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                          CHAPTER XXIII

                 The Horrors of the Inquisition

 The Massacre of the Albigenses -- The Origin of the Inquisition
     -- The Infamy of Its Procedure -- The Roman Inquisition
                   -- The Spanish Inquisition

                 THE MASSACRE OF THE ALBIGENSES

     BY modern history we mean a record of past events which is
based upon a larger knowledge than the world ever had before and,
above all, a critical use of the original documents. It is a
science, and it is just as drastically opposed to religion as is
the science of evolution. It entirely eliminates the supernatural
from the chronicle of man's development; it shows that in the
events in which we should most confidently expect the intervention
of God, if there were a God -- in human events -- there is not the
faintest trace of anything but man's own virtues and frailties: and
it completely shatters the version of the human epic which
Christianity had imposed upon the world.

     But modern history has not excited the rancor and hostility of
theologians in the same way as modern science. The reason is
simple, and it is not wholly creditable to historians. Those human
events which the historian studies are in very large part
religious. The scientist may ignore theology when he describes his
nebulae or his dinosaurs, his orchids or his diatoms. But religions
and churches and all the phenomena of their life for five or six
thousand years are a part, and a very important part, of the
material of history. And a deadly conflict has been avoided only by
the stratagem of distinguishing between sacred and profane history.

     Historians do not now, of course, observe this distinction as
rigorously as they were compelled to do in the days of Bossuet.
Voltaire and Gibbon have not lived in vain. We have, in fact, a
special branch of science and history combined -- hierology, or the
science of comparative religions -- which seems to ignore the
distinction; and the masters of ancient history talk to us about
the religions of the Egyptians and Babylonians as freely as they
discuss the costumes or customs of the old civilizations.

     But observe how cautious, how diplomatic, they become the
moment they must state something which contradicts the Old
Testament or the current Christian version of history! As to Christ
and the cardinal events of European history which depend vitally
upon religion, how many historians dare even touch them? They are
"sacred history." At the most there is a formal recognition of the
convention that Christ was "the most sublime moralist" that ever
appeared; that the stream of history somehow changed its color
after the "acceptance" (you never read of the compulsory
enforcement) of Christianity; and that everything sinister in the
ages of faith must be generously interpreted as the very natural
conduct of a people quite different from ourselves.

     Against these timid conventions of history, wherever religion
is concerned, these pages are protesting. They show that the common
belief that civilizations were vicious and stupid and brutal before
Christ is founded upon a lie. They prove that the enforcement of
Christianity was followed by such a clotted and sordid mass of

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coarseness and brutality as had never been known before in
civilized history. It is no less mythical to suppose that Europe
clung to Christianity until modern times; even these brutalized
ancestors of ours, the moment they settled in more or less orderly
civilizations, rebelled against the doctrines of the Church and the
usurped authority of its corrupt clergy and had to be bludgeoned
into submission.

     The year 1000 was a very real turning point in the history of
Europe. My friend, Professor Robinson, the very able historian of
Columbia University, does not agree with me that there was a
widespread expectation of the end of the world in the year 1000,
but I once made some research in the chronicles of the time and I
found much evidence of that expectation. At all events, the Iron
Age, the tenth century, the low-water of civilization was ending.
Rome and the Papacy, it is true, continued in their squalid
degradation for another fifty years, but no one who knows history
regards Rome as the center of light in Europe at any time after it
ceased to be pagan. I do not forget its artistic distinction during
the Renaissance because it was then pagan once more for a season.

     Enlightenment came into Europe along two paths which were very
far away from Rome. One was the road leading from the east along
the valley of the Danube, The other was a strangely circuitous
route, starting in the east, crossing the whole of north Africa and
the Straits of Gibraltar, entering Christian Europe by the Pyreness
and the south of France.

