The Inquisition

Contents Updated: Sunday, August 13, 2000

• History
• The Origin of the Inquisition
• Inquisition Procedures
• The Roman Inquisition
• The Spanish Inquisition

History

History is a science as incompatible with religion as evolution. It eliminates the supernatural from the chronicle of human development. Religion should too, because whenever a supernatural intervention would be beneficial in the affairs of humanity, it never happens. Indeed, supernatural interventions never happen for good or for ill—they just never happen, which is why historians, as opposed to theologions or religious apologists, deny them.

The science of history means making a record of past events based on a critical use of the evidence, particularly when it is documentary evidence, not gullibly accepting it because a tradition has been fostered that it is God’s own word. Even historians are still blinded by society’s intoxication with the lies called the “Holy Bible”. It purports to be history and many historians accept that it is, though it mainly is not, and it does not stand up to the scrutiny of normal historical standards.

Our age is a liberal one, and even skeptical historians bend over backwards not to offend religious people. It is time this unwarranted respect ended, whatever the religion is, because all of the patriarchal religions are equally bad. When Christians defend the indefensible, no historians will cross swords with them, though Christians heap lies upon lies. The convention is to be silent—out of “respect”. Someone might be offended. In the UK with the religions of immigrants, the brand of racism is added. Against these timid conventions of history, wherever religion is concerned, these pages are protesting.

Critical historians excite the rancour of theologians almost as much as do scientists. The discoveries of science are hard to decry even by Christians, but history does not have the same consequences, and is more readily rejected by theologians. Many people do not like it, are not interested in it, will not read it and have nothing to learn from it. They could not even begin to understand George Santayana’s chilling dictum:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

But lack of interest in history suits the clergy down to the hilt. Few people, least of all Christians know any history, and Christians know nothing about the history of Christianity. If they do, how can genuinely pious Christians accept that their religion promoted the most awful tortures—the Inquisition?

Christians say that heresy was a crime in European law. It was a secular crime against the state not a religious crime and was punished accordingly. Do they really think that their own God does not notice that this juggling with words is actually lying? Christians think their own God is a dolt and does not notice them blatantly lying as long as it is meant to be in defence of the Church. The leaders of the Church used people’s belief in their control of the destiny of their souls to oblige rulers and peoples to make heresy a crime! The church introduced the Inquisition.

The Origin of the Inquisition

The Lateran Council of 1139 AD violently urged the secular powers to proceed against heresy—they would not, to any extent. The Lateran Council of 1179 repeated the cry, pleading for the use of force and holding out tempting baits to those who murdered heretics.

Pope Lucius II in 1184 made a new departure. He laid down the penalties as exile, confiscation, and infamy or loss of civil rights. He threatened unwilling secular rulers with excommunication and interdict, and enacted that, whereas under current law a bishop was to try a heretic in open court when a man was charged, the bishop must now actively seek heretics. They had to institute a search, in Latin, an “inquisitio”. Still, few secular rulers did more than shrug their shoulders. Heresy did not concern them.

Then came Innocent III with an arsenal of anathemas. When a prince grinned at the hurled anathema, Innocent set armies in motion and drenched the man’s kingdom with blood as Gregory VII had done. Innocent formulated the new principle of “persuasion” of heretics.

There was a Papal seat at Viterbo, and the Pope was horrified to learn that not only the consuls or magistrates of the town, but his own chamberlain, were Cathars! He soon altered that, and he laid down this grim principle:

According to civil law criminals convicted of treason are punished with death and their goods are confiscated. With how much more reason then should they who offend Jesus, Son of the Lord God, by deserting their faith, be cut off from the Christian communion and stripped of their goods.

When there was some doubt amongst the jurists how far the law against heresy was still in force, the great Pope demanded death and confiscation of goods. The Nazi actions against the Jews, in what is deplored as the “Holocaust” used exactly the same principles as those of the Christian Church in the Inquisition. People were accused, murdered and robbed.

Moreover Innocent, whose name must have been chosen to fool that Christian God upstairs, completed the foundations of the Inquisition by reaffirming, with heavier emphasis, that the bishops were not to wait for charges of heresy, but were to seek it out heresy in an “inquisitio”. They were to have special officials, or “inquisitors,” for this purpose. Innocent drew up explicit instructions for the procedure, and between 1204 and 1213 he issued four decretals, Papal decrees, ordering such searches in various places.

