The Inquisition Sooner or later, any exchange of views with Fundamentalists will come around to the Inquisition. To non-Catholics it is a scandal; to Catholics, an embarrassment; to both, a confusion. At the least, it is a handy stick with which to engage in Catholic-bashing, because most Catholics seem at a loss for a sensible reply. This tract will set the record straight. There have actually been several different inquisitions. The first was established in 1184 in southern France as a response to the Catharist heresy. This was known as the Medieval Inquisition, and it was phased out as Catharism disappeared. Quite separate was the Roman Inquisition, begun in 1542. It was the least active and most benign of the three variations. Separate again was the famed Spanish Inquisition, started in 1478, a state institution used to identify conversos--Jews and Moors (Muslims) who falsely "converted" to Christianity (i.e., not out of faith in Jesus Christ but for purposes of political or social advantage) and secretly practiced their former religion. Its job was also, and more importantly, to clear the good name of many people who were falsely accused as being It was the Spanish Inquisition that had the worst record. The Main Sources Fundamentalists writing about the Inquisition rely on books by Henry C. Lea (1825-1909) and G. G. Coulton (1858-1947). Each man got most of the facts right, and each made progress in basic research. Proper credit should not be denied them. The problem is they could not weigh facts well because they harbored a fierce animosity toward the Church--animosity which had little to do with the Inquisition itself. The contrary problem has not been unknown. A few Catholic writers, particularly those less interested in digging for truth than in giving a quick excuse, have glossed over incontrovertible facts and done what they could to whitewash the Inquisition. This is as much a disservice to the truth as exaggerating the Inquisition's bad points. These well-intentioned, but misguided, apologists are, in one respect at least, much like Lea, Coulton, and the present strain of Fundamentalist writers. They fear, as the others hope, that the facts about the Inquisition might prove the illegitimacy of the Catholic Church. Don't Fear the Facts But the facts won't do that at all. The Church has nothing to fear from the truth. No account of foolishness, misguided zeal, or cruelty by Catholics can undo the divine foundation of the Church, though, admittedly, these things are stumbling blocks to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. What must be grasped is that the Church contains within herself all sorts of sinners and knaves, and some of them obtain responsible positions of responsibility. Jesus and Paul both warned us that there would be a few ravening wolves among Church leaders (Matt. 7:15, Acts 20:29). The wheat and chaff co-exist in the Kingdom until the end, which was how the Founder intended it. Fundamentalists suffer from the problem that they believe the Church includes only the elect. For them, sinners are outside the doors. Locate sinners, and you locate another place where the Church is not. It seems easy to demonstrate sin operating through the Inquisition--at least to the extent dry records allow us to perceive sin at a distance of centuries--and for Fundamentalists this proves the Inquisition, if it was the arm of a Church, was the arm of a false church. Thinking that Fundamentalists might have a point, Catholics tend to be defensive. That's the wrong attitude. The right attitude for Catholics is to learn what really happened, to understand events in light of the times, and then to explain to anti-Catholics (hard though this may be) why the sorry tale does not prove what they think it proves. How should a Catholic answer charges about the Inquisition? He should not deny the undeniable; history cannot be wished away. On the other hand, he should not, out of embarrassment, acquiesce to each Fundamentalist slander. What he should try to do is give his challenger a little perspective. If he is able, the Catholic should learn enough about the Inquisition to give his opponent some sort of overview and to demonstrate that while much of what he knows about the Inquisition is true, much is fantasy. PHONY STATISTICS Many Fundamentalists believe, for instance, that more people died under the Inquisition than in any war or plague, but in this they rely on phony "statistics" generated by one-upmanship among anti-Catholics, each of whom, it seems, tries to come up with the largest number of casualties. But trying to straighten out such historical confusions can take one only so far. As Ronald Knox put it, we should be cautious, "lest we should wander interminably in a wilderness of comparative atrocity statistics." In fact, no one knows how exactly many people perished through the Inquisition. We can determine for certain, though, one thing about numbers given by Fundamentalists: They are simply far too large. One book popular with Fundamentalists claims that 95,000,000 people died under the Inquisition. The figure is so grotesquely off that one immediately doubts the writer's sanity, or at least his grasp of demographics. Not until modern times did the population of those countries where the Inquisition existed approach 95,000,000. It did not exist in Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or England. It was confined mainly to southern France, Italy, Spain, and a few parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The Inquisitions couldn't have killed that many people because those parts of Europe didn't have that many people to kill! Furthermore, the plague, which killed a third of Europe's population, is credited by historians with major changes in the social structure. The Inquisition is credited with few--precisely because the number of its victims was, by comparison, small. WHAT'S THE POINT? Don't waste time arguing about statistics. Instead, ask Fundamentalists just what they think the Inquisition's existence demonstrates. They wouldn't bring it up in the first place unless they thought it proves something about the Catholic Church. Just what is that something? That Catholics are sinners? Guilty as charged; Catholics aren't perfect, just forgiven. That at times people in positions of authority have used poor judgment? Ditto. That otherwise good Catholics, afire with zeal, sometimes lose their balance? True, all true, but such charges could be made even if the Inquisition never existed. Fundamentalist writers claim the existence of the Inquisition proves the Catholic Church could not be the Church founded by our Lord. They use the Inquisition as a good--perhaps their best--bad example. They think it makes the Catholic Church look illegitimate. And at first blush it might, but there's only so much mileage in a ploy like that; most people see at once that the argument is weak. One reason Fundamentalists talk about the Inquisition is that they take it as a personal attack, imagining it was established to eliminate (yes, you guessed it) the Fundamentalists themselves. Not "Bible Christians" They identify themselves with the Catharists (also known as the Albigensians), or perhaps it is better to say they identify the Catharists with themselves. They think the Catharists were twelfth-century Fundamentalists and that Catholics did to them what they would do to Fundamentalists today if