Posted on 10/12/2014 3:22:48 PM PDT by Heart-Rest
We do not recall these instances of anti-Catholicism to foster more animosity or violence, but recall them as part of our history, a history that, like so many others, included the targeting of ethnic and religious groups for persecution.
From left to right—Bishop John Hughes, New York, 1844; cartoon from Anti-Catholic book published by the Ku Klux Klan, 1926; Burning of St. Augustine Church, Philadelphia, 1844; Fr. James Coyle, Birmingham Alabama, murdered, 1921.
You have, no doubt, heard the children’s rhyme: “Sticks and stones may break my bones / But names will never hurt me.” That is not exactly true. For in the history of the Church in America, Catholics have been wounded by both physical violence and hate speech. This article will examine episodes of violence against American Catholics, considering the sticks and stones, the broken bones, and the words that encouraged such violence.
If the presence of anti-Catholic violence in American history is unknown to many, it is for good reason. We as Catholics do not usually like to talk about being a minority; we do not like to talk about persecution. For generations, our immigrant ancestors and their descendants fought to be considered “100% American,” not “hyphenated” Americans: Irish-American, German-American, Polish-American, or Italian-American. We Catholics have spent decades trying to assimilate into “White, Anglo Saxon, Protestant” (“WASP”) America and have, consequently, downplayed our distinctiveness. We wanted to fit in, and to achieve the American dream—to get good jobs, get a college education, and move to the suburbs.
In considering some episodes of anti-Catholicism, it should be noted that not all violence against Catholics was motivated exclusively by religion. In many cases, religious misunderstanding blended with nativism, and xenophobia, to bring about a toxic reaction to the United States’ Catholic newcomers. Consequently, anti-Catholic groups—that included the Know-Nothing party, the American Protective Association, and the Ku Klux Klan—espoused a form of bigotry, both religious and racially/ethnically motivated.
It should also be acknowledged that most manifestations of anti-Catholicism have not been violent. Much of anti-Catholicism in this country from the 18th century to today was more or less implicit: Protestants considered Catholics “the other.” Protestants often didn’t have Catholic friends, they (and Catholics!) frowned on Catholic-Protestant marriages, and non-Catholics refused to hire or promote Catholic workers. Other times, anti-Catholicism was muted, but real; non-Catholics questioned whether Catholics were even Christians, calling the Church the “Whore of Babylon” (of Revelation 17), and considered the pope the “Anti-Christ,” or taught unequivocally that all Catholics go to hell.
Other times, anti-Catholicism was more overt. In colonial times, laws forbade Catholics from voting, becoming lawyers, and teachers. Catholics, even in Maryland, which had at first tolerated them, demanded a “double tax” on Catholic property; parents could even be fined for sending their children to Europe to be educated as Catholics. The propagation of anti-Catholic ideas manifested itself in various ways: in newspapers, books, and pamphlets, in sermons, in laws, in popular discussion and debate, and, occasionally, in violence and property destruction.
The examples of violence that follow are admittedly among the most pronounced and outrageous forms of anti-Catholicism, but we should not be led to believe that anti-Catholicism was only the experience of a few. As a corrective, it is important to remember that in the 19th century, Catholic-Protestant debates and discussions, often acrimonious, took center stage. They were on everyone’s mind. When the anti-Catholic novel, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosure—supposedly written by a former nun, telling stories of affairs between priests and nuns, and the murder of the children they conceived—was published in 1836, it became a near overnight sensation. By the start of the Civil War, it had sold 300,000 copies. Historians of this era claim it was among the most widely distributed book in America prior to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the popular anti-slavery book.
Anti-Catholic violence has taken the form of protest against Catholics who were taking their place in the public square. Catholics, it was feared, could subvert the American Republic, especially its democratic processes, and its “public” schools. When Franciscan priests and brothers first came to Cincinnati, Ohio, from Austria in 1844, onlookers did not know what to think of them, walking through the streets in their brown habits. But some recognized them immediately as “Catholic monks,” potential anti-American subversives. In his journal, one of the first Franciscans in Cincinnati, Fr. William Unterthiner, described the animosity directed at Catholics, especially priests, in mid-1840s Cincinnati:
The Protestants here are even worse (than in other places in the U.S.); so goes the protest. Today … some people threw wooden sticks at us, and cursed us (as we walked down the street). It is certainly true that a person is free to choose one, or even no religion, but one would still be very mistaken if he believed that Catholics are allowed to live unhindered.