     It must suffice here to say that during the darkest age of
Christendom, the tenth century, there was a brilliant and tolerant
Mohammedan civilization in Spain. and that rays of its wonderful
culture were passing the Pyrenees to enlighten the barbarians of
Europe. The one scholar of the tenth century, Pope Silvester II
(Gerbert), belonged to the south of France and learned his science
in Spain; and he lasted four years as Pope and died in an odor of
sulphur. It was, naturally, in the south of France that the Moors
had most influence. They even occupied it for a time.

     Meantime the second stream was crossing Europe and reaching
the south of France and the north of Italy. Heresy -- revolt
against the Christian religion -- had taken deep and strong root in
the Armenian district of the Greek Empire while the Latin world was
too utterly brutalized to think at all. This heresy was
Paulicianism, a mixture of Gnostic and Manichaean and primitive
Christian ideas. Although one priest-ridden empress of the ninth
century had, as all historians admit, slaughtered no less than one
hundred thousand of these rebels, an emperor of the tenth century
found it necessary to transplant two hundred thousand of them to
the desolate frontier of his empire, next to Bulgaria.

     The heresy soon reappeared in Bulgaria in the sect of the
Bogomiles ("Friends of God"), who would have won the entire nation
and spread over Europe if the Church had not used its customary
spiritual weapon: bloody persecution. As it was, the Bogomiles, a
most earnest and ascetic sect, sent missionaries over Europe, and
from the beginning of the eleventh century onward we find various
shades of this semi-Manichaean religion -- (the true basis of
witchcraft) appearing -- on the scaffold, of course -- in various
parts of Europe.
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     It may be useful to point out the fascination of the
Manichaean ideas which reappear in most of the European heresies.
The fundamental idea was, as I said, that there were two great
creative powers: one who created all that is good and one who was
responsible for evil. It is usually said that the Persians believed
in two supreme principles," but the evil principle (the creator of
matter, darkness, the flesh, sin, etc.). was not actually equal to,
though at present in deadly conflict with, Ahura Mazda, the real
God; because in the end Ahura Mazda would destroy the material
world and judge all men. But it was an enticing explanation of the
origin and power of evil, and it removed from God, the pure spirit,
the responsibility for matter and flesh. It was more reasonable
than Christianity. It rejected the Old Testament and all its moral
crudity, regarded Christ as a wonderful spirit (but not God),
scorned the priest-created scheme of sacraments and the whole
hierarchy, and loathed the consecrated immortality of most of the
priests, monks, and nuns of Christendom.

     It was, in all its shades, a rival religion to Christianity,
and I say confidently that it would in some form have ousted
Christianity if it had not been brutally and savagely murdered. You
never even heard of it? Well, that gives you the value of the
history of these things as it is usually written. A few of the new
writers will talk to you very learnedly about the Priscillian
heresy (also semi-Manichaean) in Spain, and the Arian (or
Unitarian) heresy which was widely adopted by the barbarians. But
the Priscillianists had vanished -- murdered, of course -- by the
seventh century, and a little astute political bargaining had
induced the Teutonic princes to adopt the Trinity (and large slices
of Europe with it) and compel their people to do the same.

     The story begins in the eleventh century. Christendom at
large, or its Popes and bishops, were still, as a rule, too much
interested in wine and women to bother about formulae, and too
ignorant to understand them. But we pick significant bits out of
the chronicles. In 1012 several "Manichaeans" are prosecuted in
Germany. In 1017 thirteen canons and priests of the diocese of
Orleans are convicted of Manichaeism and burned alive. In 1022
there are cases at Liege. In 1030 they bob up (and down) in Italy
and Germany; in 1043 near Chalons in France; in 1052 again in
Germany. In the early part of the twelfth century some "Poor Men of
Christ" are burned in Germany.

     In short, by the middle of the twelfth century Europe was
seething and bubbling with heresy. The general name for the more
important heretical sects, the Cathari, is the Greek word for "the
Pure"; and it indicates the practical features in which all agreed.
They regarded the Church as a corrupt human institution, generally
scorned its sacraments, ritual, and hierarchy, despised its
dissolute monks and nuns, and tried to get back to the pure
teaching of Christ: voluntary poverty, strict chastity, brotherly
love, and ascetic life.

