Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
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.