As Catholic immigration increased throughout the 1840s and 1850s, concern mounted that Catholics were taking over America’s public schools—an attempt that would eliminate the Bible (particularly the King James version) from everyday classroom use. The challenge offered by Catholics to “public” schools, that were de facto Protestant schools, brought Catholics and Protestants into frequent conflict.
The so-called “Eliot School Rebellion,” which occurred in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1859, proves a dramatic example. The state law that required the Ten Commandments to be recited (always using the King James Bible) in every classroom every morning, pitted Catholics, who viewed non-Catholics’ Bibles as false translations, against Protestant teachers, parents, and schoolmates. Ten-year-old Thomas Whall, a Catholic, was asked to take his turn leading the recitation of the Ten Commandments. When Whall refused because of his Catholic faith (and his desire to only read from the Douay-Rheims translation, an approved Catholic translation), he was disciplined. Whall had been urged by his parish priest not to recite Protestant prayers, nor read from the King James Bible.
A few days later, when Whall refused again, his teacher struck him with a rattan stick for half an hour until he was bleeding; he refused to give in, and his fellow Catholic classmates cheered him on. The school’s principal demanded that Catholic children, who refused to recite the commandments, leave the school; hundreds left in protest. The “rebellion” helped extend the parochial school system in Massachusetts. Within a year, a Catholic school was established in Whall’s parish with an enrollment of over 1,000.
Not all anti-Catholic violence was physical. Sometimes it resulted in the destruction of property. These episodes represent the ferocity of anti-Catholic violence, though without physical assault or loss of life.
In 1834, an anti-Catholic mob burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, near Boston. The convent school there educated primarily upper-class Protestant girls, and worries of the Protestant elites’ attraction to Catholicism festered. This, together with the rumor of an Ursuline sister being held in the convent against her will, and the anti-Catholic preaching of Rev. Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, incited a riot.
An angry mob gathered outside the convent, calling for the release of the sister, but the Ursuline mother superior threatened the crowd: “The Bishop has 20,000 of the vilest Irishmen at his command, and you may read your riot act till your throats are sore, but you’ll not quell them.” The crowd broke down doors and windows to enter the convent, and began to ransack the buildings. The sisters and their students rushed out the back of the convent, and hid in the garden. At about midnight, the rioters set fire to the building, burning it to the ground. Of the 13 men arrested and charged with arson, all but one was acquitted. The governor pardoned him in response to a petition signed by 5,000 Bostonians. Distrust of sisters in convents led eventually to a number of state legislatures proposing “convent inspection laws,” authorizing the warrantless searches of Catholic buildings—convents, monasteries, rectories, and churches—for weaponry, and for young women supposedly seduced into the convent and held against their will.
In 1844, two Catholic churches were burned in Philadelphia after it was rumored Catholics were insisting on the removal of the Bible from public schools. The same scene might have been repeated in New York City, but New York’s Bishop, John Hughes, warned: “If a single Catholic church is burned in New York, the city would become a second Moscow,” a reference to the 1812 burning of Moscow in which its own citizens set fire to the city as Napoleon’s soldiers closed in.
In 1854, as the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., was being constructed, nine men, associated with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party, sneaked up to the base of the monument to steal a stone that had been engraved “Rome to America.” The stone, which was to have been placed inside the monument, along with other stones given as gifts from foreign governments, had been shipped from the Vatican. The men carried the stone to a boat waiting at the tidal basin, smashed it into pieces, and dumped it in the middle of the Potomac River. For them, the stone indicated the threat of the Catholic Church’s takeover of the U.S. government, a much talked about, but very unlikely, threat. The identity of the conspirators was shrouded in mystery; no one was ever convicted of the crime. In 1982, a replica of the stone, given by a priest from Spokane, Washington, was installed in the monument by the National Park Service.