In 1224, Lombardy formally enacted sentence of death for heresy, and the next Pope, Gregory IX, endorsed this penalty and founded what is commonly called “the Inquisition”. Heretics were to be handed over to the “secular arm,” the corps of professional torturers appointed to absolve the priesthood of direct involvement in torture, for adequate punishment. As bishops had shown themselves remiss in the nasty work of seeking out heretics, the Pope took the job from them and entrusted it to the tender mercies of the newly founded Dominican and Franciscan friars, who took to it like flies to a corpse. Among the jokes of the time was that the Dominicans were the Domini canes, “the hounds of the Lord”.

The Inquisition, which meant originally a search for heretics conducted by the bishops, became a separate institution under the direct control of the Papacy. This was not done at one stroke. Its birth is variously put by historians in 1229, 1231, and 1232. By the latter year, at all events, the Inquisition was established, and the hounds of the Lord smelt the bloody rag at their nostrils.

Rome had discovered the solution of its dilemma. It did not want to stain its own fair robes with bloodshed, but it certainly did not want to leave the detection of heretics to secular powers, or few would be detected. Moreover, if heretics were tried by civil law, the law would not move until a charge was laid before it, and there would be a comparatively fair trial, the accuser facing the accused in open court, and again few would be condemned. The “confiscations” which Innocent III had recommended became a profitable source of revenue, and the Papacy wanted its share. The sordid scramble for the gold teeth of the dead began long before Auschwitz.

The Inquisition, the monastic agents of the Pope, were to have independent courts, of the most monstrous description, to ensure the condemnation of secret heretics, and they were then to hand them over to the secular arm and keep a sharp eye on any secular prince or official who failed to do his bloody work.

In the thirteenth century, there were few countries in Europe that the Popes did not claim as fiefs of the Papacy, and few princes who were not vassals of the Pope. Gregory VII and Innocent III and their successors asserted that they were actually the feudal sovereigns of England, France, Spain and other countries. A crime against the state was whatever they chose to call a crime against the state. The great majority of the secular rulers hated and thwarted the Inquisition—it was never admitted to England—and it was only priest-ridden rulers like Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, or those whose greed was interested, who would carry out the Pope’s orders. Christianity was forcibly thrust upon Europe for the second time, as it had been in the fourth century.

While Canon Law did not clearly prescribe the death sentence, an emperor, Frederick II, introduced it. Frederick II was scarcely a Christian, hardly concealing that he thought the Moslem religion superior to the Christian. Clerics induced him, for unclear political reasons, to enact a law which the Papacy had then merely to adopt. The heretic was to be put to death or have his tongue cut out. Such a savage law was not applied before the Pope adopted it, and, in his first declaration on the subject in the year 1220, Frederick expressly based his law upon Innocent III’s words. A skeptical monarch borrowing, for political reasons, the words of one blood-thirsty Pope to oblige another blood-thirsty Pope, is not a good basis for the claim that heresy was regarded as a crime against the state.

Pope Gregory IX had this law inscribed in the papal registry, compelled the secular authorities at Rome and in most of the Italian cities to enforce it, and did his utmost to enforce everywhere the death penalty for heresy. As soon as there was a secular law prescribing the death penalty, the Popes, with great delicacy, handed over heretics to the secular arm and tried to get the law adopted everywhere. It was made an imperial law by Frederick in 1237.

Venice almost alone in Italy defied the Papacy. Heretics were burned at Rome and at Milan, and the most fanatical monks were sent by Gregory as Inquisitors to other countries. Conrad of Marburg was sent to Germany, where he burned batches of heretics. The king of Aragon, later the king of Castile, was induced to ask the Pope for Inquisitors. Four Inquisitors were appointed by Gregory to various parts of Italy, and others were sent to Bohemia. As to France, even the sordid and comprehensive massacre had not crushed the spirit of the rebels and Dominican monk, “Robert le Bougre,” Robert the Bugger, as he was commonly called, was sent with ghastly powers. In 1239, he burned a hundred and twenty-three “Bulgars” in one town.

