The New Inquisition: Spanish Inquisition does not live up to reputation of injustice

Since the epiphany of last September, we have heard countless comparisons between the murders by militant Mohammedans and various epochs of Western history, in a bizarre, masochistic, self-condemning attempt to extenuate the current jihad movement. Dominating the examples of a Western conduit for bloodthirsty religious fervor similar to that of the Osama Movement has been the Spanish Inquisition. Unfortunately for our media and this self-deprecating sequela, examination of the Spanish Inquisition reveals it to be none of the things it is alleged to be, but to be in fact the most just tribunal of its time.

The very word “Inquisition” (which actually comes from the verb ‘to inquire’) conjures up morbid notions of torture, lynch mobs, and oppressive totalitarian men in brown robes carrying out sadistic punishments for no proven cause. This is the image taught and depicted as an apodictic truth by mainstream society. Modern scholars, and a recent BBC expose, have found the truth to be quite to the contrary.

One must first realize why the Spanish Inquisition was founded. At the time (late 15th century), Spain was under attack by, believe it or not, Turkish Muslims set on their own jihad – as it turns out the Iberian Peninsula was also infringing on Muslim Holy Ground. False conversions to Christianity to avoid suspicion were common – producing converts who would later clandestinely aid their invading cohorts. The uprooting of these bogus conversions in an attempt to halt the invading Turks was the initial aim of the Spanish Inquisition.

Within this and all later purposes, the only persons the Spanish Inquisition had jurisdiction over were self-proclaimed Christians. Contrary to popular belief, the Inquisition could not, nor did, prosecute anyone for being Jewish or Islamic. In fact, one way to avoid the trial or punishment by the Inquisition was simply to say that you were not a Christian. One could believe whatever he or she cared to, as long as the person did not claim to be Christian.

A common vision of the Inquisition is a mob of ignoble churls throwing accusations at some poor widow for being a witch, as portrayed by Monty Python. William Thomas Walsh describes the purpose of the Inquisition as “…a judicial instrument of conformity, which would eliminate the caprice, the anger, and the misinformation of the mob.” This view as a stabilizing effect seems more founded, since the Inquisitors, who as Alphonsus Duran points outs “were university lawyers and not even always priests,” claimed that witchcraft was a figment of the imagination. No one could be tried or burnt for witchcraft under the Spanish Inquisition, however there were harsh punishments for false accusation. In contrast, as the BBC points out: in the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, only between 3,000 and 5,000 people were killed, while at the same time the rest of Europe burnt 150,000 women for witchcraft alone.

Some of the information used by the BBC came from the annals of the Catholic Church, which kept in-depth internal records of each case. Since these were internal, and hence secret (until recently), their veracity is held in high regard, as forgery would gain nothing.

These records give startling enlightenment with regards to the practice of torture, which was universal in the contemporary courts of Europe. Professor Stephen Haliczer of Northern University of Illinois found that the Spanish Inquisition used torture in only 2 percent of more than 7,000 cases studied, and never for more than 15 minutes. Less than 1 percent were tortured more than once, and he found no evidence that anyone was ever tortured more than twice. This during a time when damaging shrubs in a common garden was an offence punishable by death in England.

The dungeon-like, filthy jails of the Inquisition shown in movies such as “Man of La Mancha” are another fabricated slur against the Inquisition. Prof. Haliczer claims the Inquisition’s jails were superior to all other jails in Spain, and notes, “I found instances of prisoners in secular criminal courts blaspheming in order to get into the Inquisition prison.” This is a far cry from the Neanderthal brutality and insane religious fanaticism being alluded to by the media, let alone being analogous to Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Palestinian terror groups.