     Such were the Beguines and Beghards who, founded by a Belgian
priest in the thirteenth century, spread a network of ascetic
communities, more like the ancient Essenes and Therapeutae than the
Christian monks all over Europe. They were severely persecuted,


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though their only heresy was that they did as Christ bade men do.
Substantially the same were the Waldensians, the followers of Peter
Waldo, of the same thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They called
themselves the "Poor in Spirit," and literally obeyed every word of
Christ: and so they were branded as heretics and burned in batches,
sixty at one time being committed to the flames in Germany in 1211,
and some being burned in Spain even earlier. The famous Flagellants
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairly come under the
same general heading. The modern psychologist wastes his ingenuity
upon them. The world and Church were so corrupt that they expected
a speedy end of the world and they did penance for their sins and
those of others. The Fratricelli, a detachment from the Franciscan
Order whom the clerical corruption drove into heresy, belong to the
same period, and were fiercely persecuted.

     More important were the Lollards, the followers of J. Wyclif
in England, and the Hussites of Bohemia. Wyclif's heresy -- he was
at first supported by his university and the nobles -- was really
a return to primitive Christianity; and it took such root in
England that in the middle of the fourteenth century one-tenth of
the nation, some historians estimate, were Lollards. It paid the
usual penalty of being true to Christ.

     Meantime, as the king of Bohemia married an English princess,
the Lollard ideas passed to that country, then one of the most
enlightened in Europe, and, by the preaching of John Hus, a very
large part of the nation embraced and developed them. The Hussites
scorned the corrupt priests, monks, and nuns, attacked clerical
celibacy, confession, the eucharist, and the ritual -- in short,
they were the nearest to Christ of all I have so far mentioned, and
therefore the most deadly heretics. It took two hundred years of
war and savage persecution to suppress them. At one time most of
the nobles of Bohemia were Hussites.

     But the name of Cathari, or Puritans, was particularly applied
to various sects which united a zeal for primitive Christian morals
with a tincture of the Manichaean philosophy. They were known as
Patarenes in Italy, as Publicans in France and Belgium, and by
other names in other countries. Their numbers were prodigious in
the century which is precisely chosen as "the great Catholic
century," the thirteenth century. Dante himself tells us how
prevalent heresy, even radical skepticism, was in Italy in his day.
Europe was in a fair way to desert Roman Christianity, and would
probably have done so long ago but for that ghastly weapon of
defense now devised by the Church, the Inquisition.

     We need merely to glance at the story of the Albigensians to
realize this. Albi, from which they take their name, was an
important town in one of those lovely southern provinces of France
which were to the country what southern California and Florida are
to the United States. In these southern provinces the brilliant
example of the Spanish Moors was known best, and during the
eleventh century the heresy of the Bogomiles was imported into them
by missionaries from Bulgaria or Bosnia.





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     In the Albigeois district the great majority of the population
went over to the new religion. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most
famous preacher of the time, made a campaign there in 1147. He
found the churches deserted and was unable to make any impression.
The heresy spread over France, Belgium, western Germany, Spain, and
north Italy, and the Papacy was thoroughly alarmed. One has only to
read the reports sent to Rome, as given in the "Annales" of
Cardinal Baronius. But the sequel will show that these Cathari
numbered at least hundreds of thousands in France alone.

     Pope after Pope angrily urged the secular powers to persecute
them. Alexander III, in the Lateran Council of 1179, urged the use
of force against them. To princes he gave the right to imprison
offenders and -- a ghastly appeal to cupidity which Rome was now
beginning to use -- to confiscate their property. To all who would
"take up arms," as he said, against them he promised two years'
remission of penance and even greater privileges. Briefly, the
Cathari were burned or imprisoned in many places, but in the south
of France the princes and nobles favored them and were proud of
their industry and integrity in a corrupt world. In 1167 the head
of the Paulician sect (the mother of the Bogomile sect, which was
the mother of the Albigensian sect) went to Albi, held a great
synod, consecrated five new bishops, and gave the religion a
splendid public triumph.

