[The] Spanish Inquisition

Question: What was the Church’s involvement with the Spanish Inquisition? It seems clothed in shadows. — Dorothy Perez, San Antonio

Answer: This brief column cannot cover all the details and provide extensive references. However, the Spanish Inquisition was run by the secular government, not by the Church. The Church did have its own inquisition, distinct from the secular government of Spain. Most people preferred the Church’s inquisition and often appealed cases there since it was more clement and just by their estimation.

The term “inquisition” simply refers to an inquiry into charges leveled against a person, usually of heresy. They were questioned as to their true views rather than be condemned on hearsay or rumors. If a person was found guilty of heresy, they were permitted to recant or clarify their views. If they would not, the solutions ranged from exile and imprisonment to, in rarer cases, death.

In an age of secularism and wider religious liberty (though it is increasingly threatened), such severe measures strike moderns as excessive and reactionary. However, until recent times, religion, social order and justice were strongly tied to proper religious practice and understanding. For one to adopt heretical views and encourage others to do so posed a serious threat to the social order and peace. The state, even more than the Church, would seldom abide religious rebellion and knew by instinct that social disorder and chaos often followed religious squabbles.

Did the Church cooperate with the Spaniards? To some degree yes, to others degrees no. The Church’s hands are not likely pure in the matter. But neither are the Protestants who ran a tight ship in places like Geneva and England. There are many Catholic martyrs to show that Protestants, too, worked with local governments to shut down dissent from Protestant notions and punish noncompliance, often with death.

Pssst, Baptists, KKK, Slavery, Did you manage to forget that connection?

I don't remember the KKK as being an official agent or extension of the Baptist church. Enlighten me. Slavery is a non-issue, as it existed all the way along. But if one needs to poke at it, check out the foundations of the Dominican Republic before you go poking too hard.

“Yeah, so Protestants did it too(and more prolifically) but it’s Catholics we have to talk about. Never mind those Protestant guys in Geneva and Scotland. We mustn’t talk about them.”

Thank you for your kind post.

Given the recent and undefined changes on the FR Religion Forum in regards to discussion that involves Catholicism, I will allow your post to stand on its own - unrequited - and simply wish you a wonderful day.

Perhaps in the future, things will be a bit more defined and equitable. Time will tell.

The Protestant Inquisition: “Reformation” Intolerance and Persecution
Dave Armstrong
March 07, 2007

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2007/03/protestant-inquisition-reformation.html

The intolerance of Protestantism was certainly not less tyrannical than that with which Catholicism is so much reproached. (Philosophie Positive, IV, 51)

What makes, however, Protestant persecutions specially revolting is the fact that they were absolutely inconsistent with the primary doctrine of Protestantism — the right of private judgment in matters of religious belief! Nothing can be more illogical than at one moment to assert that one may interpret the Bible to suit himself, and at the next to torture and kill him for having done so!
Nor should we ever forget that . . . the Protestants were the aggressors, the Catholics were the defenders. The Protestants were attempting to destroy the old, established Christian Church, which had existed 1500 years, and to replace it by something new, untried and revolutionary. The Catholics were upholding a Faith, hallowed by centuries of pious associations and sublime achievements; the Protestants, on the contrary, were fighting for a creed . . . which already was beginning to disintegrate into hostile sects, each of which, if it gained the upper hand, commenced to persecute the rest! . . . All religious persecution is bad; but in this case, of the two parties guilty of it, the Catholics certainly had the more defensible motives for their conduct.

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