So if the Inquisition did not just go from town to town executing anyone accused of heresy, how did it operate? Here is the account given in Alphonsus Duran’s book “Why Apologize for the Spanish Inquisition,” with information provided by the BBC documentary: Upon coming into a district, the Inquisitors would announce a “period of grace.” During this time, anyone accused could freely repent, whereupon a penance would be given and the offender forgiven. After this the accused would appear before the court. At this time he would be given the incredible privilege of writing a list of all his enemies who might want to commit calumny against him, whose testimony would automatically be thrown out. At this point the trial would take place guided by strict procedures which were constantly reviewed and revised by the hierarchy. The defendant could seek the assistance of lawyers. A conviction needed the agreement of at least two witnesses (our courts only require one), and a judge thought to be biased could be rejected by the accused. If convicted, there were multiple levels of appeal available to the accused.

This strict and just method defies our inherited notions of the Spanish Inquisition, but the statistics collaborate this. The BBC research shows that more men and women were executed by the guillotine of the French Revolution in one day than by the Spanish Inquisition during the entire 16th century. In the vast majority of cases, an Inquisition ended in absolution, penance, or a warning – not an execution.

With the chimera of the monolithic, nefarious Spanish Inquisition now debunked, one might still raise the question as to whether it is acceptable to punish, and in particular execute, in the name of God at all; even when done in this comparatively just and benevolent manner.

Is it justifiable to kill for the good of a society or an institution (for a church is an institution, divinely ordered or not)? Our own penal code says yes. Timothy McVeigh can attest to that. If the institution is a church instead of a state, heresy becomes equivalent to treason. American law holds execution as the standard punishment for treason, so the “malodorous” and “fanatical” Inquisitors can not be vilified by our own standards. Would we be better off if Bin Laden and company had been sent to a Muslim Inquisition and made to recant or die, stopping him before he spread his evil ideology? The U.S. response in Afghanistan seems to allude to such a sentiment, making the pathos of the Inquisition more similar to our War on Terror than to the attack on America.

"...their veracity is held in high regard, as forgery would gain nothing." CAN HE BE SERIOUS? Nah, the church would never cover up evil now, would she?

These were internal trial transcripts. To believe that these records were forged is like believing that the records of common criminal trials today are forged. Moreover, these transcripts only constituted part of the evidence examined by the scholars.

Additionally, why do you trust documented false accounts? It looks to me that you're fitting the evidence to your preconceived ideas, rather than pursuing the truth.

As pseudo-justin posted above:

Furthermore, the BBC production does an excellent job of explaining how the myth of the Spanish Inquisition arose in the first place. Anti-Spanish Protestants, mostly Lutherans, were master propagandists, printed and distributed copies of fabricated first-person accounts of Spanish Inquisition trials, and thus effectively whipped up sentiment against the Spanish crown. These propaganda pieces were the primary evidence that historians later used in constucting their accounts of the Inquisition (and most of those historians were Protestant).

This is documented.

Much of the factual information in this article was drawn from the scholarship represented in a BBC program regarding the Spanish Inquisition.

All Jews (including some of my ancestors) were kicked out of Spain in 1492.

As the last step in the 700 year effort to drive the Mohammedans out of Spain. The Spanish drove out the Mohammedans and, sadly, the Jews who lived under them. The desire to free the Iberian peninsula of Mohammedans should be understandable to Americans considering the events of 911.

