Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition 4
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
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.
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