MERE SLANDER?: The Real Inquisition

When the sins of the Catholic Church are recited (as they so often are) the Inquisition figures prominently. People with no interest in European history know full well that it was led by brutal and fanatical churchmen who tortured, maimed, and killed those who dared question the authority of the Church. The word "Inquisition" is part of our modern vocabulary, describing both an institution and a period of time. Having one of your hearings referred to as an "Inquisition" is not a compliment for most senators.

But in recent years the Inquisition has been subject to greater investigation. In preparation for the Jubilee in 2000, Pope John Paul II wanted to find out just what happened during the time of the Inquisition's (the institution's) existence. In 1998 the Vatican opened the archives of the Holy Office (the modern successor to the Inquisition) to a team of 30 scholars from around the world. Now at last the scholars have made their report, an 800-page tome that was unveiled at a press conference in Rome on Tuesday. Its most startling conclusion is that the Inquisition was not so bad after all. Torture was rare and only about 1 percent of those brought before the Spanish Inquisition were actually executed. As one headline read "Vatican Downsizes Inquisition."

The amazed gasps and cynical sneers that have greeted this report are just further evidence of the lamentable gulf that exists between professional historians and the general public. The truth is that, although this report makes use of previously unavailable material, it merely echoes what numerous scholars have previously learned from other European archives. Among the best recent books on the subject are Edward Peters's Inquisition (1988) and Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition (1997), but there are others. Simply put, historians have long known that the popular view of the Inquisition is a myth. So what is the truth?

To understand the Inquisition we have to remember that the Middle Ages were, well, medieval. We should not expect people in the past to view the world and their place in it the way we do today. (You try living through the Black Death and see how it changes your attitude.) For people who lived during those times, religion was not something one did just at church. It was science, philosophy, politics, identity, and hope for salvation. It was not a personal preference but an abiding and universal truth. Heresy, then, struck at the heart of that truth. It doomed the heretic, endangered those near him, and tore apart the fabric of community.

The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions. Yes, you read that correctly. Heresy was a crime against the state. Roman law in the Code of Justinian made it a capital offense. Rulers, whose authority was believed to come from God, had no patience for heretics. Neither did common people, who saw them as dangerous outsiders who would bring down divine wrath. When someone was accused of heresy in the early Middle Ages, they were brought to the local lord for judgment, just as if they had stolen a pig or damaged shrubbery (really, it was a serious crime in England). Yet in contrast to those crimes, it was not so easy to discern whether the accused was really a heretic. For starters, one needed some basic theological training — something most medieval lords sorely lacked. The result is that uncounted thousands across Europe were executed by secular authorities without fair trials or a competent assessment of the validity of the charge.

The Catholic Church's response to this problem was the Inquisition, first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184. It was born out of a need to provide fair trials for accused heretics using laws of evidence and presided over by knowledgeable judges. From the perspective of secular authorities, heretics were traitors to God and the king and therefore deserved death. From the perspective of the Church, however, heretics were lost sheep who had strayed from the flock. As shepherds, the pope and bishops had a duty to bring them back into the fold, just as the Good Shepherd had commanded them. So, while medieval secular leaders were trying to safeguard their kingdoms, the Church was trying to save souls. The Inquisition provided a means for heretics to escape death and return to the community.

As this new report confirms, most people accused of heresy by the Inquisition were either acquitted or their sentences suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.

During the 13th century the Inquisition became much more formalized in its methods and practices. Highly trained Dominicans answerable to the Pope took over the institution, creating courts that represented the best legal practices in Europe. As royal authority grew during the 14th century and beyond, control over the Inquisition slipped out of papal hands and into those of kings. Instead of one Inquisition there were now many. Despite the prospect of abuse, monarchs like those in Spain and France generally did their best to make certain that their inquisitions remained both efficient and merciful. During the 16th century, when the witch craze swept Europe, it was those areas with the best-developed inquisitions that stopped the hysteria in its tracks. In Spain and Italy, trained inquisitors investigated charges of witches' sabbaths and baby roasting and found them to be baseless. Elsewhere, particularly in Germany, secular or religious courts burned witches by the thousands.

Compared to other medieval secular courts, the Inquisition was positively enlightened. Why then are people in general and the press in particular so surprised to discover that the Inquisition did not barbecue people by the millions? First of all, when most people think of the Inquisition today what they are really thinking of is the Spanish Inquisition. No, not even that is correct. They are thinking of the myth of the Spanish Inquisition. Amazingly, before 1530 the Spanish Inquisition was widely hailed as the best run, most humane court in Europe. There are actually records of convicts in Spain purposely blaspheming so that they could be transferred to the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition. After 1530, however, the Spanish Inquisition began to turn its attention to the new heresy of Lutheranism. It was the Protestant Reformation and the rivalries it spawned that would give birth to the myth.

