Excusing the Inquisition 2
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
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!
