The Inquisition
Sooner or later, any discussion of apologetics
with Fundamentalists will address the Inquisition. To non-Catholics it
is a scandal; to Catholics, an embarrassment; to both, a confusion. It
is a handy stick for Catholic-bashing, simply because most Catholics seem
at a loss for a sensible reply. This tract will set the record straight.
There have actually been several different inquisitions.
The first was established in 1184 in southern France as a response to the
Catharist heresy. This was known as the Medieval Inquisition, and it was
phased out as Catharism disappeared.
Quite separate was the Roman Inquisition, begun
in 1542. It was the least active and most benign of the three variations.
Separate again was the infamous Spanish Inquisition,
started in 1478, a state institution used to identify conversos—Jews
and Moors (Muslims) who pretended to convert to Christianity for purposes
of political or social advantage and secretly practiced their former religion.
More importantly, its job was also to clear the good names of many people
who were falsely accused of being heretics. It was the Spanish Inquisition
that, at least in the popular imagination, had the worst record of fulfilling
these duties.
The various inquisitions stretched through the
better part of a millennia, and can collectively be called "the Inquisition."
The Main Sources
Fundamentalists writing about the Inquisition rely
on books by Henry C. Lea (1825–1909) and G. G. Coulton (1858–1947). Each
man got most of the facts right, and each made progress in basic research,
so proper credit should not be denied them. The problem is that they did
not weigh facts well, because they harbored fierce animosity toward the
Church—animosity that had little to do with the Inquisition itself.
The contrary problem has not been unknown. A few
Catholic writers, particularly those less interested in digging for truth
than in diffusing a criticism of the Church, have glossed over incontrovertible
facts and tried to whitewash the Inquisition. This is as much a disservice
to the truth as an exaggeration of the Inquisition’s bad points. These
well-intentioned, but misguided, apologists are, in one respect, much like
Lea, Coulton, and contemporary Fundamentalist writers. They fear, while
the others hope, that the facts about the Inquisition might prove the illegitimacy
of the Catholic Church.
Don’t Fear the Facts
But the facts fail to do that. The Church has nothing
to fear from the truth. No account of foolishness, misguided zeal, or cruelty
by Catholics can undo the divine foundation of the Church, though, admittedly,
these things are stumbling blocks to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
What must be grasped is that the Church contains
within itself all sorts of sinners and knaves, and some of them obtain
positions of responsibility. Paul and Christ himself warned us that there
would be a few ravenous wolves among Church leaders (Acts 20:29; Matt.
7:15).
Fundamentalists suffer from the mistaken notion
that the Church includes only the elect. For them, sinners are outside
the doors. Locate sinners, and you locate another place where the Church
is not.
Thinking that Fundamentalists might have a point
in their attacks on the Inquisition, Catholics tend to be defensive. This
is the wrong attitude; rather, we should learn what really happened, understand
events in light of the times, and then explain to anti-Catholics why the
sorry tale does not prove what they think it proves.
Phony Statistics
Many Fundamentalists believe, for instance, that
more people died under the Inquisition than in any war or plague; but in
this they rely on phony "statistics" generated by one-upmanship among anti-Catholics,
each of whom, it seems, tries to come up with the largest number of casualties.
But trying to straighten out such historical confusions
can take one only so far. As Ronald Knox put it, we should be cautious,
"lest we should wander interminably in a wilderness of comparative atrocity
statistics." In fact, no one knows exactly how many people perished through
the various Inquisitions. We can determine for certain, though, one thing
about numbers given by Fundamentalists: They are far too large. One book
popular with Fundamentalists claims that 95 million people died under the
Inquisition.
The figure is so grotesquely off that one immediately
doubts the writer’s sanity, or at least his grasp of demographics. Not
until modern times did the population of those countries where the Inquisitions
existed approach 95 million.
Inquisitions did not exist in Northern Europe,
Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or England, being confined mainly to southern
France, Italy, Spain, and a few parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The Inquisition
could not have killed that many people because those parts of Europe did
not have that many people to kill!
Furthermore, the plague, which killed a third of
Europe’s population, is credited by historians with major changes in the
social structure. The Inquisition is credited with few—precisely because
the number of its victims was comparitively small. In fact, recent studies
indicate that at most there were only a few thousand capital sentences
carried out for heresy in Spain, and these were over the course of several
centuries.
What’s the Point?
Ultimately, it may be a waste of time arguing about
statistics. Instead, ask Fundamentalists just what they think the existence
of the Inquisition demonstrates. They would not bring it up in the first
place unless they thought it proves something about the Catholic Church.
And what is that something? That Catholics are sinners? Guilty as charged.
That at times people in positions of authority have used poor judgment?
Ditto. That otherwise good Catholics, afire with zeal, sometimes lose their
balance? All true, but such charges could be made even if the Inquisition
had never existed and perhaps could be made of some Fundamentalists.
Fundamentalist writers claim the existence of the
Inquisition proves the Catholic Church could not be the Church founded
by our Lord. They use the Inquisition as a good—perhaps their best—bad
example. They think this shows that the Catholic Church is illegitimate.
At first blush it might seem so, but there is only so much mileage in a
ploy like that; most people see at once that the argument is weak. One
reason Fundamentalists talk about the Inquisition is that they take it
as a personal attack, imagining it was established to eliminate (yes, you
guessed it) the Fundamentalists themselves.
Not "Bible Christians"
They identify themselves with the Catharists (also
known as the Albigensians), or perhaps it is better to say they identify
the Catharists with themselves. They think the Catharists were twelfth-century
Fundamentalists and that Catholics did to them what they would do to Fundamentalists
today if they had the political strength they once had.