The attack on the Shrine of Our Lady of Juan del Valle in San Juan, Texas, provides a final, modern example. In 1970, a non-denominational preacher intentionally flew a small airplane into the church while Mass was being celebrated. No one was injured except the kamikaze pilot who died. While the overall property loss was estimated at $1.5 million, many believed it a miracle that no one else was hurt or died in the tragedy. A new shrine was dedicated in 1980 where the previous church had stood.
Infrequently, physical violence and death were the consequence of anti-Catholicism. In 1853, Pope Pius IX sent Archbishop Gaetano Bedini to visit the U.S. and report back to him on the state of the Catholic Church in America. Because many U.S. Protestants viewed the pope as sinister, and as an enemy of freedom, they blamed his representative.
In Cincinnati, hundreds of protesters marched towards the cathedral where Bedini was staying, carrying signs, a scaffold, and an effigy of the archbishop. The signs read “Down with Bedini!”; “No Priests, No Kings”; and “Down with the Papacy!” Fearing an attack on the residence, the police attempted to turn back the demonstrators. In the ensuing melee, one protester was killed, 15 were wounded, and 63 were arrested. Most of the city’s residents supported the protesters, blaming the police for exercising brutality. Those who had been arrested were released, the charges were dropped, and an investigation of the police commenced. As Bedini continued to tour the country, violent disturbances erupted in Cleveland, Louisville, Baltimore, Boston, and New York. Fearing further violence in New York, Bedini was secretly transported by way of a rowboat to the steamship on which he would depart for Europe.
Not long after Bedini returned to Italy, anti-Catholic mob violence struck Louisville, Kentucky. In an incident known as “Bloody Monday” (August 6, 1855), concern about Catholic influence over the electoral process contributed to a mob attack on Irish Catholic neighborhoods, resulting in 22 deaths, scores of injuries, and widespread property destruction. Five people were later indicted; none was convicted.
Religious and racial prejudice combined in the deep South, resulting in the murder of a priest in 1921. Father James Coyle, priest of Birmingham, Alabama, was shot and killed on his rectory front porch. Coyle had performed the wedding of a recent convert to Catholicism, the daughter of a Methodist minister and Ku Klux Klan member, to a Puerto Rican Catholic man. The Methodist minister’s daughter had become interested in Catholicism as a young girl; she converted at age 18 and was received into the Catholic faith by Father Coyle. Only a few months later, Coyle witnessed the girl’s marriage. When her father found out about the clandestine wedding, he confronted Coyle and shot him. The minister was charged with the priest’s murder, but was acquitted by a jury who found him not guilty by reason of insanity. In 2012, Bishop William H. Willimon of the United Methodist Church presided over a service of reconciliation and forgiveness in Birmingham, asking for forgiveness for the role his church had played in the death of Father Coyle.
In recent years the threat of anti-Catholic violence has surrounded fidelity to the Church’s teaching on marriage and family life. In 2002, Mary Stachowicz, the parish secretary of now Bishop, Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, was raped and murdered. Her killer stated to police that he attacked Stachowicz after she confronted him about his gay lifestyle. Bishop Paprocki, in public addresses on the Church’s approach to same sex attraction, relates the story of his former secretary’s murder in order to condemn all forms of violence based on bigotry. He feels compelled to speak about this form of anti-Catholic violence because it has been almost completely ignored by the media. Bishop Paprocki notes:
A Google search on the Internet for the name “Matthew Shepard” at one time produced 11.9 million results. Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old college student who was savagely beaten to death in 1998 in Wyoming. His murder has been called a hate crime because Shepard was gay. A similar search on the Internet for the name “Mary Stachowicz” yielded 26,800 results.
Mary Stachowicz was also brutally murdered, also the victim of a hate crime, yet, her death went unnoticed. Perhaps, this is a signal that, as in the past, various forms of anti-Catholic violence are still viewed by some as acceptable, or at least, not worthy of notice.