Inquisition Procedure

The Inquisition is irrefutable proof of the wickedness of the religion that created it. The tribulations of Christians in the Roman amphitheatre were in comparison drops of blood in a barrel full. No practicer of a Pagan Nature religion could imagine anything on such a horrific scale. This holy court was presided over by the holiest of men, under the direct control of their holinesses the Popes. It was the most infamous instrument of injustice and the most terrible indictment of Christian “love” the world has ever seen.

The crude and simple-minded Christian dismisses it all because only a million rebels were executed, proving the remaining fifty million Europeans were orthodox and docile Christians. The tribunal’s methods were so barbarous and stupid from the juridical point of view that how many of its “heretics” were real rebels cannot be judged. If anyone was denounced for heresy to the Inquisitors, the best thing they could do was to go at once and declare themselves as heretics and abjure their supposed heresy. Whether you were a heretic or not, denial meant horrible torture and certain death for those who continued in their honest denial. The Inquisition must have fined, imprisoned, tortured, and even slain a large number of honest Christians.

The modern apologists for the Inquisition, who ask us to acquit the Church because only fifty thousand instead of three hundred thousand were murdered, take the line of proving that the Inquisitors tried immensely more prisoners than they executed. The apologists for the church like to cite a few particular cases. The Inquisitor, Bernard Gui, had nine hundred and thirty cases in one district between 1308 and 1325, and he handed over only forty-two to the secular arm. At Poniers five out of forty-two accused were put to death. What this really means is that 95 per cent of these men and women charged with heresy confessed that they were heretics and abjured the heresy. There were perhaps ten times as many heretics as those executed. The Inquisition was then a sword of intimidation to end rebellion against Rome.

When the friar-Inquisitors arrived at a town, they convened a solemn meeting of bishop, clergy, and people and announced that secret heretics were to be reported to them. There would be a “time of grace,” usually a month, and heretics who voluntarily came forward, and confessed and abjured, during that period received only the lighter penances, prayers, fasts, pilgrimages, fines. Meantime the Inquisitors, who were to “act with the bishop” though he had no power, had to choose an advisory council of “good and experienced men”—twenty to fifty in number—and come to a decision only in conjunction with these.

A most beneficent provision, says the Jesuit! Actually the beginning of the jury-system in Europe, says the Canon! But who were these men, and what did they do? They were, as a rule, mostly priests and monks, with a few orthodox laymen. In a few places quite a number of local pious lawyers—the decree stipulated that they must be “zealous for the faith”—were found amongst the “good men”. They considered the names of the accusers, says the Jesuit, and, being local men, they might thus detect enmity or cupidity.

The leading Inquisitors tell us that it is the common practice to conceal the names of the accusers even from these men, and that they usually saw only a summary of the evidence carefully prepared for them. Few of them ever knew the name of the accused or the accuser, or saw all the evidence. An abstract case and selected evidence are laid before them. They did not have data enough to decide a concrete case, as even a Christian scholar admits. They did not decide it, but only gave their opinion, and the Inquisitors decided.

The “jury” never hampered the Inquisitors. They took up their quarters, in a Dominican monastery, and received secret denunciations. At an early date it was decided by the Popes that two accusers sufficed. These are called “witnesses,” but that is a parody of a judicial term. They were secret accusers, and not only were they never confronted with the accused, but their names were concealed. Christians tell us that Boniface VIII set aside this usage and commanded that at all trials, even inquisitorial, the witnesses must be named to the accused. It is a lie. Boniface said:

Where there is no such danger, the names of accusers and witnesses must be published, as is done in other trials.

What danger? The Inquisitors claimed that there was always danger of revenge. So, Boniface’s words would not affect the procedure at all.

The day the monks of the Inquisition marched with their golden cross into the town, the fear of the population began. The accused were notified and the terror began in earnest. It was not a trial as today. If he was denounced, he was guilty:

If two witnesses, considered of good repute by the Inquisitors, agreed in accusing the prisoner his fate was at once sealed, whether he confessed or not, he was at once declared a heretic.

