Excusing the Inquisition 6
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
A Jesuit Apology?
Fr Van Hove, from Kamen, tells us that the “frequency of burnings in the earlier years disappeared in the eighteenth century, and in the twenty-nine years of the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV only four people were burnt”. These two kings reigned around the year 1800, when modern Europe was emerging, and the Inquisition was looking like a spent anachronism. So, the good Jesusit tries to make out that it never was much from its final exhausted years. It is pathetic.
He adds that “the execution rate over the period 1540-1700 was 1.83 per cent for relaxations in person and 1.65 per cent for relaxations in effigy… during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less than three people a year were executed by the Inquisition in the whole of the Spanish monarchy”. The two figures add up to 3.48 per cent—most of those killed in effigy dying in fact but in prison—and it tells us nothing about those who died under other circumstances, nor does it allow for the misery and destitution created among the families of those who were tortured and murdered. Hove blandly concedes that “although the death rate was low it was also heavily weighted against people of Jewish and Moorish origin”. He means that the victims were almost all Jews and Moors, the purpose of the Inquisition, at the outset, at any rate being to evict or kill off Jews and Moors, not Catholic Spaniards. It is all right then.
Spain for centuries had enjoyed “convivencia”, a pluralistic and harmonious coexistence of the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities. Hove ingenuously says:
Gradually, Spain moved away from harmony to a conflict society.
He passes over the fact that this happened because of the Christian destruction of “convivencia”—of which the Inquisition was the main tool—because Catholic Christianity insisted on being the only allowed belief. He plainly talks in his Jesuit inquisitor's manner when he speaks as if it was all utterly acceptable and quite understandable!
Some of the “conversos” were indeed only feigning Christianity, sometimes because they had never been taught much about it, or because they belonged to “underground” communities that were scattered around the peninsula.
Why should they do this? Because the Inquisition had obliged them to convert or get out penniless. To keep the possessions that they had they had no choice but to convert, so why should the process have been necessarily sincere? Many did sincerely convert, and indeed, many had converted long ago, but the inquisitors were not bothered about sincerity. Hove freely admits the “hidden issue was in effect racial, not doctrinal at all, because the Old Christian elite sometimes felt outdone by the New Christian elite. This whole topic was called limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”)”.
Frankly the converted Jews and Moors were more successful than the idle “old” Christians, who, therefore, wanted to get rid of anyone with Moorish and Jewish blood. They did it with the worst cruelty and intimidation. As in all these matters that the Church pretends innocence over, it need only have threatened excommunication and interdict and the situation could have been utterly different. The Spanish Inquisition was a dual responsibility of king and Church, and there is no way the Church can escape its responsibility. Hove tells us that the popes did question the kings of Spain, but the questioning was about the sharing of the loot taken in confiscated property, not about love or justice:
In 1546 the pope intervened and decreed that for a minimum period of ten years the Inquisition should not confiscate any property from the Moriscos.
Having got rid of them, which they did quickly enough in a frenzy of terror, the Inquisition had to find other targets. Kamen affirms that the Inquisition's authority was never defined:
The truth is that the Inquisition itself always refused to define its own jurisdiction clearly, since that would have been to set clear limits to its power.
The appearance of Protestantism outside Spain gave the Inquisition the new purpose of rooting out Erasmianism, Lutheranism, and any other Protestant tendencies. Hove also tells us that “many rural and mountainous areas of the country were only superficially Christianized anyway, and gross ignorance was the norm for clergy and people”. It meant there were always sufficient ignorant and unchristianized people for them to find, and they soon realized that there was a pecuniary advantage in picking on rich people to accuse. Hove admits the greed of the inquisitors, and that ought to alert him to what people with absolute power will to to gratify their greed. Hove tells us that the Inquisition in Spain was never given a regular budget for its work, making its vile practices even more necessary for its own survival.
The inquisitors, forever in search of revenue, were usually paid out of their confiscations, not by a salary meted out by the crown from other sources or taxation.
An anonymous converso of Toledo in 1538 directed a memorial to Charles V:
Your Majesty should above all provide that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the property of the condemned, because it is a repugnant thing if inquisitors cannot eat unless they burn.
Hove thinks it is natural to seize foreigners who do not share your own views and burn them to a cinder. The spirit of the Inquisition is not dead among Jesuits at least:
Foreign heretics appeared from time to time in autos held in Spain. The burning of Protestants at Seville in the mid-1500s shows a gradual increase in the number of foreigners seized, a natural phenomenon in an international seaport.
