Excusing the Inquisition 5
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
Secular?
A popular revisionist excuse is that none of it had anything to do with the Church. Or alternatively, government and church were united, there was no difference among heretics, religious rebels, and traitors. They were considered all the same. It was not an unfair system, given the times. So, it was all the framework of the time. Hitchcock writes:
Religious uniformity and orthodoxy, and obedience to authority, were enforced by almost all political and religious institutions, considered essential for the very survival of society.
Fr Van Hove, SJ, wants us to believe that what led to the Inquisition was just the way people thought at the time. Everybody thought in black and white. He writes:
To criticize the Inquisition is to criticize every other institution and every other human enterprise. They were just people running it, and their consciousness was the one that prevailed everywhere.
When we read anything that a Jesuit says we would do well to remember the recommendation of Ignatius Loyola:
We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.S Ignition of Loyola, Exercitia Spiritualia
Indeed, it is a fundamental principle of all Christian apologetics. Lactantius, a Christian apologist of the fourth century, wrote:
Among those who seek power and gain from religion, there will never be wanting an inclination to forge and lie for it.cited by Conyers Middleton, Miscellaneous Works (1752)
Rice claims the Inquisition had a “secular character”, even repeating it in case you missed it the first time. Professor James Hitchcock contradicts Rice. The Church was responsible. The state of each country sanctioned the deaths through their legal systems, but the Church had urged the state to do so, and the Church was so powerful, even kings could not dissent. Never expect Christian apologists to agree. Disagreement on questions of fact is a sure sign that someone is lying.
The revisionists tell us inquisitors had a hard job. Inquisitors had to journey to the country to question people about heresy. Rice argues the Holy Office was understaffed(!) in country areas where one or two inquisitors had to cover a “thousand-mile territory”. Is she talking about Spain or Mexico? The full dimensions of Spain do not exceed this figure—Spain being about 600 miles square—so she has one or two inquisitors for the whole of Spain. And four out of five Spaniards were out of the reach of the inquisitors, living in a countryside that was inaccessible. Revisionist historians have discovered that the roads were bad in winter, and the summers were too hot for the urban prelates who were the inquisitors to make the journey. They want to add idleness to their sadism.
Even when they got there, no one liked them. “No one cared and no one spoke to them”. Is it surprising? Spanish peasants were concerned with survival. Correct religious belief was not uppermost in their minds. The revisionists say that heresy would not arise, and the village priest would tell his flock not to accuse anyone, and say nothing. Apparently the proof is that “it rings true”, always an excuse for the absence of evidence. Rice hopes to show the clerics as terribly hard done by. Good Catholics trying their best to do a difficult job. They could have done with a lot more help!
Inquisitors did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be lawyers. Nevertheless, the crime was heresy, and so it was plainly a religious offence. Heresy means to doubt or deny obstinately any of the Church’s doctrines. Doctrines which have often been disputed include the authority of the pope, purgatory, indulgences, the veneration of Mary and the saints, and transubstantiation—the doctrine that the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ are fully present in every fragment of consecrated bread.
The believer has to accept the whole deposit of the faith as proposed by the Church. The heretic accepts only such parts of it as commend themselves to their own approval. The heretical tenets may be involuntary or the will may freely incline the intellect to tenets declared false by the Church. Heresy thus willed is voluntary and imputable to the subject and carries with it a varying degree of guilt. It is called formal. Pertinacity, obstinate adhesion to a particular tenet is also required to make heresy formal. Anyone willing to submit to the Church’s decision remains a Catholic Christian at heart and his wrong beliefs are only transient errors and fleeting opinions.
Canon 751 says heresy applies only to people who have been baptized, but most Catholics, guided by the schemes of Augustine, are baptized as infants, when they cannot object to the doctrines they are being obliged to accept. Nor does the law say it only applies to baptized Catholics. Protestants are baptized and could be regarded as having been baptized into heresy. During the Protestant Reformation, people who had been born and raised Protestant were killed as heretics. For centuries, the Waldensians and other puritanical Christians, never baptized as Catholics, were persecuted as heretics. In Spain, Jews and Moslems were treated as heretics.
And how many of these lawyers were only lawyers and not clerics trained as lawyers? Education in those days was invariably a religious education, and functions like law were speciality subjects for clerics. Meticulous clerics were not going to record the whole caboozle as being legalized sadism and robbery. The documents of the Inquisition were bound to put every case in the fairest possible light. It is more foolish to believe official records uncritically than opposition propaganda. Any good historian does not seek to uphold one side or the other but to find the truth. Christians are never interested in finding the truth because they already know it.
These revisionists cannot seem to relate any of their findings to the rule of Christianity, the rule of the agents of the God of love, and His suffering Son on the cross. They expect you to forget the claims of the church. It claims moral authority. It has the authority of God Himself, and had been teaching everyone this moral way of thinking for 800 years when the Inquisition began. The basis of the Inquisition was S Augustine’s vision of an ideal society, with the Roman Catholic Church at its center, governing all aspects of human life. It required conformity in belief and practice, and so Augustine thought it was right the Catholic Church should force people to comply.
The institutions of the time were all Christian institutions, whether political or religious. Yet everyone thought in black and white terms. Everything was good or evil. No doubt, but they thought like that because the Church taught them to think like that, and encouraged them to continue to do so for another 500 years on pain of death by torture or incineration. The US leadership still thinks in the same simplistic way, and they are Protestants not Catholics. The Church can have its excuse, if it wants it, but it admits no moral right to expound to others.
The worst sort of Christian apology is to attempt to justify Christian horror by claiming other places were worse. Other nations had worse reputations than Spain in dealing with heretics. English Catholics suffered horribly under Protestant regimes. Irish Protestants suffered horribly at Catholic hands. They do not seem to notice that they were all Christians, supposedly motivated by the same bible that we still have. Is the torturing of God Himself, or His Son, the excuse for torturing anyone else?
The BBC documentary says torture was used, but it could not last more than 15 minutes and could never be used twice on the same person. Even if this were true, 15 minutes of torture is still torture and it can lead to permanent maiming and horrific pain. Could any one of these revisionist historians put up with being burnt for 15 seconds let alone 15 minutes. These excuses are exactly that, but these people called themselves Christians and claim moral authority. Nothing can excuse it. Nothing can reduce it or minimise it.
