astonishing attitude when he refers to “the good news that the Inquisition was not as bad” as many people thought. He writes:

They refuse to hear it. Post-conciliar Catholicism has spawned in many people a permanent attitude of obsequiousness before the secular world, and they know no other stance except that of continuous apology. Their view of the present Church requires them to believe that the Church of the past centuries was really a nightmare from which we are finally waking up.

The Spanish scholars say the inquisitional courts of the Church were more just and more lenient than civil courts and than religious courts elsewhere in Europe at the time. All religious courts were run by the Church! Prisoners in Spanish secular courts, knowing this would sometimes blaspheme to be sent to the courts of the Inquisition where conditions were better. Who is defending Medieval secular courts or prisons? Secular courts and prisons were for criminals. Only in the heads of people turned insane by their fancies could heresy be called a crime. The inquisitors saved the Church the obloquy of murder by passing condemned heretics to the civil authorities for execution of the penalties imposed.

Europe was a large and varied continent with parts more civilized than others. The Church objected to civilization and attacked civilized people as a menace to its superstitious hold on them. H C Lea points out that Civil Law was reviving and that was even more menacing to the Church. By the middle of the twelfth century, it was eagerly being studied in all the great centers of learning. Classic tests entered Europe from the Spanish Caliphate and from the east via the Crusaders and were translated into Latin. Justice—superior to the confused mess of canon law, and feudal custom—based on good sense and facilitating human interaction made some begin to wonder about Papal decretals and even Holy Writ as the source of justice.

Apologists tell us hopefully that three popes—Sixtus IV (1471-1484), Innocent VIII (1484-1492), and Alexander VI (1492-1503)—tried to moderate the undue severity of the early Spanish Inquisition. This immediately belies their general case that the Inquisition was a pussy cat—some popes noticed it was severe! The Catholic sovereigns had been empowered to establish the Inquisition by Sixtus IV in 1478, but, by 1482, complaints of grievous abuses reached Sixtus IV in Rome, and were well founded. The inquisitors had unjustly imprisoned many people, subjected them to cruel tortures, declared them false believers, and sequestrated the property of the executed. The pope, Sixtus IV, appointed Torquemada first Grand Inquisitor of Spain in 1483, fifteen years before he died in 1498 at 78 years old. Innocent VIII (1484-1492) confirmed the act of his predecessor. As papal representative and the highest official of the inquisitorial court, thereafter Torquemada directed the entire business of the Inquisition in Spain.

The revisionists give no evidence that the Inquisition was tempered by these Papal strictions. According to the liars for Christ, Fray Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor whose name is a symbol of ruthless cruelty, checked the excessive zeal of the earlier inquisitors in many ways, including the limiting and mitigating of torture. Perhaps he did, but it was only because the first inquisitors were so blatantly abominable that they were threatened with deposition by the pope. Torquemada might have been mild in comparison, but that does not make him a nice torturer as the apologists want their simple readers to think.

Other Inquisitors of his own choosing were accountable to him. In 1492, within a few weeks of the fall of Grenada, Torquemada urged the Spanish sovereigns to compel all the Jews either to become Christians or to leave Spain. The Jews agreed to pay the Spanish government 30,000 ducats if left unmolested. Torquemada appeared before Ferdinand, bearing a crucifix aloft, and pronouncing:

Judas Iscariot sold Christ for 30 pieces of silver. Your Highness is about to sell him for 30,000 ducats. Here He is. Take Him and sell Him.

Much has been written of the inhuman cruelty of Torquemada. That the contemporary Spanish chronicler, Sebastian de Olmedo praises Torquemada as “the hammer of heretics”, and the saviour of Spain, need not be surprising. Who can assume he dared say anything less complementary?

Llorente computes that during Torquemada’s office (1483-98) 8800 suffered death by fire and 9,654 were punished in other ways. From 1481 to 1517, 13,000 were burnt alive out of 30,000 punished. The Jewish historian Graetz says that Torquemada, in the fourteen years (1485-1498) burnt at least 2000 Jews as impenitent sinners. Most historians now say, in Torquemada’s entire tenure as Grand Inquisitor, 100,000 prisoners passed before his various tribunals throughout Spain. Of this number, less than two percent were executed. They give the number of people killed from 1481 to 1504, when Isabella died, as about 2000.

The Catholic apologists think that, on their own figures, almost 2000 people executed, mainly by burning, by the Inquisition in 15 years is moderate! They do not say what the other 98,000—6,500 each year—suffered before they were released. In Barcelona alone, from 1488 to 1498, 23 people were executed—one prisoner out of 20—meaning that 500 people were examined in ten years in that one city. One revisionist, Edward O’Brien, without a grain of humanity in him, concludes:

Torquemada is not the monster of the Black Legend.

Hitchcock blames vested interests for keeping the traditional image, alive. Those who do it resent the Church’s claim to moral authority, and use the false claims of the Inquisition uphold the charge of hypocrisy. A Church which has the blood of millions on its hands, even if they all did not die, has no moral authority at all. Who are the popes and inquisitors who boldly stated?

It is not for man, but for Him who searcheth the reins and heart, to sit in judgment on the guilt which attaches to an heretical conscience.

If there were any, they were all guilty of heresy and burnt to death! One writer sums up:

The Magisterium cannot be authoritative because it has been guilty of error in the past. The Church was wrong about Galileo, wrong about the Inquisition…

Further Reading

• More on the persecution of heretics
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Spanish Inquisition

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