Trial by the Inquisition did not mean an examination to find out if a man was a heretic. If two secret witnesses said that he was, he was, and all the “third degree” and torture was merely to make him confess that he was and abjure his heresy.

The Inquisitors had three ways of influencing the accused before it came to torture. The fear of death was the first. If this certain knowledge that he would die a painful and lingering death unless he came and abjured his, perhaps imaginary, heresy did not move a denounced man, he was confined to his house and harried and weakened in various ways. If this was not enough, two visitors were sent to put him through the third degree. If he still denied that he was a heretic, he received the grim summons to the Inquisition.

It was no use asking who accused him. Gregory IX, Innocent IV, and Alexander IV forbade the Inquisitors to reveal the names and the declaration of Boniface VIII did not alter matters. All that the man could do was to name any enemies be had in the town. By another refinement of clerical procedure, unknown in mere human law, slaves, women, children, and convicted criminals could lodge an accusation. Religion alone listened to such witnesses, but then religion is so important, the apologists say. Moreover, it was no use the man protesting that he had attended mass regularly. Outward conformity did not count. Once he was denounced for secret heresy, he was guilty of it—all that he had to do was to abjure it.

He could not bring a lawyer. That good and great Pope, Innocent III, had in 1205 sternly forbidden lawyers to help heretics “in any way,” and any lawyer who ventured to do so would soon be on trial. A saintly friar in France who defended a rich and pious patron of his order, whose goods the Inquisitors wanted and got, ended in prison. Some Christians argue that the rule of excluding lawyers was soon relaxed, and “universal custom” allowed a legal adviser, but this is yet another lie and the truth was quite the opposite. Pope Innocent had referred to confessed heretics, and at first Inquisitors allowed lawyers to suspected or accused, but the law was soon taken to apply to all heretics.

A man could not bring witnesses or they would be on the list of heretics the next day. On the other hand, witnesses could be put to the torture to give evidence against him. If one witness cared to say that his charge could be supported by so-and-so, the man was brought and tortured until he told the desired lie. In practice one witness would suffice and in Spain he got his share of the spoils.

Those accused, unless they were of the stuff of martyrs, meekly acknowledged and abjured the heresy. They then had to name their accomplices—denounce others! By thus confessing their heresy and naming others, they merely got a heavy penance—a pilgrimage, to fast for years, to build a church, to pay a heavy fine or wear a hideous cross sewn on their clothes. If they persisted in denying the heresy or refused to name others, they were tortured.

The Inquisitors, with great humanity, always showed the man or woman the instruments of torture first. These were usually a scourge for flogging, a rack for pulling the limbs until the joints cracked, a strappado and a brasier of burning coals to be applied to bare feet. The strappado was an arrangement by which the victim was suspended, with their hands tied behind their back, by the wrists from the ceiling, and jerked downward if they refused to admit the charge. As a further inducement heavy weights would be tied to their feet. Strong men died from it.

Pope Innocent introduced torture into the procedure as even Jesuits admit but, as if to suggest it was not that serious they say it was not a means of punishment but a way of getting the truth, and, to exonerate the Pope they claim the idea came from the civil courts. They also want to imply it was not often used because it was seldom mentioned in the records. Papal decree forbade a cleric, being of a holy estate, from being present at the torture. It was done outside the court and so was not in the records.

Though the Popes at first said that clerics must not be present at torture, Alexander IV and Urban IV said they might be present. Thereafter, everywhere the Inquisitor bent over the writhing victim and shrieked his “Do you confess?”

Torture was habitual and appalling. Apologists claim that the Inquisition was humanely conducted. Are we to suppose with the Christians that the rack, thumbscrews, strappado and burning coals are “humane?”. And this is the Church, the body of Christ, as it likes to maintain. How could a holy body allow even one case of torture, and, having allowed it, how can it try to pretend it never happened, or was humane? Savonarola, an orthodox and most pious Puritan, was tortured seven times. The witches of Arras were tortured forty times. Thirty-six Knights Templar—tough soldier monks—died under torture at Paris and twenty-five more at Sens.

