Excusing the Inquisition 4
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
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.