Why examine these episodes of hate? Why not let them remain hidden in scarcely-read tomes of Catholic history? We do not recall these instances of anti-Catholicism to foster more animosity or violence, but recall them as part of our history, a history that, like so many others, included the targeting of ethnic and religious groups for persecution. Though the Church is often seen in overblown narratives as a perpetrator of violence, responsible for the horrors of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Holocaust, the Church has also been afflicted by violence motivated by religion. If history teaches us anything, it is that the memory of the past is so often selective.
Yet, this discussion should not end by recalling the role of religious belief in contributing to violence, but should remember the role of religious faith in promoting love. Fundamental to the Church’s teaching is the importance of humanity’s dignity as sons and daughters of the Creator. Violence, if even partly motivated by religion, contradicts what St. John taught us about God—“God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16)—a divine love that humanity is called to mirror and extend.
By your own logic, your own comment about this very thread is "weak."
The Calverts did found Maryland as a Catholic Colony, but the majority of the citizens were CoE. Calvert did establish a government of religious toleration, but several times it was "overthrown" and the Catholics were persecuted. When Calvert s authority was reasserted the persecution subsided. A number of years later the Puritans were facing persecution in Massachusetts, Calvert offered them Sanctuary and religious freedom.
One enraged London tobacco merchant laid siege to the then-capital, St. Mary’s City, due to the colony seizing one of his ships. He purchased a ship, outfitted it with cannon, christened it “Reformation,” then set sail. He succeeded in taking over the government there for a period of time. His name was Richard Ingle. There’s some wild, little-known history in that state. Of course there is here, too.
I saw NOT ONE Christian in that post. Those protestants listed are not Christians, those Catholics listed are not Christians.
I have met a lot of non Christians that claim to be Christian, or some denomination of Christian, but the fruits of their walk speak volumes otherwise.
I am sure that many “Christian” anti Catholics have plied the Devil’s trade in attacking the Catholic Church and other churches as whom better to use for the job?
It is important that we recognize the enemy for who they are: Eph 6:12.
A large part of what here is called anti Catholic is specifically anti Christian. I must say I have a keen appreciation for the Catholic Church’s current (as in my lifetime) unwillingness to give in to political correctness as compared to many main stream Protestant churches that have shown their hand now as not being Christian. I.E. birth control, homosexuality, abortion, etc.
The British Jewish historian Henry Kamen, a well respected scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, has calculated a total of some 2,000 victims along its four centuries of existence. Kamen adds that “it is interesting to compare the statistics on sentences to death of civilians and inquisitorial tribunals between the 15th and 18th centuries in Europe: for every one hundred death sentences handed down by courts, the Inquisition (Catholic) issued ONE”.
Another historian, Ricardo García Cárcel, estimated that the total number of processed by the Inquisition throughout its history was about 150,000. By applying the percentage of executed appears in the causes of 1560-1700, nearly 2% - can be said that in the worst cases the number of executed persons probably approached three thousand (3,000).
According to American Professor Philip Wayne Powell, were executed just over 100 people in the 250 years in which it was acting the Inquisition in the Spanish America.
In Germany and France, the wars of religion lasted more than one century with a balance of hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Spanish Inquisition, together with the religious reform sponsored by the Catholic Kings, avoided the fratricidal wars are extended to Spain between Christians who leak so much blood in the rest of Europe.
Sir James Stephen calculates that in 300 years there was in Protestant England 264,000 sentenced to death for various crimes. About 800 per year (more than two per day).
Luther, founder of Protestantism, in 1525 writes to the nobles: “kill as many farmers you can: wound, paste, disgorging to himself.” Happy if you die in it, you die in obedience to the word divine. More than one hundred thousand peasants perished. Luther also demanded that the heretics must be condemned without hearing them... “a sample of the terrible and bigoted Protestant Inquisition. (Amazing parallel with current Islamofascism).
Luther wrote in July 1525 in his open letter about his book against the peasants:
“If you believe that this answer is too hard and that its only purpose is to let them shut up by violence, I reply that this is true - a rebel does not deserve to be replied with reasons, because does not accept them.” The appropriate response is a punch that causes you to bleed nose. The farmers don’t want to hear... need to open their ears with bullets until blow up their heads. Who does not want to hear the word of God when is told with goodness has to listen to the executioner when it arrives with his axe...I don’t want to hear or know nothing of mercy.”