Hove, in astonishing denial like an alcoholic or any addict of something that they know is wrong or damaging, says “honest students of history” regard allegations of torture and the extraction of confessions by coercion “as mere propaganda”. He tries to make the Autos da Fé seem perfectly acceptable with the words:
Auto pageantry (remember how much Spaniards like bullfights!) was designed to instruct, impress, and inspire the crowds in the direction of religious orthodoxy. This was a form of popular education, in other words.
It turns out then for this Jesuit in denial that burning people publicly was simply to educate them. Naturally, it was, but this Jesuit plainly agrees with education like this. He wants us to think that the pageantry was all there was to it and the blackened corpses on the stakes were propaganda, but cannot, so he again tries dilution by telling us that sometimes no fires were lit.
Hove quotes Kamen as writing that “the Inquisition was actually a marginal phenomenon in the evolution of Spain, and that it touched the lives of relatively few ordinary Spaniards”. The same could be said of the persecution of any minority, thus justifying it by its unimportance. He might as well have written, the Jewish Holocaust was actually a marginal phenomenon in the evolution of twentieth century Europe, and touched the lives of relatively few ordinary Europeans. Kamen and Hove seems to be arguing that the Inquisition had to kill a majority of the Spanish to be really bad. Kamen writes:
What did Spaniards themselves think of the Inquisition? There can be no doubt that the people as a whole gave their ready support to its existence.
He seems here to be speaking in general. An initial welcome for the novelty might be true, but did the same people still welcome it after a century, two centuries, three centuries? After three centuries, they plainly did not because it ended with little uproar from all the Spaniards who ought to have been defending it. By then, “few had any notion of its history or any knowledge of its actual operation”, wrote Peters. Even so, at the outset, Kamen says public authorities were pressurized to conform and the protests of individuals stilled, and “some prominent Spaniards called for evangelization, not Inquisition”. Then the Toledo writer introduced above wrote, only 50 years after its institution, that “if the Catholic kings were still alive, they would have reformed it twenty years ago, given the change in conditions”. He adds there is also evidence that some of the most sophisticated people of Spain condemned the Inquisition and its practices. It hardly sounds to have been overwhelmingly popular even in the beginning. Hove again cites Kamen:
In the early years of the Inquisition, considerable evidence came to light not simply of judaizing but also of messianism on one hand and irreligious scepticism on the other. Many conversos were ironically condemned for beliefs that orthodox Judaism would have regarded as heretical, such as denying the immortality of the soul. Dissent among the conversos did not necessarily imply any drift towards Judaism… the environment was the comfortable patronage afforded by Old Christian nobility.
The fact is that the Christians whether in the Church or the nobility were not acting according to the tenets of their own God. Did they ever? Yet despite their sorry record, they continue to claim to be good!
Peters writes:
The distinguishing feature of the Inquisition—its absolute secrecy—was the one which made it more open to abuses than any public tribunal.
It seems that secrecy was not in the original remit but it was by the beginning of the sixteenth century, in other words within about twenty years of its inception. Even the Instructions of the Inquisition, although set down in print, were for restricted circulation only and not for the public eye. Even prisoners upon leaving were bound to secrecy:
On finally leaving the gaol they were obliged to take an oath not to reveal anything they had seen or experienced in the cells: small wonder if this absolute secrecy gave rise to the most blood-curdling legends about what went on inside.
It does not seem to occur to these apologists for Christianity that there must have been good reasons for this secrecy, and the best of them is that the “blood curdling legends” were true. Anyway, the general public were ignorant of the methods and procedure of the Inquisition. Peters says this helped the tribunal by creating reverential fear in the minds of evildoers, but later led to the rise of fear and hatred based on “a highly imaginative idea” of how the tribunal worked. Unless, of course, it was a true idea.
Moral Authority
These Inquisition revisers are in a permanent state of denial. Hitchcock shows his astonishing attitude when he refers to “the good news that the Inquisition was not as bad” as many people thought. He writes:
They refuse to hear it. Post-conciliar Catholicism has spawned in many people a permanent attitude of obsequiousness before the secular world, and they know no other stance except that of continuous apology. Their view of the present Church requires them to believe that the Church of the past centuries was really a nightmare from which we are finally waking up.
- Peter Martyr (d 1252)
- John Capistran (d 1456)
- Peter Arbues (d 1485)
- Pius V (d 1572)
The Spanish scholars say the inquisitional courts of the Church were more just and more lenient than civil courts and than religious courts elsewhere in Europe at the time. All religious courts were run by the Church! Prisoners in Spanish secular courts, knowing this would sometimes blaspheme to be sent to the courts of the Inquisition where conditions were better. Who is defending Medieval secular courts or prisons? Secular courts and prisons were for criminals. Only in the heads of people turned insane by their fancies could heresy be called a crime. The inquisitors saved the Church the obloquy of murder by passing condemned heretics to the civil authorities for execution of the penalties imposed.
