Sooner or later, any discussion of apologetics with Fundamentalists (or SDA) will address the
Inquisition. It is a handy stick for Catholic-bashing, simply 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 infamous Spanish Inquisition, started in 1478, a state institution used to identify
conversos—Jews and Muslims who pretended to convert to Christianity for political or social advantage and secretly practiced their former religion. More importantly, its job was also to clear the good names of many people who were falsely accused of being heretics. It was the Spanish Inquisition that, at least in the popular imagination, had the worst record of fulfilling these duties.
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. The problem is that they did not weigh facts well,
because they harbored fierce animosity toward the Church that had little to do with the Inquisition itself.
The contrary problem has not been unknown. A few Catholic writers have glossed over incontrovertible facts and tried to whitewash the Inquisition. These well-intentioned but misguided apologists are, in one respect, much like Lea, Coulton, and contemporary Fundamentalist writers. They fear, while the others hope, that the facts about the Inquisition might prove the illegitimacy of the Catholic Church.
The various inquisitions stretched through the better part of a millennium, and can collectively be called “the Inquisition.”
Don’t Fear the Facts
But the facts fail to do that. 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 itself all sorts of sinners and knaves, and some of them obtain positions of responsibility. Paul and Christ himself warned us that there would be a few ravenous wolves among Church leaders (Acts 20:29; Matt. 7:15).
Thinking that Fundamentalists might have a point in their attacks on the Inquisition, Catholics tend to be defensive. This is the wrong attitude; rather, we should learn what really happened, understand events in light of the times, and then explain to anti-Catholics
why the sorry tale does not prove what they think.
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.
In fact, no one knows exactly how many people perished through the various Inquisitions. We can determine for certain, though, one thing about numbers given by Fundamentalists: They are far too large. One book popular with Fundamentalists claims that 95 million 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 Inquisitions existed approach 95 million. Inquisitions did not exist in Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or England, being confined mainly to southern France, Italy, Spain, and a few parts of the Holy Roman Empire. The Inquisition could not have killed that many people because those parts of Europe did not 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 comparatively small. In fact, recent studies indicate that at most there were only a few thousand capital sentences carried out for heresy in Spain, and these were over the course of several centuries.