This is a fantasy. Fundamentalist writers take
one point—that Catharists used a vernacular version of the Bible—and conclude
from it that these people were "Bible Christians." In fact, theirs was a curious religion that apparently (no one
knows for certain) came to France from what is now Bulgaria. Catharism
was a blend of Gnosticism, which claimed to have access to a secret source
of religious knowledge, and of Manichaeism, which said matter is evil.
The Catharists believed in two gods: the "good" God of the New Testament,
who sent Jesus to save our souls from being trapped in matter; and the
"evil" God of the Old Testament, who created the material world in the
first place. The Catharists’ beliefs entailed serious—truly civilization-destroying—social
consequences.
Marriage was scorned because it legitimized sexual
relations, which Catharists identified as the Original Sin. But fornication
was permitted because it was temporary, secret, and was not generally approved
of; while marriage was permanent, open, and publicly sanctioned.
The ramifications of such theories are not hard
to imagine. In addition, ritualistic suicide was encouraged (those who
would not take their own lives were frequently "helped" along), and Catharists
refused to take oaths, which, in a feudal society, meant they opposed all
governmental authority. Thus, Catharism was both a moral and a political
danger.
Even Lea, so strongly opposed to the Catholic Church,
admitted: "The cause of orthodoxy was the cause of progress and civilization.
Had Catharism become dominant, or even had it been allowed to exist on
equal terms, its influence could not have failed to become disastrous."
Whatever else might be said about Catharism, it was certainly not the same
as modern Fundamentalism, and Fundamentalist sympathy for this destructive
belief system is sadly misplaced.
The Real Point
Many discussions about the Inquisition get bogged
down in numbers and many Catholics fail to understand what Fundamentalists
are really driving at. As a result, Catholics restrict themselves to secondary
matters. Instead, they should force the Fundamentalists to say explicitly
what they are trying to prove.
However, there is a certain utility—though a decidedly
limited one—in demonstrating that the kinds and degrees of punishments
inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition were similar to (actually, even lighter
than) those meted out by secular courts. It is equally true that, despite
what we consider the Spanish Inquisition’s lamentable procedures, many
people preferred to have their cases tried by ecclesiastical courts because
the secular courts had even fewer safeguards. In fact, historians have
found records of people blaspheming in secular courts of the period so
they could have their case transferred to an ecclesiastical court, where
they would get a better hearing.
The crucial thing for Catholics, once they have
obtained some appreciation of the history of the Inquisition, is to explain
how such an institution could have been associated with a divinely established
Church and why it is not proper to conclude, from the existence of the
Inquisition, that the Catholic Church is not the Church of Christ. This
is the real point at issue, and this is where any discussion should focus.
To that end, it is helpful to point out that it
is easy to see how those who led the Inquisitions could think their actions
were justified. The Bible itself records instances where God commanded
that formal, legal inquiries—that is, inquisitions—be carried out to expose
secret believers in false religions. In Deuteronomy 17:2–5 God said: "If
there is found among you, within any of your towns which the Lord your
God gives you, a man or woman who does what is evil in the sight of the
Lord your God, in transgressing his covenant, and has gone and served other
gods and worshiped them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven,
which I have forbidden, and it is told you and you hear of it; then you
shall inquire diligently [note that phrase: "inquire diligently"], and
if it is true and certain that such an abominable thing has been done in
Israel, then you shall bring forth to your gates that man or woman who
has done this evil thing, and you shall stone that man or woman to death
with stones."
It is clear that there were some Israelites who
posed as believers in and keepers of the covenant with Yahweh, while inwardly
they did not believe and secretly practiced false religions, and even tried
to spread them (cf. Deut. 13:6–11). To protect the kingdom from such hidden
heresy, these secret practitioners of false religions had to be rooted
out and expelled from the community. This directive from the Lord applied
even to whole cities that turned away from the true religion (Deut. 13:12–18).
Like Israel, medieval Europe was a society of Christian kingdoms that were
formally consecrated to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is therefore quite understandable
that these Catholics would read their Bibles and conclude that for the
good of their Christian society they, like the Israelites before them,
"must purge the evil from the midst of you" (Deut. 13:5, 17:7, 12). Paul
repeats this principle in 1 Corinthians 5:13.
These same texts were interpreted similarly by
the first Protestants, who also tried to root out and punish those they
regarded as heretics. Luther and Calvin both endorsed the right of the
state to protect society by purging false religion. In fact, Calvin not
only banished from Geneva those who did not share his views, he permitted
and in some cases ordered others to be executed for "heresy" (e.g. Jacques
Gouet, tortured and beheaded in 1547; and Michael Servetus, burned at the
stake in 1553). In England and Ireland, Reformers engaged in their own
ruthless inquisitions and executions. Conservative estimates indicate that
thousands of English and Irish Catholics were put to death—many by being
hanged, drawn, and quartered—for practicing the Catholic faith and refusing
to become Protestant. An even greater number were forced to flee to the
Continent for their safety. We point this out to show that the situation
was a two-way street; and both sides easily understood the Bible to require
the use of penal sanctions to root out false religion from Christian society.
The fact that the Protestant Reformers also created
inquisitions to root out Catholics and others who did not fall into line
with the doctrines of the local Protestant sect shows that the existence
of an inquisition does not prove that a movement is not of God. Protestants
cannot make this claim against Catholics without having it backfire on
themselves. Neither can Catholics make such a charge against Protestants.
The truth of a particular system of belief must be decided on other grounds.
NIHIL OBSTAT:
I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane Carr, STL, Censor Librorum, August 10, 2004
IMPRIMATUR:
In accord with 1983 CIC 827
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
+Robert H. Brom, Bishop of San Diego, August 10, 2004
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