Posted on 07/27/2002 6:37:13 PM PDT by JMJ333
There is a little too much evidence to bury the inquisition. The author is a revisionist.
To all our friends, it has just been announced that there are one million people in attendance in Toronto, Canada. Old Grandpa has three grandchildren in attendance in addition to a wonderful daughter, called Kathleen. In addition we have a wonderful group of young people from our parish that are in attendance.
Please keep them all in your prayers. They will all spend an all night vigil tonight and witness Holy Mass with the Holy Father tomorrow morning.
If you can do EWTN tomorrow morning please tune in.
To all,I think there is much hope for Holy Mother Church in the future.
Please pray for granddaughter Steffie (22)and Peter (11) who feel the draw to a religious life. Your prayers are most important.
Anyone on this thread can send me a birthday message tomorrow as I will attain the ripe old age of 72 years young.
To you JMJ333, a big hug as always. PA Lurker
THE INQUISITION
One other task within Spain faced Isabel. During the years of turmoil, the Church had become weak and corrupt. Isabel was a fervent Catholic, putting the cause of Christ first in all she did. Furthermore, she knew that Spain's unity as a nation depended upon a strong Church — Spain might as well not exist if it were not Catholic through and through. She set about reforming the Church, raising the educational and moral standards of the clergy. Many abuses were halted, including the practice of selling indulgences, which would cause much grief in the rest of Europe.
One of the most serious problems the Church faced was the number of Jews and Moors who had been baptized Catholics and risen to high positions in the government and the Church without really believing in Christian doctrine. These false Conversos and Moriscos (converted Jews and Moors) were a threat to the Church and to Spain, and a way had to be found of determining who was a true Christian and loyal Spaniard and who was a traitor. Isabel knew that not all the Conversos and Moriscos were enemies — her own confessor was a Converso as was the husband of her best friend. But to protect the innocent, the guilty had to be found.
The method Isabel chose was the Inquisition: a court which would examine evidence and judge whether a person was a faithful Christian or an enemy of Church and country. At the beginning of the Inquisition, there were many abuses — some innocent people suffered and torture was used frequently. At this point the Pope stepped in and appointed new Inquisitors, with the Grand Inquisitor (head of the Inquisition) being a Dominican monk named Tomas de Torquemada. Torquemada reformed the procedure of the Inquisition to ensure that justice would he done. He made its procedures more lenient and improved conditions in the prisons. He personally examined appeals from the accused and gave money to help the families of those on trial.
The actions of the Inquisitors are often criticized, usually as a means of attacking Spain by those who resent the strong Catholic character of the country. One criticism is that the Inquisition used torture. It did, though less so under Torquemada than before him. Torture is wrong, and the Church has since condemned any use of torture. But at the time, all governments routinely used torture as a means of extracting confessions. Though the fact that a sin is routinely committed does not justify it, the Inquisitors were most probably acting in good faith, and they should not be singled out as unusually evil.
A second attack is that the Inquisition's judgments led to the execution of the guilty. People in modern times consider it wrong to execute people for not truly believing in the religion they professed, but that is not in fact why they were executed. Those found guilty were traitors to the state and to the Church, and treason has almost always been recognized as a crime justifying capital punishment. Furthermore, those found guilty were always given a chance to repent. Only if they refused to repent or if they relapsed into their crimes after promising repentance were they executed. Finally, only 2,000 were executed, a small percentage of the 100,000 put on trial.
A final charge is that the method of execution, burning at the stake, was unusually barbaric. But the 16th century was a brutal time. In England capital punishment consisted of being hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled, and then cut into four pieces (hanged, drawn and quartered); in France, it was to be boiled alive. Again, Spain should not be singled out for condemnation.
The Inquisition, in fact, though not perfect, was a more just court than most. Often, people charged with regular crimes would pretend to be heretics so that they could be transferred to the custody of the Inquisition, whose prisoners were better treated.
Looking at the Inquisition historically, we see that it avoided more deaths than it caused. Because Spain was united religiously as well as politically, it did not suffer the religious wars which came when Protestantism began in other countries. Furthermore, a few years later other parts of Europe went through a witchcraft hysteria, when many people were executed as witches on only the flimsiest of evidence, or no evidence at all (30,000 in England, 100,000 in Germany). In Spain, the Inquisition investigated charges of witchcraft and found them baseless, thus saving many innocent people from death.
All the efforts of Ferdinand and lsabel — ending civil war, restoring order and justice, completing the Reconquista, reforming the Church — brought peace and prosperity to Spain. The latter years of their reign and the years immediately following are known as Spain's Golden Age, when art, literature, culture and science reached a high point. During the 16th century, Spain was the intellectual capital of the world, with scholars coming from all over Europe to study there.
Out of Spain's optimism, joy and excitement came the explorations and discoveries which were to open up our own hemisphere and bring about the settlement of a whole new world.
And Happy Birthday to you, and many many more. ;)
Hugs back to you!
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