Yes..the Inquisition was an atrocity beyond imagination. Not long ago I looked closer at that period of catholic history...I knew it was bad I did not realize the depth of evil and brutality that it went to in it's barbaric and cruelty of the people then....all in the name of the church!
I found a web page that described the instruments of torture used and has pictures of them and described what they did to the human body.
I couldn’t read much of it. Barbarism beyond belief. It is beyond my comprehension how one human being to inflict such horror and pain on another, much less claiming it was in the name of Christ.
Ah, yes, the Inquisition. Now did you read this from impartial history books or from what your pastors told you?
If you read impartial history books you see that
- In practice, the Inquisition would not itself pronounce sentence, but handed over convicted heretics to secular authorities
- the Inquisition had jurisdiction only over baptised members of the Church
- Secular courts could still try non-Christians for blasphemy.
- Most witch trials went through secular courts.
- the Inquisition in Iberia, in the lands of the Reconquista counties and kingdoms like Portugal, Leon, Castile and Aragon, had a special socio-political basis as well as more conventional religious motives. This was because Portugal and Spain in the late Middle Ages consisted largely of multicultural territories fairly recently re-conquered from the Islamic states of Al-Andalus control, and the new Christian authorities could not assume that all their subjects would suddenly become and remain orthodox Catholics (as Muslims were of course suspect of sympathizing with the Moors and so too the Jews (as at least initially they were treated very well, rising to positions of Viziers and also business under the Moors was far more advanced than under the Christian reconquistadors))
- Modern historians have begun to study the documentary records of the Inquisition. The archives of the Suprema, today held by the National Historical Archive of Spain (Archivo Histórico Nacional), conserves the annual relations of all processes between 1540 and 1700. This material provides information on about 44,674 judgements, the latter studied by Gustav Henningsen and Jaime Contreras. These 44,674 cases include 826 executions in persona and 778 in effigie. This material, however, is far from being complete - for example, the tribunal of Cuenca is entirely omitted, because no relaciones de causas from this tribunal has been found, and significant gaps concern some other tribunals (e.g. Valladolid). Many more cases not reported to Suprema are known from the other sources (e.g. no relaciones de causas from Cuenca has been found, but its original records has been preserved), but were not included in Contreras-Hennigsen's statistics for the methodological reasons
- García Cárcel estimates that the total number processed by the Inquisition throughout its history was approximately 150,000. Applying the percentages of executions that appeared in the trials of 1560-1700—about 2%—the approximate total would be about 3,000 put to death. Nevertheless, very probably this total should be raised keeping in mind the data provided by Dedieu and García Cárcel for the tribunals of Toledo and Valencia, respectively. It is likely that the total would be between 3,000 and 5,000 executed.
- There were so few Protestants in Spain that widespread persecution of Protestantism was not physically possible
So, let's see there were 150,000 trials over 200+ years. That's about 750 trials a year. hmmm...
Conviction rates were
2% -- compare that to the chances of being sentenced to death in the secular courts, which would be at least 20%, and you can see why many preferred to be sentenced in inquisition courts
So, you think it was an atrocity beyond imagination? What about Geneva under Calvin? You will see a higher conviction rate.