     This was the situation when, in 1198, Innocent III, the
greatest of the Popes, donned the tiara. Some of my friends gently
chide me because I will not, as historians generally do, speak
amiably at least of such profoundly religious Popes as Gregory I,
Gregory VII, and Innocent III. The Catholic would do well to
understand that, when non-Catholic historical writers have a
complimentary word for such Popes they strain the evidence in order
to conciliate religious readers. For it is just these men who did
European civilization, and therefore the American civilization
which awaited its development, the most deadly injury.

     For nine years Innocent had monk-preachers in the heretical
provinces, urging the bishops and princes to persecute, but they
were quite ineffective. His chief legate, Pierre de Castelnau,
received instructions in 1207 to arrange a warlike campaign of the
princes, and most of the smaller nobles agreed. It is necessary for
the reader to bear in mind that in the thirteenth century war meant
unlimited loot, and the Albigensian towns were amongst the most
prosperous in Europe. An acrid spirit was created, and the Legate
was murdered. Angyily proclaiming that Raymond, Count of Toulouse,
was responsible -- Innocent in later life admitted there was no
evidence, and it is in the highest degree improbable -- the "great"
Pope sent out a ringing call to arms, and heavily threatened
Christian princes and knights who did not obey it.

     There was no need of threats. Imagine the president of the
United States informing the gunmen of Chicago -- Christian knights
in those days had no higher ethic -- that he permitted them to
invade and sack Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Pasadena, and you have
something of a parallel. It is said by a contemporary poet that
twenty thousand knights and two hundred thousand afoot converged
upon the Albigensians. They were led by the Abbot of Citeaux -- as


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bloody a priest as Torquemada -- and a seedy English-French
adventurer, Simon de Montfort, whose purse was empty. The King of
France was not in it -- at first, only because his terms to the
Pope were exorbitant.

     The magnitude of the "heresy" can be guessed when we learn
that after two years of the most brutal carnage the Albigensians
were still so strong that, when the Pope renewed the "crusade" in
1214, a fresh hundred thousand "pilgrims" had to be summoned.
Innocent boasts that they took five hundred towns and castles from
the heretics, and they generally butchered every man, woman and
child in a town when they took it. Noble ladies with their
daughters were thrown down wells, and large stones flung upon them.
Knights were hanged in batches of eighty. When, at the first large
town, soldiers asked how they could distinguish between heretics
and orthodox, the Cistercian abbot thundered: "Kill them all, God
will know his own," and they put to the sword the forty thousand
surviving men, women and children. Modern Catholic writers merely
quibble when they dispute these things. It is the Catholics of the
time who tell us.

     The Pope's behavior during these horrible years was revolting.
I have fully described his twists and turns in my "Crises in the
History of the Papacy" (based upon the Pope's own letters), and
must here be brief. Raymond of Toulouse, to spare his people,
submitted before the crusade began, although the Pope expressly
told his legates ("Letters," xi, 232) to "deceive him and pass to
the extirpation of the other heretics." His brutal treatment of
Raymond, without any trial, earned the censure even of the king of
France. He stopped the crusade after two years of almost
unparalleled butchery, then yielded to the fanaticism of the monks
and the greed of the soldiers, and reopened it. He was plainly
sickened by the slaughter and the vile passions of his instruments,
but he made vast material profit for the Papacy out of the
monumental crime, and he left the world, which he soon quitted, a
gift as deadly and revolting as his massacre the foundation-stone
of the Inquisition.

                  THE ORIGIN OF THE INQUISITION

     Before I trace the development of the specific tribunal which
we call the Inquisition, it is well to give the reader a word of
caution about the literature of these matters. No historian in the
world, even Catholic, questions that the Pope summoned this
"crusade" and nearly annihilated one of the finest bodies of men
and women of the time. But ... Were there really forty thousand
killed at Biziers, or was it only ten thousand men, women, and
children (especially women and children) who had their throats cut
when the fighting was over? And did not the Albigensians hold
opinions which were socially very mischievous? And so on.