they had the means. This is a fantasy. Fundamentalist writers take one point--that Catharists used a vernacular version of the Bible--and conclude from it that these people were, well, "Bible Christians." In fact, they were not Christians at all. Theirs was a curious religion that apparently (no one knows for certain) came to France from what is now Bulgaria. Catharism was a blend of Gnosticism, which claimed to have access to a secret source of religious knowledge, and of Manicheeism, which said matter is evil. The Catharists believed in two Gods: the "good" God of the New Testament, who sent Jesus to save our souls from being trapped in matter; and the "evil" God of the Old Testament, who created the material world in the first place. The Catharists' beliefs entailed serious--truly civilization-destroying--social consequences. Marriage was scorned because it legitimized sexual relations, which Catharists identified as the Original Sin. But fornication was permitted because it was temporary and secret and was not given formal approval, while marriage was permanent, open, and publicly sanctioned. The ramifications of such theories are not hard to imagine. In addition, ritualistic suicide was encouraged (those who wouldn't take their own lives were frequently "helped" along), and Catharists refused to take oaths, which, in feudal society, meant they opposed all governmental authority. Thus, Catharism was both a moral and a political evil. Even Lea, so strongly opposed to the Catholic Church, said "the cause of orthodoxy was the cause of progress and civilization. Had Catharism become dominant, or even had it been allowed to exist on equal terms, its influence could not have failed to become disastrous." Whatever else might be said about Catharism, it was certainly not the same as modern Fundamentalism, and Fundamentalist sympathy for this odd religion is sadly misplaced. The Real Point Most discussions about the Inquisition get bogged down in numbers. Many Catholics fail to understand what Fundamentalists are really driving at, and they restrict themselves to secondary matters. Instead, they should discover what Fundamentalists are trying to prove with their talk about hecatombs. However, there is a certain utility--but a decidedly limited one--in demonstrating that the kinds and degrees of punishments inflicted by the Inquisition were similar to (or even lighter than) those meted out by secular courts. It is equally true that, despite what we consider the Inquisition's lamentable procedures, many people preferred to have their cases tried by ecclesiastical courts because the secular courts had even fewer safeguards. And, as some have pointed out, it does not hurt to remember that only fifty years ago torture ("the third degree") was routinely used by American police. But such arguments are better suited to quiet discussions with reasonably informed people than with Fundamentalists who think they can injure Catholicism by talking about judicial practices that are universally acknowledged to be unjust. "The Inquisition was punctilious in its adherence to law," wrote Donald Attwater, "but after full allowance has been made for 'other times, other manners,' some of its procedure and punishments must be set down as utterly unreasonable and in consequence cruel." One should not try to justify them, but to understand them. They need to be explained, but not explained away. The crucial thing for Catholics, once they have obtained some appreciation of the history of the Inquisition, is to explain how such an institution could have been associated with a divinely-established Church and why it is not proper to conclude, from the fact of the Inquisition, that the Catholic Church is not the Church of Christ. This is the real point at issue, and this is where any discussion should focus. To that end, it's helpful to point out that it's easy to see how those who led the Inquisition could think their actions were justified. The Bible itself records instances where God commanded that inquiries--a synonym for inquisitions--to be carried out to expose false believers. In Deuteronomy 17:2-5 God said: "If there is found among you, within any of your towns which the Lord your God gives you, a man or woman who does what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, in transgressing his covenant, and has gone and served other gods and worshipped them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have forbidden, and it is told you and you hear of it; then you shall inquire diligently [note that phrase: "inquire diligently"], and if it is true and certain that such an abominable thing has been done in Israel, then you shall bring forth to your gates that man or woman who has done this evil thing, and you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones." It's clear that there were some Israelites who posed as believers in and keepers of the Covenant with Yahweh, while inwardly they did not believe and in secret practiced false religions, and even, perhaps, tried to spread it (cf. Deut. 13:6-11). To protect the kingdom from such hidden heresy, these secret practitioners of false religions had to be rooted out and expelled from the community. This directive from the Lord applied even to whole cities which turned away from the true religion (Deut. 13:12-18). Like Israel, Medieval Europe was a society of Christian kingdoms that were formally consecrated to the Lord Jesus Christ. It's therefore quite understandable that these Catholics would read their Bibles and conclude that for the good of their Christian society they, like the Israelites before them, "must purge the evil from the midst of you" (Deut. 13:5, 17:7, 12). Paul repeats this principle in 1 Corinthians 5:13. These same texts were interpreted similarly by the first Protestants, who also tried to root out and punish those they regarded as heretics. Luther and Calvin both endorsed the right of the state to protect society by purging false religion. In fact, Calvin not only banished from Geneva those who did not share his views, he permitted and in some cases ordered others to be executed for "heresy" (e.g. Jaques Gouet, tortured and beheaded in 1547; and Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553). In England and Ireland, Reformers engaged in their own ruthless inquisitions and executions, but on a far greater scale. Conservative estimates indicate that hundreds of English and Irish Catholics were put to death--many by being hanged, drawn, and quartered--for practicing the Catholic faith and refusing to become Protestant. An even greater number were forced to flee to the Continent for their safety. We point this out not because these facts of history somehow "disprove" but to point out that the situation was a two-way street and to point out how both sides easily understood the Bible to require the use of penal sanctions to root out false religion from Christian society (though they differed on which understanding of Christian society was correct). _________________________________________________________________ RETURN Return to Topical Tract Page RETURN Return to Catholic Answers Home Page © 1996 Catholic Answers, Inc. This text may be downloaded or printed out for private reading, but it may not be uploaded to another Internet site or published, electronically or otherwise, without express written permission from the copyright holder. Last modified May 25, 1996.