About Jews in his famous lectures of desktop said: “throw them to the fire, it would be much better if one could send them the hell fire.. and this must be done in honor of our Lord and of Christianity.” Their houses must be splintered and destroyed... be removed their books of prayers and Talmudes and also all their Bible; be prohibited from their rabbis teaching, under the penalty of death, from now on. And if all this were not enough, expelled them from the country as rabid dogs.”
And yet the Catholic Church quite often has been accused of anti-Semitism dismissing the words asking of forgiveness of the Pope Juan Pablo II. Who of the Lutheran Church has apologized to the Jews?
In Protestant Saxony, blasphemy entailed the death penalty. In Switzerland, Calvin sent Miguel Servet to be burned alive, a Catholic theologian and a doctor who discovered the pulmonary blood circulation. Calvin eliminated anyone for theological disagreements, as they were other many victims of the religious intolerance of the tyrant of Geneva.
In Germany, more than 100,000 witches were burned. Even children seven years old and the dying elderly couldn’t escape the firing pyre. A single judge, burned in 16 years 800 witches (an average of 50 people a year).
In 1560 the Scottish Parliament decreed death penalty against all Catholics.
Here are some articles of the English code for Ireland: “The Catholic who teaches other Catholic or Protestant will be hanged”. “If a Catholic acquires land, all Protestant has the right to deprive him.” “Perpetual banishment to every Catholic priest; those who evaded it, be half hanged alive and then dismembered”.
The Calvinist communities of Paris, Orleans, Rouen, Lyon, Angey at general synod in 1559, enacted death penalty to the heretics. Let’s not forget that United States owes its foundation to Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England.
The Spanish Inquisition was not free of the ideas of his time, and participated in general cruelty. But keep in mind the following points: the number of Protestants condemned to death by the Catholic Inquisition, from 1520 to 1820 when was ended, or in 300 years, according to the German Protestant researcher who specialized in this issue, Schafer, was 220; of them, only 12 were burned. You see: is even less than one per year.
What happens with the image of the Spanish Inquisitor stood front of endless rows of pyres with doomed? ... It becomes that he is lying.
“It’s a really indisputable that the life of a human being is sacred and nobody is entitled on the basis of any book or idea or religious creed, nor based on the Gospel and Christianity, to destroy a life which is God’s image, since a single life lost by intolerance cries out to heaven like the blood of Abel.”
However, as José Ortega y Gasset, ”a man he is and his circumstances”, therefore we have to judge the facts within its historical context, the codes of ethics and morals of societies in the centuries XIII, XIV, XV and XVI can not be judged by the standards of the 20th century, although it means not to condone them or justify them.
The Spaniards, had an almost pathological compulsion to document all the happenings in their kingdoms. There are detailed records of the trials of the Inquisition. In the “Archivo de Indias” in Sevilla you can find millions of “bundles” with more detailed memory of the historical facts of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, including those that could be used against them. He studied and tried to save the Indian languages, giving them a written form for their conservation. The only forms of art destroyed by Spaniards were some of the idols associated with the execution of human sacrifice.
Despite the “black legend” aimed to discredit the Inquisition as well as the work of civilizing of the Catholic Spain, resorting to historical distortions that are accepted as facts without real critical analysis, as the American Professor Philip Powell said in his book “Tree of hate” on the Spain of the XV, XVI and XVII: “also is instructive to the roots of the thought of a century of Spanish gold and intellectuality that prevailed for nearly two centuries, reaching “to the greatest heights along almost all the lines of the cultural activities, certainly a true golden age.”
There’s no denying that there were cases of abuses of the Inquisition by prelates without scruples; But if we put things in their proper historical perspective and do a small study of society at the time and his way of thinking, in order to present the truth of the Catholic Inquisition is not what has been presented and is a undeniable fact that the Protestant Reformation also executed many more lives and by means much more brutal and which is not mentioned giving the impression that the Catholic Church was the major killer of their theological peaceful opponents, although it was not so.