By the mid 16th century, Spain was the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe. Europe's Protestant areas, including the Netherlands, northern Germany, and England, may not have been as militarily mighty, but they did have a potent new weapon: the printing press. Although the Spanish defeated Protestants on the battlefield, they would lose the propaganda war. These were the years when the famous "Black Legend" of Spain was forged. Innumerable books and pamphlets poured from northern presses accusing the Spanish Empire of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities in the New World. Opulent Spain was cast as a place of darkness, ignorance, and evil.

Protestant propaganda that took aim at the Spanish Inquisition drew liberally from the Black Legend. But it had other sources as well. From the beginning of the Reformation, Protestants had difficulty explaining the 15-century gap between Christ's institution of His Church and the founding of the Protestant churches. Catholics naturally pointed out this problem, accusing Protestants of having created a new church separate from that of Christ. Protestants countered that their church was the one created by Christ, but that it had been forced underground by the Catholic Church. Thus, just as the Roman Empire had persecuted Christians, so its successor, the Roman Catholic Church, continued to persecute them throughout the Middle Ages. Inconveniently, there were no Protestants in the Middle Ages, yet Protestant authors found them there anyway in the guise of various medieval heretics. In this light, the medieval Inquisition was nothing more than an attempt to crush the hidden, true church. The Spanish Inquisition, still active and extremely efficient at keeping Protestants out of Spain, was for Protestant writers merely the latest version of this persecution. Mix liberally with the Black Legend and you have everything you need to produce tract after tract about the hideous and cruel Spanish Inquisition. And so they did.

In time, Spain's empire would fade away. Wealth and power shifted to the north, in particular to France and England. By the late 17th century new ideas of religious tolerance were bubbling across the coffeehouses and salons of Europe. Inquisitions, both Catholic and Protestant, withered. The Spanish stubbornly held on to theirs, and for that they were ridiculed. French philosophes like Voltaire saw in Spain a model of the Middle Ages: weak, barbaric, superstitious. The Spanish Inquisition, already established as a bloodthirsty tool of religious persecution, was derided by Enlightenment thinkers as a brutal weapon of intolerance and ignorance. A new, fictional Spanish Inquisition had been constructed, designed by the enemies of Spain and the Catholic Church.

Now a bit more of the real Inquisition has come back into view. The question remains, will anyone take notice?

— Thomas F. Madden is professor and chair of the department of history at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author most recently of Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice and editor of the forthcoming Crusades: The Illustrated History.

No, but sometimes they burned people's hats. This is not a joke - many condemnations in the later, more political Inquisition, were posthumous or in absentia, because the person had either fled or was protected. On numerous occasions, they executed the sentence by digging up the person's bones and scattering them, or by burning a hat or some other personal item.

Also, what is not stressed is that most of those put to death by the Inquistion were clergy. Sometimes it was a doctrinal thing, but often it was a disciplinary matter - homosexuality, sleeping around with females even after they had been told to quit it, stealing, or in the case of Mexico, enslaving Indian converts, etc.

Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church

That's a bunch a dung dangus. The RCC threatened civil authorities with excommunication if they did not burn the heretics. A minor detail and a major consequence -- but Madden wouldn't let that get into the way of objectivity.

Inquisition was born out of a need to provide fair trials for accused heretics using laws of evidence and presided over by knowledgeable judges

Fair trials? The judges and the prosecutors were one and the same. The witnesses were seceret. The accused could not face the accusers. Rules of evidence were hearsay, etc.

Madden blathers Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ ... If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular authorities

Of course, it hasn't occured to this genius that perhaps under the "fair" system, as mentioned above, the falsley accused could not prove their innocence and that they were considered guilty before proven innocent. Ultimately, if someone was falsley accused of heresey, how could he or she (1) "confess" his/her sins (heresy), (2) "repent" [!], and (3) be "returned" to the Body of Christ [!] is they never were heretics, had nothing to repent for and never left the Body of Christ?!?

And this is supposed to be a "proof" that the Inquisition was really not about killing but about saving lives? I have heard and read absurd revisions, but this one takes the cake.

BTW, (1) who were these 30 individuals who were allowed to review unreleased Vatican documents (not forgetting that it was the Vatican that sponsored this "study"), and (2) why are all these documents still "classified?"

This is an Anti-Protestant screed.

Read carefully the snotty tone in which Protestants are portrayed in this article....

"Protestant Propaganda..." as if the claims of the protestants of the day were no more valid than the ramblings of petty pamphleteers....

Whenever somebody tries to rehabilitate The Inquisition, I begin to wonder what comes next....

>>The RCC threatened civil authorities with excommunication if they did not burn the heretics. <<

The RCC motivated the civil authorities that they were required to uphold the faith, and it certainly was held that killing seditious heretics was, in the proper circumstances, a just and necessary way to do that. But more typically, as the scholars presented, it was the civilian authorities killing right and left to maintain power, and the church acting to find a more just system. The issues are matters of degree and frequency, and the point made by these scholars is that the inquisition killed far less and set free far more than the propaganda-fed public imagination.

>> Fair trials? The judges and the prosecutors were one and the same. The witnesses were seceret. The accused could not face the accusers. Rules of evidence were hearsay, etc. <<

Fair by today's standards, no. Did it stop the thousands of innocents being killed by indiscriminite, corrupt local governments? yes.