Then some Christian apologists try to say that the Popes did their best to check the excessive zeal of Inquisitors, even though it was the Popes who introduced it. Well, Clement V said that the accused must be tortured only once, but, though torture could not be “repeated,” all over Christendom the Inquisitors found that no one—Popes among them—would object if it were “continued,” on the next day and as many days as they thought fit. Furthermore, Clement had spoken only of the accused, so the Inquisitors concluded they were free to torture witnesses to make them denounce people for as long and as harshly as they liked. Did a Pope rebuke or check them?

There was a political reason when Popes restrained the local zeal of the Inquisition anywhere. The king of France, who had no tenderness for heretics, forced the Pope to interfere with his Inquisitors in the south of France for the barbarity of their prisons. Hundreds died in them. If the victim persisted in denying that he was a heretic, in spite of torture, he was handed over to the secular arm—after Gregory IX had succeeded in having the secular authorities adopt the death sentence for heresy—everywhere. In face of the horrible death in front of them many now “confessed, and they were imprisoned for life. Imprisonment was quite a humane business on the whole, apologists say. They often had good cheer, saw their friends, and so on. Yet, the common sentence was “strict prison:” solitary confinement on bread and water, in the foulest dungeons conceivable, often in chains.

Money will buy comforts and privileges in most places and rich heretics got less strict conditions, but even their treatment was not a holiday camp. Without trial, on the mere denunciation of two men who might be enemies or tortured witnesses or men bribed to bring about the confiscation of their property, they have, for a “heresy” which they have abjured, if it ever existed, lost all their property, seen wife and children reduced to beggary, and been imprisoned for life.

The goods of a fugitive or of a man imprisoned for life or condemned to death were confiscated. Confiscation was of supreme importance for the economic history of the Inquisition. Moreover, the Inquisitors within ten years of the establishment of the inquisition got from the Popes the right to impose fines, or to commute the lighter sentences for payments of money. If you did not want to wear a yellow cross on your coat for life, to spend three years in jail, to live on bread and water for two years—pay up. That merciful safety valve against injustice of which the apologists make so much was to appeal to Rome against an excessive sentence. The Vatican loved it: you paid the fine at Rome.

Can any Christian see the Inquisition and therefore their church as anything other than horrific? It was a scramble for gold on a soil red with human blood. Who got the profit? First the secular authority, and that is in most cases the main reason why heresy was “a crime against the state”. That is why the kings of France permitted tens of thousands of their subjects in the south to be imprisoned for life or burned, why Venice dealt with its own heretics, why the Popes so readily denounced Inquisitors, like the Spanish, who were not under their own control. Secondly, the bishop and the Inquisitors got a share. Thirdly, the Papacy got its share. Everybody hated heresy in those godfearing days! The Inquisition was designed to rob the rich to help the rich, as Catholic writers of the time admit. Eventually, the Inquisitor Eymeric bemoaned: “There are no more rich heretics, so that princes, not seeing much money in prospect, will not put themselves to any expense”.

Even dead men could be accused of heresy. Let two unknown witnesses say that a man, even forty years dead, had been a secret heretic, and his children or even grandchildren were ruined. For him there was no chance of “repentance”. He was an unrepentant heretic. His bones were dug up, paraded through the street, and burned. His widow and children were robbed of every penny. Bernard Gui had eighty-eight of these posthumous cases in six hundred and thirty-six!

Each Sunday morning a solemn ceremony closed the weekly work of the Inquisitors. They gathered the culprits, the clergy, and the people in some great church or public square, and read out the sentences. The unrepentant were then handed over to the secular authorities with a recommendation to mercy—and a stern assurance, from the Pope, that unless those men and women were burned at the stake within five days the magistrate or prince would be excommunicated and the city or kingdom laid under the appalling blight of an interdict. Then the Dominican or Franciscan agents of the Pope washed their hands.

The Roman Inquisition

The criminal procedure of the Middle Ages was grosser than any man can imagine nowadays, and the secular criminal procedure of the Middle Ages was innocent and refined in comparison with the procedure of the Holy Church. It tortured the accused, it is true, but no lawyer that ever lived, in the most imperfect civilization, would have admitted justice in that mixture of fanaticism, cupidity, and brutality.