     Anybody who would ask me to respect the Paulists and Jesuits
who trim the edges of a great crime in this fashion, and throw dust
in the eyes of their followers, asks in vain. But a more serious
fact is that these Catholic writers are now worming their way into
works to which the general public turns innocently for information,
not propaganda (or lies). Let me give two instances. The "New


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International Encyclopedia" is the most accessible work of general
reference in America, and is generally good. But the article on
"The Inquisition" has quite obviously been written by a Roman
Catholic, who gives neither his name nor his initials. It is
unreliable from beginning to end, and is, in spite of its
Jesuitical form, largely untruthful.

     Oh, you say, people may be confined to that in Dayton, but I
consult an authoritative work like the learned "Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics." This is, in fact, one of the most scholarly
of recent encyclopedias. But it has no article at all on
witchcraft, and its article on the Inquisition is actually written
by a well-known Roman Catholic apologist, Canon Vacandard! But he
is quite a scholar, you may say. And I reply that there is not a
wholly unbiased Catholic scholar in the world, and that Vacandard's
article is a disgrace to the Encyclopedia. Let me quote a passage
which will serve as text for this section. The canon begins by
placidly announcing that the Spanish Inquisition is outside his
scope; which is like writing "Hamlet" without the ghost, Hamlet,
the King, and Ophelia. The Spanish horror is not treated elsewhere
in the Encyclopedia. Then he says:

          From the twelfth century onward the repression of heresy
     was the great business of Church and State. The distress
     caused, particularly in the north of Italy and the south of
     France, by the Cathari or Manichaeans, whose doctrine wrought
     destruction to society as well as to faith, appalled the
     leaders of Christianity. On several occasions, in various
     places, people and rulers at first sought justice in summary
     conviction and execution; culprits were either outlawed or put
     to death. The Church for a long time opposed these rigorous
     measures. ... The death-penalty was never included in any
     system of repressions.

That passage, occurring in one of the most scholarly encyclopedias
of recent times, is one of the basest and meanest that ever came
from the pen of an apologist. The death-penalty never included! Why
it was, at the dictation of Christian bishops, made a part of
European law by the Christian emperors of the fourth and fifth
centuries, and for many it remained the law. I have just given
hundreds of instances in the twelfth century.

     Then we are asked to believe that "the people and rulers" did
these horrible things, while the gentle Church tried to restrain
them. That is an insult to our intelligence. No ruler or people
ever moved against heretics without the impulsion of the Church,
and at the period we are discussing the Papacy complained every
decade that it could not get rulers to apply its own "rigorous
measures": exile, infamy, confiscation, and destruction of the
heretics home. Innocent III, who, as we shall see in a moment,
demanded the death-sentence, launched his ghastly crusade of murder
and theft precisely because he could not get "people and rulers" to
proceed otherwise.

     And the meanest thing of all is that Canon Vacandard, and most
of your modern Catholic apologists, raise over the bones of those
hundreds of thousands of murdered men, women, and children the smug


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and lying inscription that they were "dangerous to society." How?
You will smile when you hear: like Christ, they advocated voluntary
poverty and virginity! We know their ideas only from bitter
enemies, and this seems to be the rock of offense.

     Yes, but how could society persist if there were no private
property, no soldiers (they opposed war), no procreation of
children. And the answer again is simple: these counsels of Christ
were (exactly as the modern Catholic theologian says) for the elect
few, the "perfect," as the Albigensians called them, and the great
body of the "believers" could own what property they liked, marry
when they liked, and bear arms when necessary. They were, as
Professor Bass Mullinger says in an article in the same
Encyclopedia, men of "simple blameless life," and were not
responsible for the brawls about the churches. Rome murdered a few
hundred thousand real followers of Christ because they were not
Christians.

