RELIGIOUS SMOKE (part 2): The Inquisition

If the Crusades were a European Vietnam that lasted almost as long as the United States has been in existence, the Inquisition was the McCarthy era to the 10th power.
During the “red scare” of the 1940s, Americans of various stripes and stations were accused “of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence and the use of unfair investigatory or accusatory methods in order to suppress opposition;” “those accused during the McCarthy trials had nearly no (sic) chance of proving their innocence.” See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy

As I write I am listening to a piece by Aaron Copeland, my wife’s favorite composer, who—along with Charlie Chaplin and others—was a victim of McCarthyism.

The McCarthy trials have been called “witch-hunts,” an “American Inquisition.” This inquisition essentially lasted from 1950-1956, and in those six long years profoundly impacted the way Americans view government and personal freedom.

The Catholic Inquisitions lasted 650 years and profoundly impacted the way Europeans view Christianity and the Church. There were four distinct though related Inquisitions: Medieval (begun by the Pope in 1184 to control heresy in Southern France), Spanish, Portuguese and Roman.

The Roman Inquisition (begun in 1542) blacklisted all of Galileo’s works condemning him for "grave suspicion of heresy" due to the influence of Copernicus. Thus in many Europeans’ minds today, Christianity remains associated with self-preserving obscurantism.

Galileo's trial

The Spanish Inquisition was notoriously grisly (and fertile as it gave birth to the Peruvian and Mexican Inquisitions). In 1478 under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, subsequent to the Christian recapture of Spain (see previous blog: the Crusades), the Inquisition was mandated to convert Muslims and Jews to Christian faith; torture was a legitimate means to gain information and lead heretics to repentance (though at times they were thus persuaded to confess but not permitted to recant).

Disembowelment

A Catholic encyclopedia unreassuringly attempts to debunk Inquisition fiction by presenting the facts:

“Curiously enough torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth.… The general rule ran that torture was to be resorted to only once. But this was sometimes circumvented -- first, by assuming that with every new piece of evidence the rack could be utilized afresh, and secondly, by imposing fresh torments on the poor victim (often on different days), not by way of repetition, but as a continuation.” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

The Wheel

Now to be pragmatically cynical about this, if the Inquisition had only condemned Europe’s enemies, I doubt that it would not have become the pejorative term that it is today. “All’s fair in… war.” But the Roman Church also unleashed the Inquisition on its own people, the Europeans, in order to ferret out religious unorthodoxy through a “reign of violence, terror and torture” (Monty Python).

The Judas Chair

Like under McCarthyism, Europeans could be turned in on hearsay. But unlike McCarthyism, the Inquisition was permitted to employ torture to extract confessions, utilizing methods such as the Judas chair, the head vice, the pear, the wheel, the stake, burning at the stake, sawing, disembowelment. (I’ll let you do the research on these techniques, but be warned that they carry an R-rating.) The Inquisition was a religious Gestapo, the mere mention of which struck terror in Europeans’ hearts.
(I can sense a bit of the revulsion that today's Europeans might feel about the Inquisition. Do you remember the old Vincent Price movie, “the Pit and the Pendulum”? That was set in the Inquisition years. I saw it as a kid. Just last year I was reading “Ten Great Mysteries” by Edgar Allan Poe. Well, I only read nine and left “Pit and the Pendulum” for stronger stomachs.)

When a person was found to be a heretic, the Church turned the apostate over to secular authorities for punishment because “the Church does not shed blood.” Thus in some Europeans’ minds, the Church is viewed as the worse kind of hypocrite, having coerced secular authorities to act as its executioner.

The following is an authorized (with imprimatur) Catholic Encyclopedia's attempt to put the Inquisitions in their context so that the 21st century reader might better understand how such things could have happened:

“Moderns experience difficulty in understanding this institution, because they have, to no small extent, lost sight of two facts.
On the one hand they have ceased to grasp religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God, and therefore outside the realm of free private judgment; on the other they no longer see in the Church a society perfect and sovereign, based substantially on a pure and authentic Revelation, whose first most important duty must naturally be to retain unsullied this original deposit of faith. Before the religious revolution of the sixteenth century these views were still common to all Christians; that orthodoxy should be maintained at any cost seemed self-evident.”
“The dogmatic teaching of the Church is in no way affected by the question as to whether the Inquisition was justified in its scope, or wise in its methods, or extreme in its practice. The Church established by Christ, as a perfect society, is empowered to make laws and inflict penalties for their violation. Heresy not only violates her law but strikes at her very life, unity of belief; and from the beginning the heretic had incurred all the penalties of the ecclesiastical courts.” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08026a.htm

I will allow you to draw your own conclusions from the above text, but I know absolutely no European who views the Church as “a perfect society” due in part to the obscurantism, hypocrisy, abuse of unbridled power, torture and carnage of the Inquisition.

In the 16th century, believers were burned at the stake in Dijon were I live. This sort of religious smoke clouds people's understanding of the gospel even today.

If just six years of McCarthyism imprinted political paranoia upon the American psyche, try to imagine this...

Imagine, if you dare, that an evangelical doctrinal police force had existed since the birth of the United States until now, and that this evangelical gestapo will float from California to Texas to Florida to New York over the next 400 years. In order to keep the faith pure, and based upon allegations of doctrinal deviation by anonymous witnesses, they will continue to arrest, torture and turn people over to the civil authorities for capital punishment.

Now in the year 2406, what sort of thoughts and feelings might your descendants have concerning the Church and Christianity?

That might be how the Spaniards felt about the Church and Christianity by 1834 when the Inquisition finally came to an end.

And so the Inquisition explains in part why today, Spaniards and other Europeans appear to be so resistant to the gospel in a way that is inconceivable to Americans. But would you pray right now? Pray that the light of the Good News would cut through the religious smoke of the Crusades and Inquisitions; pray that these people who have suffered under the heavy hand of religion would nonetheless be drawn to Jesus Christ.