This was the Roman Inquisition, the tribunal set up by the Roman Church in nearly every country except Spain. England never admitted it, except in one brief episode. The Scandinavian countries, which had few heretics, never had it. It failed also to get a firm foothold in the southeast, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Romania and Hungary, where the heretics were too powerful to let it settle permanently or act considerably. In Bohemia and Poland, it has not a great history. In the former kingdom, where four hundred and fifty nobles signed a protest against the burning of Hus, the Papacy had to use war to murder heresy, and in Poland there was not much to be done.

In Italy itself, rebels against Rome were extraordinarily numerous and strong by the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the specially Papal town of Viterbo the Pope found that nearly all the authorities and his own chamberlain were Cathari. In Florence, heretics and skeptics were extremely numerous and outspoken. From the time of Frederick II and Gregory IX onward, there was a terrible struggle and large numbers were plundered, imprisoned, or burned. One fierce Inquisitor, Peter the Martyr, was assassinated in 1252. Venice kept the profits of the business to itself and defied the Popes. In the north the Waldensians were so numerous that the decimating procedure of the tribunals could not check them. In 1488 the Pope flung a force of fifteen thousand soldiers upon them, and the soldiers were beaten. In 1510, the Inquisition moved further armies against them but they survived in great numbers in the valleys of the Alps until the terrible Vaudois massacres of the year 1655 contributed their share to the “unity of the Church”.

Catholics boast that in Rome itself, where the Popes directly controlled the tribunal, there was singularly little persecution. One Catholic writer says no man was ever put to death by the Roman Inquisition. Giordano Bruno? The Papacy has kept the records of the Inquisition in Rome from the profane eye of the historian. When Leo XIII, with a flourish, threw open the Secret Archives of the Vatican, the records of the Inquisition were not there. The Pope had chosen to remove the documents before he opened the Archives!

In any case, Manichaeans would hardly choose to propagate their gospel under the nose of Gregory IX or Innocent IV, and in a city that had clerics in every second house. But make no mistake about the responsibility of the Popes. The Inquisition in Florence, in France, in Germany, or in Belgium was the Papal Roman Inquisition, as directly controlled and guided by the Popes as was the Inquisition of Rome itself.

In the south of France the activity of the Inquisition was almost as horrible as in Spain. Catholic historians agree that Robert le Bougre, supposed to be a convert from the neo-Manichaean or Bulgar religion, and Inquisitors like him “seem to have yielded to a blind fanaticism” and “deliberately to have provoked executions en masse”. On May 29th, 1239, he burned one hundred and eighty heretics, including the bishop, in a small town of the province of Champagne. The “trial” of this immense number of denounced did not last a week. The bishops of central and northern France had reported that there was no heresy in their territory, but Robert found it everywhere. After a few years of gross and murderous activity he was himself deposed and imprisoned by the Pope.

Inquisitors were mainly active in the south of France. The fearful massacres of the Albigensians at the beginning of the thirteenth century had by no means extinguished the rebellion. In 1241 and 1242, the Inquisitors provoked such anger by their conduct that one of them was assassinated. The Pope compelled the Count of Toulouse to lead his troops against them, and the war or “crusade” was resumed. They were, however, now not numerous enough to sustain the shock of armies. Their last town was taken from them, and thousands were added to the hundreds of thousands of their martyrs. It would be safe to estimate that there were at least a hundred times more semi-Manichaeans put to death for their religion in fifty years in the south of France than there had been Christians put to death in three centuries in the early Church. And that is the record of one small area in one half- century.

When the soldiers had made the land “safe for heroes,” the Inquisitors set to work with redoubled brutality. Their excesses were so great that repeated complaints were sent to the king, Philip the Fair, and it depended entirely on the momentary state of his relations with the Pope whether he intervened or not, In 1290, they made a victim of a notoriously pious and charitable friend of the Franciscan friars, Fabri, finding him a heretic when his lips were sealed by death and confiscating his estate. In 1301, the king sent representatives to investigate the charges against the Inquisitors, and they found the prisons so foul and deadly, and the procedure so gross and unjust, that the king complained to Rome. Two of the Inquisitors were suspended, and their powers were curtailed in France.