     In the "Catholic Encyclopedia" we expect anything, and I will
notice only one remark of Professor Weber, who writes on the
Albigensians. They were, be says, "offended by the excessive
outward splendor of Catholic preachers." That is really rich. Let
Professor Weber look up the letter (Migne edition, vii, 75) which
Pope Innocent wrote in 1204 to his Legate. It is a scorching
exposure of the general clerical immorality which Professor Weber
regards, apparently, as "outward splendor." Innocent talks of the
concubines (he uses a word which the modern police would not let me
translate literally) of the priests and the monks everywhere, and
says that their bishops can hunt and gamble, but are "dumb dogs
that cannot even bark."

     Let us return to the facts; though I trust the reader
perceives the importance of noting here and there the trickery by
which apologists divert the minds of the faithful from the facts.

     I have given the early stages of the evolution of the
Inquisition. Heresy was a crime in European law. Exactly, say some
of the apologists; it was in those days thought to be a crime
against the State and was punished accordingly. What miserable
juggling with words! The Church made rulers and peoples regard it
as a crime; and what was happening in the thirteenth century, the
great age of heresy before the Reformation, shows this very
clearly.

     The Lateran Council of 1139 violently urged the secular powers
to proceed against heresy; and 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 (loss of civil
rights): 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 seek out heretics. In Latin the search for a thing
is an Inquisitio. Still very few secular rulers did more than shrug
their shoulders. Heresy did not concern them.



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     Then came Innocent III, who had a perfect arsenal of
anathemas, and who, when a prince ducked with a grin at the hurled
anathema, 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 (magistrates) of the town, but the chamberlain of his own
were Cathari! 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.

It is Canon Vacandard who gives us that quotation: a perfectly
clear demand that heretics shall be put to death! It was,
therefore, not "people and rulers," but the great Pope, who, when
there seemed to be some doubt amongst the jurists how far the old
law against heresy was still in force, demanded death. St. Bloody
would not be a bad title for Innocent III, "the greatest of the
Popes."

     Moreover Innocent -- what an ironic name! -- 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 out heresy, or make 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 ordering such
searches in various places.

     In 1224 the Constitution of 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 for "adequate
punishment" -- of which we find the definition in the words I
quoted from Innocent III -- and, as bishops had shown themselves
very 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 blood-hounds to a scent. Among the wits of the time the
Dominicans were known as the Domini canes, "the hounds of the
Lord," a very neat Latin pun on their name.

     Thus 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 felt 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

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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. In fine,
these "confiscations" which Innocent III had recommended were
becoming a very profitable source of revenue, and the Papacy wanted
its share. The sordid scramble for gold amongst the bones of the
dead had already begun.

     Hence the Inquisition. These monastic agents of the Pope were
to have independent courts, of the most monstrous description, and
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.

     All this modern talk about heresy as "a crime against the
State" is loathsome. There were in the thirteenth century few
countries in Europe which the Popes did not claim to be fiefs of
the Papacy, and few princes who were not held to be, in the literal
political sense, 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 what 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.

     The one material exception is the enactment of the death-
penalty in the secular Constitution of Lombardy in 1222 and 1224.
Here, at first sight, is an historical fact of great value to the
apologist: while Canon Law did not clearly prescribe the death-
sentence, an emperor, Frederick II, introduced it. But the joy of
the apologist will be brief if he looks up the record of Frederick
II. He was scarcely even a Christian. Instead of heresy deeply
offending him, he hardly concealed the fact that he thought the
Mohammedan religion superior to the Christian. What political
motive he had for obliging the Pope -- it is admitted that clerics
induced him to do it -- by thus enacting a law which the Papacy had
then merely to adopt cannot be studied here. Canon Vacandard
observes that Frederick merely copied the common German law in his
new constitution. Professor Turberville is frankly puzzled. But it
is admitted that the law, savage as it was in form -- the heretic
was to be put to death or else have his tongue cut out -- was not
applied before the Pope adopted it; and that, as Canon Vacandard
reminds us, in his first declaration on the subject in the year
1220, Frederick expressly based his law upon the words of Innocent
III which I have previously quoted. A skeptical monarch borrowing,
for political reasons, the words of one blood-thirsty Pope to
oblige another blood-thirsty Pope, is not a very 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, as Vacandard assures us, "did
his utmost to enforce everywhere the death-penalty for heresy"