Europe was a large and varied continent with parts more civilized than others. The Church objected to civilization and attacked civilized people as a menace to its superstitious hold on them. H C Lea points out that Civil Law was reviving and that was even more menacing to the Church. By the middle of the twelfth century, it was eagerly being studied in all the great centers of learning. Classic tests entered Europe from the Spanish Caliphate and from the east via the Crusaders and were translated into Latin. Justice—superior to the confused mess of canon law, and feudal custom—based on good sense and facilitating human interaction made some begin to wonder about Papal decretals and even Holy Writ as the source of justice.
Apologists tell us hopefully that three popes—Sixtus IV (1471-1484), Innocent VIII (1484-1492), and Alexander VI (1492-1503)—tried to moderate the undue severity of the early Spanish Inquisition. This immediately belies their general case that the Inquisition was a pussy cat—some popes noticed it was severe! The Catholic sovereigns had been empowered to establish the Inquisition by Sixtus IV in 1478, but, by 1482, complaints of grievous abuses reached Sixtus IV in Rome, and were well founded. The inquisitors had unjustly imprisoned many people, subjected them to cruel tortures, declared them false believers, and sequestrated the property of the executed. The pope, Sixtus IV, appointed Torquemada first Grand Inquisitor of Spain in 1483, fifteen years before he died in 1498 at 78 years old. Innocent VIII (1484-1492) confirmed the act of his predecessor. As papal representative and the highest official of the inquisitorial court, thereafter Torquemada directed the entire business of the Inquisition in Spain.
The revisionists give no evidence that the Inquisition was tempered by these Papal strictions. According to the liars for Christ, Fray Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor whose name is a symbol of ruthless cruelty, checked the excessive zeal of the earlier inquisitors in many ways, including the limiting and mitigating of torture. Perhaps he did, but it was only because the first inquisitors were so blatantly abominable that they were threatened with deposition by the pope. Torquemada might have been mild in comparison, but that does not make him a nice torturer as the apologists want their simple readers to think.
Other Inquisitors of his own choosing were accountable to him. In 1492, within a few weeks of the fall of Grenada, Torquemada urged the Spanish sovereigns to compel all the Jews either to become Christians or to leave Spain. The Jews agreed to pay the Spanish government 30,000 ducats if left unmolested. Torquemada appeared before Ferdinand, bearing a crucifix aloft, and pronouncing:
Judas Iscariot sold Christ for 30 pieces of silver. Your Highness is about to sell him for 30,000 ducats. Here He is. Take Him and sell Him.
Much has been written of the inhuman cruelty of Torquemada. That the contemporary Spanish chronicler, Sebastian de Olmedo praises Torquemada as “the hammer of heretics”, and the saviour of Spain, need not be surprising. Who can assume he dared say anything less complementary?
Llorente computes that during Torquemada’s office (1483-98) 8800 suffered death by fire and 9,654 were punished in other ways. From 1481 to 1517, 13,000 were burnt alive out of 30,000 punished. The Jewish historian Graetz says that Torquemada, in the fourteen years (1485-1498) burnt at least 2000 Jews as impenitent sinners. Most historians now say, in Torquemada’s entire tenure as Grand Inquisitor, 100,000 prisoners passed before his various tribunals throughout Spain. Of this number, less than two percent were executed. They give the number of people killed from 1481 to 1504, when Isabella died, as about 2000.
The Catholic apologists think that, on their own figures, almost 2000 people executed, mainly by burning, by the Inquisition in 15 years is moderate! They do not say what the other 98,000—6,500 each year—suffered before they were released. In Barcelona alone, from 1488 to 1498, 23 people were executed—one prisoner out of 20—meaning that 500 people were examined in ten years in that one city. One revisionist, Edward O’Brien, without a grain of humanity in him, concludes:
Torquemada is not the monster of the Black Legend.
Hitchcock blames vested interests for keeping the traditional image, alive. Those who do it resent the Church’s claim to moral authority, and use the false claims of the Inquisition uphold the charge of hypocrisy. A Church which has the blood of millions on its hands, even if they all did not die, has no moral authority at all. Who are the popes and inquisitors who boldly stated?
It is not for man, but for Him who searcheth the reins and heart, to sit in judgment on the guilt which attaches to an heretical conscience.
If there were any, they were all guilty of heresy and burnt to death! One writer sums up:
The Magisterium cannot be authoritative because it has been guilty of error in the past. The Church was wrong about Galileo, wrong about the Inquisition…
