Excusing the Inquisition 3
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
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.