A lengthier treatment here

In the Iberia of the reconquista a scenario of this kind presented a danger profoundly more serious than elsewhere. As the Christians slowly reestablished their hegemony over the peninsula - expressed in the two distinct political entities, Portugal and Spain - the potential antagonists of religious uniformity they were determined to impose were not indigenous eccentrics, as was the case in other European countries (bear in mind that the Protestant Reformation was at this moment still forty years in the future), but a conquered population linked by ties of race and religion to the Muslims living in the principalities of North Africa, which at Gibraltar lay only sixteen watery miles away. Even more ominous from the Spanish point of view was the fact that these so-called barbary states - the modern nations of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia - formed part of a vast imperial system established by the Muslim Turks, a system as powerful and menacing to western Europe as the Soviet bloc was conceived to be in our day. As the reconquista proceeded, therefore, and especially after Granada and the last remnant of Spanish Islam fell to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, policy-makers had to decide how to treat the Moors and the relatively small but influential Jewish community which, in marked contrast to what our century has witnessed, had flourished within a larger Islamic society. The Christian victors, fearful of Muslim sympathizers in their midst, offered no compromise: Moors and Jews had to accept baptism or face expulsion from the country now defined as entirely Catholic.
What this decision amounted to, of course, was a policy of forced conversion, something quite incompatible with traditional Catholic teaching. This fact was pointed out by several popes and numerous Spanish theologians over a long period, but the sentiment expressed by one of Ferdinand of Aragon's royal predecessors was the one that prevailed: "The enemies of the cross of Christ and violators of the Christian law are likewise our enemies and the enemies of our kingdom, and ought therefore to be dealt with as such."
Predictably, however, the stark choice between conformity and exile invited pretense and hypocrisy on the part of those dragooned into a faith not of their own choosing. The Jews and Moors who conformed rather than depart the land in which they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years did so with varying measures of reluctance, merging often into downright dissimulation. And this is precisely why the Inquisition was created by the Spanish monarchs: as the etymology of the word implies, the first task of this new judicial body was inquiry, specifically inquiry into the authenticity of the conversion of the Moors and Jews who had come under the sway of those monarchs.
But once again we must stress the chronological track, because the bloody reputation of the Spanish Inquisition - though it formally existed for more than three centuries - was earned during its first decade and a half, even before, that is, the capture of Granada. During this unhappy period perhaps as many as 2000 persons were burnt as heretics. Though this number is only a small fraction of what the Black Legend routinely alleged, it is nevertheless sobering enough. Almost all those executed were conversos or New Christians, converts, that is, from Judaism who were convicted of secretly practicing their former religion. It should be borne in mind that the Inquisition, as a church-court, had no jurisdiction over Moors and Jews as such. But, ironically, once such persons accepted baptism they became capable of heresy in the technical sense of the word. Thus the early savagery of the Spanish Inquisition contributes another chapter to the sad history of anti-Semitism, motivated on this occasion, however, more by politico-religious expediency than by racial hatred. It was in any event an enormous and unforgivable miscalculation. Far from constituting a danger to the nation, the Jewish conversos of previous decades had already been admirably blended into the larger community. As Professor William Monter has pointed out, the New Christians "represent the first known large-scale and long-term assimilation of Jews into any Christian society. Although the process included many painful adaptations, some severe backlash and even a decade of brutal persecution under the Inquisition, it ended with their general integration into Spanish society. Their descendants quietly flouted racist codes and contributed to the vibrant Catholicism of Golden Age Spain; St. Teresa of Avila was the granddaughter of a New Christian penanced by the Inquisition."
It seems as though the violence with which the Spanish Inquisition began its tenure exhausted or perhaps shamed it into a moderation which the purveyors of the Black Legend stonily ignore. But the facts cannot be gainsaid. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Spanish sovereignty extended from Italy to most of Latin America, on average less than three persons a year were executed by the Inquisition, which was formally constituted in all those places as well as at home. Or, to give the Spaniards the benefit of the doubt, perhaps as the bitter struggle of the reconquista gradually faded from their collective memory, even as the Muslim threat itself receded, they exercised a restraint consistent with their principles. However that may be, for my part I am glad there is no longer in existence an Inquisition that might have me arrested on the basis of charges lodged by persons unknown to me, as happened to St. Ignatius Loyola. Yet as one who has lived through most of a century in which cruelty and atrocity and oppression have reached a pitch, quantitatively and qualitatively, inconceivable to our ancestors - inconceivable even to Torquemada - I think a measure of discretion would be appropriate when bemoaning the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition, more discretion anyway than that exercised by Poe and Dostoyevsky.

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