Later Pope Clement V got such complants from Bordeaux and Carcassonne that be had to send two cardinals, and they found a sordid system. Clement had, within the limits of the barbaric ideal of the Inquisition, some feeling of humanity. When he died, the Inquisitors resumed their work with more “zeal” than ever and, as a result of more than one hundred years of bloodshed, robbery, and vile treatment, they persuaded the southern provinces of France to become orthodox.

Christians seeking to extenuate these crimes say heresy in the Middle Ages was associated with anti-social ideas. Thus the tenets of these heretics of southern France were that the inner circle, the elect, of the Albigensians were vowed to celibacy and voluntary poverty—just as the monks were. The mass of the Albigensians however married and held property like all others. Much is made of their teaching the right to commit suicide, which is recognized as true, but the evident answer for the church was to relieve them of the probelem by murdering them first. These southern provinces of France were, after the Mohammedan kingdoms in Spain, the most prosperous and contented in Europe, and they were ruined when the “heresy” was ruined.

Two particular incidents,—the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431 and the condemnation of the Knights Templars in 1312—fitly illustrate the spirit and procedure of the Roman Inquisition in France. Whether Joan was a witch or not, she was vilely drawn into a death-trap by having the use of male clothing practically forced upon her, and the recantation she signed was fraudulently replaced by another.

The crushing of the Order of the Templars is one of the grossest single exploits of the Inquisition. The king of France wanted their wealth, and the Pope “truckled” to him, because he had bought the tiara, with the help of the French king. This was Clement V, the one Pope in whom there was a semblance of humanity, and his name is the one most frequently quoted by apologists when they would illustrate the liberality of the Popes. Yet he lived a life of royal sensuality in the Papal palace at Avignon and had the Countess de Talleyrand-Perigord as a mistress. He died worth more than $100,000,000. This was the good Pope, the humane Pope, who permitted the Templars to be robbed and murdered after one of the grossest travesties of a trial in history. Large numbers of the Knights died under the fearful torture rather than lie about their own Order.

In connexion with the trial of the Templars, the Inquisition had its one experience on English soil. Not that there was religious toleration in medieval England. The fearful persecution of the followers of Wyclif and the later hanging, burning, beheading and quartering of Protestant and Catholic rivals are well known. The death-sentence was decreed in 1400.

But England dealt with its own heretics, and when Edward II was informed of the false and incredible stories told of the Templars, be bluntly refused to believe them. Pope Clement V assured him that the Knights had confessed these things—he probably omitted to describe the tortures—and in 1309 two Inquisitors were admitted into England to conduct a trial. They were refused the right to torture, and, as they could find no proof of guilt without that barbarous instrument, they complained to the Pope. Clement the Humane angrily demanded that the king should permit torture, claiming that Church law was higher than English civil law. In the end he bribed the king, in the customary Papal manner, and the Templars were tortured and destroyed. This is Clement “checking the zeal of the Inquisitors”.

In southern and western Germany, Conrad of Marburg, the ascetic friend of S Elizabeth, was almost as brutal as Robert le Bougre. An accused person was harshly ordered to reply simply “yes” or “no” to the charge, and if he did not at once say “yes,” he was condemned and sent to the stake. The bishops of Germany angrily protested against Conrad’s Inquisition and he was one of the many Inquisitors whom the people assassinated. When Frederick II died the Inquisition was checked, but later the Popes re-imposed it, and large numbers of rebels were put to death.

With the growth of heresy on a large scale, at the Reformation, the Roman Church had to reorganize its Inquisition. What is now called the Holy Office is its reconstructed successor. It was created in 1542 by Paul III with the title of The Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, or the Holy Office. Humour is unknown in the Vatican. Its permanent court of six, later eight and eventually thirteen, cardinals was supposed to be the final court of appeal on charges of heresy. But the times are evil, and the “sacred” machinery is stored away in the Papal furniture repository, awaiting the dawn of that more religious age which, some say, American Christians will inaugurate.

The Spanish Inquisition

Most people know nothing about the horrors of the Inquisition except in connexion with Torquemada and the Spanish tribunals. Christian apologists claim it was a Spanish state institution that the Popes earnestly protested about.