During the 300 years that was in function of the courts of inquisition in America, slightly more than 300 were sentenced to death (one per year), an often common criminals committed blasphemy to be judged by the courts of the Inquisition rather than the civil courts which were much more severe.
As we can see, the Inquisition in Spain was much more human and civilized than the methods used by Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Castro. You could not expected anything else from the Catholic Spain which gave the world the modern international law with the father Francisco de Vitoria and at the University of Salamanca and a lofty humanist group Catholic Theologians gave the world the first code in defense of the human rights of the American Indian, and that planted the seed of the Gospel together with schools, universities and hospitals in the new world.
References
“La Inquisición Española” por Henry Kamen Henry Kamen, historiador y profesor ingles que ha dado clases y conferencias a través de las universidades de Gran Bretaña, Estados Unidos y España siendo profesor invitado a la Universidad de Chicago habiendo escrito varios importantes libros sobre la España de los Siglos XV, XVI, y XVII.
“Tree of Hate” por el profesor Emérito de Historia de la Universidad de California en Santa Barbara. Philip Wayne Powell
“Characters of the Inquisition” por William Thomas Walsh
“The Last Crusade: Isabella of Spain” por William Thomas Walsh
(*) Bedouelle, Guy. La Fuerza de la Palabra. Domingo de Guzmán. Editorial San Esteban, 1987.
Thank you for the advice, I just ordered a coy of his book. It is nice to see someone that is not a Catholic presenting what the Catholics have been saying right along.
This "Bible Thing" over the truly insignificant differences between the "King James" and the "Douay-Rheims" was (and is) tragic, because it (IMHO) led eventually to the end of the Bible in the Public Schools, where even in my time in them, (1940's) the OT especially was an integral part of the school day. Those making the "Church-State Separation" argument and applying it to the Public Schools seized upon this controversy (IMHO) and perverted to their campaign for God-less schools.
Violent measures against Catholics were especially vicious during the 19th C, and were really only ended by violent counter-measures, as against the KKK. To this day, lower-class Protestants (see Belfast) are most ignorantly vituperative about the issue, matched in the still-occuring occasional violence by lower-class Catholics. This is not to say that rigorous upper-class religious partisans do not exist, but they are rarely violent!
Muslims, OTOH, cheerfully dispatch all Christians, the high and the low of all denominations, with equal barbaric cruelty and glee. Can we not oppose them together?
I highly recommend Philip W Powell “Tree of Hate” and Isabelle of Spain, the Last Crusader, by William Thomas Walsh. Both are American writer and historian.
Thank you, Right now I have a pile of books about a foot tall on the night stand that I need to get to. If I get a chance I will add those to the list, or see if the library has them.
you’re right
it the fault of the Jews...
(Can you sink any lower in the defense of the inquisition?)
I'll have to get to work on that.
Ignorance or bigotry? I repeat, neither Jews or Muslims were under Spanish Inquisition jurisdiction. As mater of fact, many of the most famous and respected inquisitors were “conversos”’, Jews converted to the Catholic faith.
Jews reached out to Muslims to bring about the Arab invasion in the first place. They also actively and eagerly collaborated with Muslims during the invasion itself. There are many accounts of fortified Spanish cities being mysteriously captured without a fight, as if an enemy within had opened the gates, otherwise facilitated entry or undermined the possibility of resistance.
Probably they were expelled from Spain for the same reasons they were expelled several centuries before from France and England and we never hear any complaints over those expulsions.
According to historian Jean Dumont:
A “LITTLE FACT” about the Inquisition process.
The communication of charges could not be made to the accused until after a supplementary procedural act, one of those “little facts” as Stendhal would say, that clearly proves the true spirit of an institution: in this case opposed to the spirit of injustice and - it bears repeating - repression at any price.
Prior to the “notification” of charges, the accusers were once again called before the tribunal. Once again, they had to declare under oath whether or not they persisted in maintaining their accusations. And this, a point of great interest, apart and away from the inquisitors and before two priests who had no connection with the Inquisition.
Obviously the purpose of this was to allow the witnesses against the accused to more easily retract, because of doubts or possible errors, their accusations in a sort of free confession.
