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 Moors (Muslims) who pretended to convert to Christianity for purposes of 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 various inquisitions stretched through the better part of a millennia, and can collectively be called "the Inquisition."
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, so proper credit should not be denied them. The problem is that they did not weigh facts well, because they harbored fierce animosity toward the Church—
animosity that 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 diffusing a criticism of the Church, have glossed over incontrovertible facts and tried to whitewash the Inquisition. This is as much a disservice to the truth as an exaggeration of the Inquisition’s bad points. 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.
Don’t Fear the Facts
But the facts fail to do that. 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 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).
Fundamentalists suffer from the mistaken notion that 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.
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 it proves.
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 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 comparitively 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.
What’s the Point?
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 this shows that the Catholic Church is illegitimate. At first blush it might seem so, but there is 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.
Ultimately, it may be a waste of time arguing about statistics. Instead, ask Fundamentalists just what they think the existence of the Inquisition demonstrates. They would not bring it up in the first place unless they thought it proves something about the Catholic Church. And what is that something? That Catholics are sinners? Guilty as charged. That at times people in positions of authority have used poor judgment? Ditto. That otherwise good Catholics, afire with zeal, sometimes lose their balance? All true, but such charges could be made even if the Inquisition had never existed and perhaps could be made of some Fundamentalists.
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