>> Of course, it hasn't occured to this genius that perhaps under the "fair" system, as mentioned above, the falsley accused could not prove their innocence and that they were considered guilty before proven innocent. <<

Well, the point of the article was that the system was far more fair than as the slander presented it to be.

>>(1) who were these 30 individuals who were allowed to review unreleased Vatican documents (not forgetting that it was the Vatican that sponsored this "study"),<<

I dunno, but if you read Catholic-authorized modern studies, you quite quickly get a sense of how they do things. In the new bible translations, the verification of miraculous artifacts, the verification of biblical events, the 20th pattern has always been to gather the best researchers available, including typically 1/3 Protestants and 1/3 Jews and skeptics. I do not know if that was done here, but I wish they'd say.

This whole article is either bogus or so twisted that the truth is simply obfuscated. The civil authorities of the medieval Spain and other European countries did not as a rule execute heretics, but would have their porperty confiscated and they heretics expelled from the community. Saying that the poor Church had no choice but to turn those who didn't repent to the civil authorities to be burned is a joke.

Poeple used to report their noisy neighbors for "heresy" and if they didn't want to "repent" ad do indulgencies for soemthing they didn't do the Church that preaches the Gospel of Mercy then had no choice but to have the man roasted.

It takes complete lack of shame to claim that the Inquisition was insitituted to save lives, as claimed in the article.

Bottom line is: whatever the numbers, the method and the institution of Inquitiion was morally inconcistsent with the Christian teachings.

Some will, of course, bring up the fact that the OT says it's okay to kill -- even exterminate, ethnically cleanse -- whole ethnic groups like Canaanites, their women, chidlren and even live stock! So, it must be okay for the Church to do the same. No Sir! We do not live, aboide nor follow what the OT teaches. The OT tells us of God and predicts the coming of His Word. We don't fast like the Jews, we don't sacrifice like the Jews and we don't approve ethnic cleansing in the name of God! By the same token, it is not the job of the Church od Christ to declare wars (Crusades) or send people to death (Inquisition). It is morally wrong -- expecially when it is done in the name of the whole Church.

>>Saying that the poor Church had no choice but to turn those who didn't repent to the civil authorities to be burned is a joke.<<

Actually, that's exactly the oposite of what the article states.

>> Poeple used to report their noisy neighbors for "heresy" and if they didn't want to "repent" ad do indulgencies for soemthing they didn't do the Church that preaches the Gospel of Mercy then had no choice but to have the man roasted. <<

No-one is claiming that the system of justice in those days was anywhere nearly as advanced as it is now... the point of the article, however, is to point out that the Inquisition was a remarkable leap forward, not back. Yes, there were false accusations. And yes, I certainly do imagine there were false accusations.

>>By the same token, it is not the job of the Church od Christ to declare wars (Crusades) <<

There's the rub. For four centuries, the Christian church did not go to war against the Moslems. The result was that most of Christendom was in Moslem hands, and the horde has established territory on the Italian peninsula itself. Had the Church not finally fought back, there would be no Christianity today.

War is ugly, unfortunate, and a terrible reminder of the fallen state of man. It is, however, necessary.

So, the Christian Europe needed the pope to tell them to defend Christianity? As if they didn’t see that Christian parts of Africa and the Midde East were being swallowed by Islam!

Besides, where was the pope calling on Christian nations to come to the defense of Serbia being invaded by the same Turks against whom the last Crusades were mounted in the distant Middle East?

Not a single Catholic prince or king came to the aid of (Orthodox) Christian Serbia at the battle of Kosovo, on the doorsteps of Europe. Where was the urgency?

Also, the popes exercised their power to call all Chrsitians to fight the Muslims, but had no authority to stop the sacking of Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church, on their way to fight against the Muslims.

Protestant Lutheran princes slaughtered a quarter of a million people in the name of their new religion--from 1523-1527. In 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, about 4000 people were put to death.

Condemnation of Inquisition as an official institution of the Church, regardless of numbers, is not invalidated by the fact that other Christians have blood on their hands as well. Downsizing may have some historical value, but does not change the immorality of the Inquisition, and any apologetics who try to change this fact with new numbers only make the whole issue that much more immoral.

It is also an error to compare, indeed equate, the (im)moral acts of secular Lutheran princes to those of the official Church.

This jurisdiction is virtually identical to the jurisdiction of the Church Courts in England, under which heretics were handed over to secular authorities after trial

Eastern Orthodoxy is full of individual sinners, and I am certainly one of them. The Church cannot be held responsible for the free will of its members. I do not consider the whole RCC immoral because of its immoral popes, or lower clergy (which is not to say that at one point in time I didn't, and I was wrong).

But the official (Eastern Orthodox) Church as a Body of Christ did not, to the best of my knolwegde, organize, sanction or perform anything similar or comparable to the Crusades or the Inquisition.

Eastern Orthodoxy has but one purpose on this earth -- our salvation.

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