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("The Inquisition," p. 132). In other words, 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 whole batches of heretics. The
king of Aragon, later the king of Castile, were 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 the Dominican monk "Robert le Bougre"
(I may not translate the name, but you need know little French to
understand that), as he was commonly called, was sent with ghastly
powers. In 1239 he burned a hundred and twenty-three "Bulgars" in
one town. Mr. C.H. Hoskins has published in America a short account
of "Robert le Bougre and the Beginnings of the Inquisition in
France." But you may read all these and further details in the
history of the Inquisition by Canon Vacandard: the same gentleman
who assures us in the "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics" that
"the death-penalty was never included in any system of repression!"
It had been included for more than eight hundred years, and it was
merely disputed by canon lawyers how far the old law applied in the
Middle Ages.

                   THE INFAMY OF ITS PROCEDURE

     The Inquisition is an indelible disgrace to the religion which
created it; the horrors of the Roman amphitheater were in
comparison only a misguided exhibition of manliness; the amorous
license of Paphos or of Corinth was, contrasted with it, an amiable
and innocent indulgence of human nature; in its procedure this holy
court, presided over by the holiest of men, under the direct
control of their holinesses the Popes, was the most infamous
instrument of injustice and the worst fomenter of murderous
cupidity that the world has ever seen.

     And, lest any he tempted to think, as the simple-minded
believer thinks, that, after all, these repressions merely removed,
let us say, a million rebels, and thus proved the remaining fifty
million Europeans to be orthodox and docile Christians, we must
study the procedure of the Inquisition more closely. Its methods
were so barbarous and stupid from the juridical point of view that
we really cannot say how many of its "heretics" were real rebels.
In one respect the situation was simple: if you were denounced for
heresy to the Inquisitors, the best thing you could do was to go at
once and declare yourself a heretic and abjure your supposed
heresy. Denial meant, whatever your views really were, horrible
torture and, if you still honestly denied the charge, certain
death. We must make allowance for this. It is, in fact, part of the
indictment of the Inquisition that it must have fined, imprisoned,
tortured, and even slain a large number of Christians.




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     However, even allowing for this, the figures are significant.
The modern apologists for the Inquisition, who ask us to smile and
rub our hands and acquit the Church because they discover (they
say) that the men and women murdered numbered only fifty thousand
instead of three hundred thousand, take the line of proving that
the Inquisitors generally tried immensely more prisoners than they
executed. Vacandard points out how the famous 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. And so on.
What this really means is that nine-tenths or nineteen-twentieths
of the men and women charged with heresy confessed that they were
heretics and abjured the heresy. In other words, there were at
least ten times as many heretics as those executed; the Inquisition
was a monument of intimidation to put an end to the growth of
rebellion against Rome.

     Its procedure will make this clear, and the account I give of
it in this chapter is based entirely upon Canon Vacandard's book
"The Inquisition" (1908) and the article on the Inquisition by the
Jesuit Father Blotzer in the "Catholic Encyclopedia" The Jesuit, of
course, Jesuitizes here and there, but fortunately the Canon,
unconsciously, gives away his colleague. It will be seen that, in
spite of all the Catholic reviling of Lea's historical works, these
writers have to agree with him in every word in this most important
section. In fact, Vacandard bases his own work largely upon Lea's
most careful research, and Blotzer generally follows Vacandard.

     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, etc.
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 very 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.

     But Vacandard gives the show away. He quotes two of the
leading Inquisitors telling 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. "Very few of them," the writers of the time say, "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," says Vacandard, honestly, "have data enough
to decide a concrete case." In point of fact, they did not decide

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it. They gave their opinion, and the Inquisitors decided. And when
the Jesuit and the Canon assure us that the Inquisitors usually
adopted their opinion, unless it was too severe (!), their only
authority is another modern apologist.

