By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 54
The Spanish Inquisition has been portrayed by anti-Catholic historians as the climax of injustice, discrimination, and horrendous persecution of innocent people. It is seen as something like the witch “Maleficent” in the famous Walt Disney cartoon. Even Barack Obama mentioned it in order to explain away the atrocities of ISIS.
Such people enjoy a morbid thrill in speaking against the “cruelty of the Catholic Church” epitomized by the Spanish Inquisition. It became a kind of bogeyman of history.
What are the facts about the ill-famed Spanish Inquisition?
In simple terms, it was a tribunal established in 1478 by the King and Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, at the request of their subjects and with the approval of the Holy See.
Oh, yes, the people of Spain asked for it in order to defend themselves from the infiltration of enemies of both Church and state in their society: Its purpose was to unmask and punish pretended converts from Judaism and Islam. Such people pretended to have “converted” to Catholicism, only to get into positions of power and prestige, in order in some instances to sabotage the country and Church. Some of these held high office in the state and even in the Church. And some of their actions threatened to reverse the dearly bought victory which the Spaniards had won over the Moors after a struggle of seven centuries.
Let us get the correct perspective: After more than 700 years of struggle — yes, you read it right, 700 years — Spain finally managed to expel an invading Moorish king of Granada and his people. But the false converts remained in Spain in order to sabotage the Catholic victory.
Here’s the thing: As long as they minded their own business and did not act against Church and state, both Muslims and Jews enjoyed freedom in Spain, and did their worship in their synagogues and mosques. But otherwise, they got into trouble.
Like the Venetian Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition enjoyed the support of the populace as a whole — civil authorities and citizens alike — because they generally saw heresy as creating not only religious and social disturbances and disintegration, but also as leading to political upheaval.
Suppose you were a Spaniard who, after having celebrated the victory of your King and Queen against the invading enemy that took over your land for centuries, found out that some individuals pretended to have converted to your religion in order to undermine the social and political order (some of them kept in touch with the Muslims who wanted to invade Spain again as a retaliation for their defeat in Granada). I ask you: What would you do? Would you not support your King and Queen in freeing your society from this threat?
OK, but you may ask: How did the Inquisition receive such a bad name?
Oh, the power of the media! Protestants, who were defeated on the battlefield, counterattacked Catholic Spain via the printing press, at times with a stream of anti-Spanish invective. Of course, the Inquisition provided the ideal target for the propaganda.
In 1567 a booklet was prepared denouncing all the alleged horrors and tortures and murders of the Inquisition, and it was distributed everywhere in Europe. Its title was “A Discovery and Plain Declaration of Sundry Subtle Practices of the Holy Inquisition of Spain,” and to this day it remains the main source of “direct eyewitness” information about the Inquisition. Fine.
But who was the author, what were his sources of information? Oh, didn’t I mention it? The booklet was published under a pseudonym, a nom-de-plume — someone writing under the fake name of “Montanus,” who conveniently posed as a victim.
But, you may ask, didn’t people realize that it might be a fake? Wake up, friend! The same thing happens today: If you repeat a lie often enough, there will always be people who will believe it. Lie, lie, lie. . . . Something always sticks, is a sentence attributed to God’s archenemy in France, Voltaire. And the Protestants, who could not defeat Spain by the force of arms, spread the stories by the force of the media of the time.
Another major book against the Inquisition was written by a former Inquisition secretary, Juan Antonio Llorente, who was dismissed from his job because of misconduct. In the war between France and Spain, he sided with his country’s enemies and moved to Paris, and there, safe from his former bosses, he wrote A Critical History of the Inquisition.
The image presented in that work has persisted and been perpetuated ever since. It is interesting to know that Llorente destroyed the records on which he supposedly based his statistics — very convenient, eh?
The research into Spanish written records by Dr. Henry Kamen of the Barcelona Higher Council for Scientific Research has produced findings demolishing the Inquisition’s previous image.
According to Professor Stephen Haliczer of Northern Illinois University, the Spanish Inquisition rarely used torture at all. An analysis of 7,000 cases from Valencia, for example, revealed that only 2 percent involved torture, and then for no more than 15 minutes. Only 1 percent experienced torture more than once. This was far less than other tribunals of the time.
Secular Tribunals
Edward Peters says that the Spanish Inquisition “acted with considerable restraint in inflicting the death penalty, far more restraint than was demonstrated in secular tribunals elsewhere in Europe that dealt with the same kinds of offenses,” and its “torture appears to have been extremely conservative and infrequently used.”
The Inquisition methods were remarkably more lenient in comparison with the methods of the civil courts of the time. To put this in context, during the same period in the rest of Europe, cruel punishments were commonplace: In England, execution was the penalty for damaging a shrub in a public garden; in Germany, those returning from banishment had their eyes gouged out; in France, sheep stealers were disemboweled.
The Inquisition, however, had a rulebook, Instructiones, specifying legal and illegal procedures. Inquisitors who broke the rules were dismissed. As for prisons, a document from Barcelona produced by Professor Haliczer records that prisoners in secular courts would blaspheme in order to be sent to Inquisition prisons — they got a much better treatment there.
But you may say, surely there were some abuses, miscarriages of justice, in the Spanish Inquisition. Yes, of course, there were some. In every human undertaking you will find abuses.
But nothing in comparison with the miscarriages of justice of our days, especially by the so-called Supreme Court, which permitted the widespread murder of innocent preborn babies, over 50 million in this country alone! They do not deserve the clemency of the Spanish Inquisition!
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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