The Spanish Inquisition (1478 to 1808)
is the one people usually mean when they talk about the
Inquisition. This Inquisition had the misfortune
to be operating at a time when the Spanish were our mortal
enemies. To understand the Spanish inquisition
one should look at France in 1945. At the end of
the last war, members of the French resistance and those
who, now the occupation was over, claimed to have been
active members of the French resistance, were handing
out summary justice without trial to people accused of
having been quislings and collaborators. Charles
De Gaulle, the post-war President of the Provisional
Government of France, cracked down hard on this lawlessness
and ensured that if any Frenchman were to be punished
for collaborating with the occupying power it should
be after a fair trial and a proper legal process.
The Spanish Queen, Isabelle, and her
consort, Ferdinand, were in a not dissimilar situation. They
had just ended 700 years of occupation of their country
by the Moors. In the civil unrest following the
war, the Spanish crown began the Inquisition hoping that
religious unity would foster political unity. By
the standards of the time, the Inquisition was very enlightened. One
may also point out that while the Church was heavily
implicated in the Spanish Inquisition, it was a secular
not a Church inquiry.
Most of the penalties handed down were
spiritual, rather than physical. Its severest sentences
were reserved for people who bore false witness against
others. As for torture, in an age when the secular
powers (including England) used torture routinely, the
Inquisition was restricted by its rules to using it rarely
and in very limited circumstances. And as for
persecuting Protestants, not one Protestant was ever
arrested by the Inquisition, let alone tried - for one
very simple reason, the Inquisition regarded non-Catholics
as outside its jurisdiction.
Its judicial procedures were far ahead
of their time. Such things as the need for witnesses,
the rights of the accused to question and challenge their
accusers and the right of appeal where all laid down. Inquisitors
did not have to be clerics, but they did have to be qualified
lawyers. As for the death penalty, it has been
notoriously difficult to reach a consensus on the numbers
involved, but the highest number supported by serious
historians is in the order of 3000 to 5000 over the entire
330 years of its operation.
While we may all readily agree that
3000 to 5000 was 3000 to 5000 too many, it pales into
insignificance in comparison to the 150,000 documented
witch-burnings in Protestant Britain, Germany and New
England over the same period, where often a mere accusation
was enough to send one to the stake. The Spanish were
spared this carnage by the judicial standards of the
Inquisition and its absolute requirement for hard evidence.
Queen Mary -v- Queen Elizabeth
I
The Protestant journalist
and reformer, William
Cobbett (1763-1835),
describing
the Tudor deception, stated that, “for every drop
of blood (Catholic) Mary shed, (Protestant) Elizabeth
shed a pint.” Yet we are conditioned to refer
to Mary as “Bloody Mary” and to Elizabeth
as “Good Queen Bess”, and while the former
sends our blood cold, the latter evokes feeling of national
pride in a great monarch.
Raphael Holisend, the Protestant historian,
wrote that although Henry VIII executed 72,000 Catholics,
Elizabeth I killed more than the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions
combined did in 300 years! Further, Elizabeth’s
warrants frequently dispensed with a trial and proceeded
straight to hanging and disemboweling; the penalty for
merely being a faithful Catholic priest.
The Enlightenment and the French
Revolution
The Rationalists behind the French
Revolution, in the two years, 1792-1794, managed to slaughter
over 40,000 (At least 8 time as many as the Spanish Inquisition
managed in 330 years). Many were executed for merely
refusing to abandon their Catholic Faith. The
Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre, on the
10th June 1794, pushed through a law abolishing the right
of the accused to a trial. It was actually argued
at the time by Robespierre’s mouthpiece, Georges
Couthon, that the right to a trial was no more than a
prejudice left over from France’s (Catholic) past.
Nevertheless, our anti-Catholic conditioning
has “taught” us to believe that the French
Revolution was on balance a good and enlightened thing,
notwithstanding the fact that its nearest modern equivalent
would have been the Hutus massacre of Tutsis and moderate
Hutus in Rwanda in April 1994.
During the Age of Enlightenment, championed
by Voltaire and later the French Revolution, people were
commonly executed by “breaking on the wheel”. A
method of execution which very slowly reduced its victims
limbs to pulped flesh with shards of bone sticking through. In
our enlightened age of course that sort of bloody end
is strictly reserved by secularists for unborn children
whose only crime being inconveniencing the secular gods
of unbridled licentiousness by daring to be conceived.
Modern History
It is also interesting to compare the
effect that the word “inquisition” has on
the soul of the average Englishman with his relatively
bland reaction to the following list of facts: 7,000,000
murdered (without trial) by the Nazis (self-confessed
pagans); 17,000,000 murdered by Stalin (a militant atheist);
a number only exceeded by the Chinese communist (more
militant atheists); the 9000 unarmed priests and nuns
murdered by the Bolsheviks (more militant atheists) in
a few months in Spain (a slaughter which sparked the
Spanish civil war); and one could add the 1,000,000 (a
number that would have been nearer 2,000,000 had it not
been for the courageous sanctions-busting activities
of Irish Catholic missionaries) Biafran babies and
young children, who, in less than two years,
where starved to death to serve the oil policies
of Harold Wilson’s government of secular humanists.
There is a good deal of secularist
propaganda to the effect that religion is at the root
of all the strife in the world. The facts, as opposed
to the propaganda, are very simple. Wars fought
by, or on behalf of, the Church (such as the Crusades)
have killed about 4,500,000 people over the last 2000
years. Secular humanist, militant atheist and Nazis
(i.e. pagans) have accounted for something nearer 200,000,000
in the last 80 years! This means that you are at
least a 1000 times more likely to be slaughtered by a
militant atheist in the service of his ideology than
by a Catholic in the service of his.
Conclusion
You may wonder why when writing about
the Catholic religion we have devoted a whole essay to
what is very much a side issue. Well it is important
for English speaking people, if they are to explore the
faith of the Church in an open and objective way, honestly
to face up to the fact that they are coming to the table
loaded down with cultural baggage. Further, unless
they have the intellectual insight and courage consciously
to divest themselves of some of this accumulated baggage,
they are wasting their time.
Many English Catholics also carry some
of this baggage, especially the young. Its result
is a reduced sense of self-worth, a sort of cultural
low self-esteem. It is unavoidable, for anti-Catholicism
is in the air we breathe and we take it in with our mother’s
milk. It is simply that after 400 years of inculturation
we no longer notice that we are doing so.
You may protest that England is no
longer a Protestant, but a secular humanist country. However,
secular humanism is the daughter of Protestantism (albeit
the illegitimate daughter) - it is the antithesis of
Catholicism and one of the key ideologies behind the
systematic murder of countless millions, born and unborn,
in our time.
The
problem with discussing Catholicism with many native
English-speakers is that they come to the table loaded
down with so much baggage. They have been formed
by 400 years of anti-Catholic propaganda. Consequently,
their negative view of the Catholic religion is in the
national subconscious, it is in our blood. If a
man actually believes at the level of his sub-conscious
that a rosebush is a man-eating tiger, then he will jump
and break out in a sweat of fear when he passes a rosebush
regardless of the fact that at the level of conscious
thought he knows that this is absurd.