As to this plea of political and secular character, even Catholic priests sometimes reject the subterfuge with disgust. “The Inquisition originated not so much in political as in religious motives,” Canon Dalton said, and “no contemporary authority asserts the contrary”. Spanish writers represent it as a purely religious tribunal.

The confusion arises from the division of the spoils. Sixtus IV and his successors greatly disliked the Spanish Inquisition because all the confiscated wealth remained in Spain. The Popes raised a little by receiving at Rome appeals from the sentences of the Spanish Inquisitors, and remitting penances for a payment. But the Spaniards retorted by refusing to recognize the Pope’s dispensations, and there was an unholy struggle.

The Spanish people, every historian tells us, were tolerant and disinclined to quarrel, but the preachers lashed them, especially against the Jews, and from the fourteenth century onward there were frequent pogroms. In 1391, four thousand Jews were killed in Seville alone. But Jews, unless they had once embraced Christianity, did not come under the cognizance of the Inquisition. The final expulsion of the Jews in 1492, when two hundred thousand were driven abroad with every circumstance of brutality and impoverishment, must be added separately to the ghastly account of the Christian religion. It is an ironic comment on the supposed “anti-social” doctrines of heretics that these expulsions of Jews and Moors ruined the brilliant civilization they had created in Spain just as the massacre of the Albigensians ruined Languedoc and the massacre of the Hussites ruined Bohemia.

Until the second half of the fifteenth century, the Inquisition set up there by Gregory IX had comparatively little influence. Neither people nor rulers wanted its bloody work. With the accession of the fanatical Ferdinand and Isabella, however, and the fall of the last great Moorish city, Granada, a new era opened. Even in the case of Isabella it is an historical fact that the priests compelled her to act. For a long time she refused the solicitation of the Dominican monks, but she yielded at last to the grim and overbearing Torquemada.

The record of Christianity from the days when it first obtained the power to persecute is one of the most monstrous in history. The total number of Manichaeans, Arians, Priscillianists, Paulicians, Bogomiles, Cathari, Waldensians, Albigensians, witches, Lollards, Hussites, Jews, Protestants and Catholics killed because of their rebellion against Rome clearly runs to many millions and beyond these actual executions or massacres is the enormously larger number of those who were tortured, imprisoned or beggared. In almost every century, many people have tried to reject the Christian religion, and it would have disappeared but for Christian intimidation, and the lack of freedom we have today.

The Reformers followed for a time in the bloody footsteps of the Popes. But when Catholic apologists eagerly quote the sentiments of Reformers and the executions of Catholics by Protestants, they betray the usual lack of sense of proportion. A twelve-century-old tradition of religious persecution is not likely to be abandoned in a few decades. This particular kind of savagery, the infliction of a horrible death for opinions, had been introduced into Europe by the Christian leaders—ancient Rome never persecuted for opinion or had any standard of orthodoxy—and it had got into the blood. The killing of men for their beliefs by the early Protestants was murder just as was the killing of men by the Inquisition. It is a mockery to ask us to detect any divine interest in Churches during those fourteen centuries of devilish injustice and inhumanity.

Protestant Churches have abandoned the principle that you may slay a man for heresy. The English law “De Haeretico Comburendo,” framed and inspired by Roman Catholicism, was abandoned three centuries ago, though the English Church retained absolute power in the land. One may speculate as to whether a Protestant Church might at some time revert to the old ideal, if it had the old power.

Death for heresy is the law of the Roman Catholic Church today. Rome is peinted as penitent like every other Church. It has not sacrificed one syllable of its teaching about heretics. Joseph McCabe, the dissident priest, was under sentence of death in the Canon Law of the Roman Church.

Leo XIII published a work, written by a Papal professor and printed in a Papal press. It was in Latin, and few Catholics will fail to be astonished that the author states, and proves at great length, that the Church has “the right of the sword” over heretics, and only the perversity of our age prevents it from exercising that right! More recent manuals of Church Law have the same thesis. It is still the law of the Roman Church. Remember it when you read these subtle and eloquent and unctuous bishops on the “blunders” of the past and the right and duty of toleration today. The Inquisition, the Holy Office, exists. The law exists. Thank this age of skepticism that our blood remains in our veins.

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