But current historians fail to mention this “little fact”, the need for a confirmation of the accusation on “neutral” territory, a practice which is unknown to our modern day judges. And this played an important role in the Instructions of Valdes (question 30).
FAMOUS DEFENSES
On the other hand- Henry Kamen, a Jewish British historian, the Inquisition has usefully and exactly delineated the means of defense available to the accused.
First of all, he had the assistance of an advocate, generally, but not always, appointed by the Inquisition, who for all that did not perform his duty less conscientiously. The fee of the advocate was paid from the sequestered goods of the accused. If these were insufficient, the Inquisition paid the advocate from confiscated goods taken from condemned individuals and placed in the royal treasury. (Preliminary instructions of Torquemada, q 16.)
Next followed the right to produce witnesses for acquittal. The right to bring forth proof that the witnesses making the accusation were inspired by enmity, which if demonstrated would lead to the challenging of witnesses - a right liberally accorded as we have noted.
And beyond this, the possibility of invoking attenuating circumstances (drunkedness, youth, old age, stupidity, etc.). And finally the ability to call back even the judges themselves because of personal animosity; other judges then being appointed by the Suprema after a process of arbitrage between a representative of the accused and one of the tribunal (process Carranza).
Let us add that the Instructions of Valdes were greatly concerned with giving these means of defense their greatest possible efficacy. They encouraged the accused to call “a great number of witnesses, in order that the most qualified among them could be examined.” And they stressed to the inquisitors that they should “consider the fact that the accused, being incarcerated, could not do all that he might consider necessary and all that he would have done if he had been able to prepare his defense in freedom.” These are significant considerations.
Let us further note that some of the great advocates were able to win fame and reputation in the defense of those accused by the Inquisition. Thus, the advocate Gutierre de Palma gained his reputation in the defense of the conversos of Toledo And again, Dr. Palacios Rubios, to whom the Catholic Kings confided the editing of the code for the colonization of the Americas, and who published a sort of manual of defense before the Inquisition, the Allegatio in materia haeresis which went through many editions.
I have found both to be in abundance here.
:)
repititious excuses to lessen the effect of murders that cannot be denied
and cannot be denied they were done with glee and celebration
to even strike a coin to celebrate the deaths of the unbelievers
and the creation of holidays to celebrate the deaths of those who had the Bible correct, and the torturing of those who were innocent
and that is what you are defending
That sentence as worded, beginning with the word "if" scarcely makes sense.
The last half is one of those declarative type of things - which the later following paragraphs do not establish.
But nice bluff. I'm sure it will fool a few, perhaps as we'll as it seem to have distracted yourself...
Your boy Dumont was semi- of the "white legend" crowd.
He only picked on them a little -- just enough to make it out to be he wasn't one of them.
Then -- he plunged straight towards reveling in how 'glorious' it all was.
Fairly typical RC pom-pom waving cheerleader. yeah team.
And there we have it, folks.
Proof positive that Free Republic management (and many of the denizens of this portion of the interwebs) is [drum roll, please]
Any pro-RCC article published here vanishes -- poof -- sent into the aether, banished to the Siberia of the web-archive of the world... never to be seen or heard from again
Even the very existence of this thread yet more proof positive of your suppositions.
But just what until the 'mods' get back from Dairy Queen or wherever they traipse off to when JimRob aint' watchin' 'em. They are always slinking away -- shirking their duties (which they don't get paid for). When the cat's away -- the mice will play-play-play.
When the big guy get's them back on track -- then that giant sucking sound you will be hearing will include this thread too --- riding the train to everlasting exile (and torment -- don't forget the torment) all at the hands of "the mods" -- who simply push a button to make all pro-Roman Catholicism articles (and all whiny complaints about how mistreated they all are) go bye-bye.
BBC: THE SPANISH INQUISITION IS 99% MYTH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qhlAqklH0do
Is the BBC another apologist of the Spanish Inquisition?
Please leave my DQ foot-long chili-cheese dogs out of this discussion.
you said onions.
i asked for onions.
they didn't have any onions -- "all out" they said.
quit hassling me over this
ok -- so it looks like i'm engaging in "mind reading"
...but we both know the real truth about this
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