     The "jury" never hampered the Inquisitors. They took up their
quarters, generally in a Dominican monastery, and received secret
denunciations. At an early date it was decided by the Popes that
two accusers sufficed. These are generally 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. "Boniface VIII," says the Jesuit, "set aside
this usage ... and commanded that at all trials, even
inquisitorial, the witnesses must be named to the accused." That
statement of the "Catholic Encyclopedia" is a lie. Vacandard gives
the words of Boniface, and I will translate them: "Where there is
no such danger, the names of accusers and witnesses must be
published, as is done in other trials." What danger? There is the
rub. The Inquisitors pretended that there was always danger of
revenge, and Boniface's words would not affect their procedure in
the least.

     The accused are notified, and the terror begins; it has begun,
in fact, the day the terrible monks have marched with their golden
cross into the town. The Inquisitors had three ways of influencing
the accused before it came to torture. The fear of death was the
first. Do not imagine a man going to face a trial as he does today.
If he was denounced, he was guilty. Impossible, you say; no
Catholic writer, at least, would admit that. But it is a truism.
Listen to the Canon: "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" (p. 128). 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. Bernard Shaw's theatrical representation of a trial is
quite absurd.

     If this certain knowledge that he would die a horrible 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 what is now known as "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 tell 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 very important, the apologists say. Moreover, it was
no use the man protesting that he had attended mass regularly, and
so on. Outward conformity did not count. He was denounced for
secret heresy; he was guilty of it -- all that he had to do was to
abjure it.
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     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
very 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. Father Blotzer, it is true,
tells us that the rule of excluding lawyers was soon relaxed, and
"universal custom" allowed a legal adviser. And Vacandard, the real
authority, explains that this is the opposite of the truth. 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, at least, he got his share of
the spoils.

     Unless, therefore, a man had in him the rare stuff of a real
martyr, he meekly acknowledged that he was a heretic, and he
abjured the heresy. He was then required to denounce others, or
"name his accomplices." If he thus confessed his heresy and named
a few others, he merely got: a heavy penance, a pilgrimage, orders
to fast for years, to build a church, pay a heavy fine, wear a
hideous cross sewn on his clothes, etc. If he persisted in denying
that he was a heretic, or refused to name others, he was taken into
the next room.

     The Inquisitors, with great humanity, always showed the man
(or woman) the instruments of torture first. These were, as a rule,
a horrible scourge for flogging, a rack (for pulling out the limbs
until the joints cracked), a strappado, and a brasier of burning
coals to be applied to his bare feet. The strappado was a pleasant
little arrangement by which a man was suspended by the wrists from
the ceiling, and jerked downward whenever he refused to say that he
was a heretic. As a further inducement heavy weights would be tied
to his feet. Strong men died from it.

     I have told how torture was deliberately introduced into the
procedure, at the request of the Inquisitors by Pope Innocent IV.
No one disputes that. "The Church is responsible for having
introduced torture into the proceedings of the Inquisition," says
Vacandard (p. 147). But, says the Jesuit, airily, curiously enough,
torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a
means of eliciting the truth; and, of course, it was the naughty
civil courts which gave the Pope the idea. What is curious enough
is that the Jesuits and Paulists of the twentieth century,
demanding "liberty" in Protestant countries, can write so callously
and insincerely about the horrors perpetrated by their Church when
it had the power. "Torture is," says the Jesuit, "seldom mentioned
in the records"; and he himself admits that, as it was done outside
the court, one would not expect to find it in the records.




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     Torture was habitual and appalling. "On the whole," says this
gentle Jesuit, "the Inquisition was humanely conducted"; and the
Canon tells us that Savonarola (an orthodox and most pious Puritan)
was tortured seven times, certain witches of Arras were tortured
forty times, thirty-six Knights Templars -- tough folk, one would
imagine -- died under torture at Paris and twenty-five at Sens, and
so on. The rack, thumbscrews, strappado, and burning coals are
certainly "humane" instruments.

     But the Popes (who introduced torture) did their best to check
the excessive zeal of Inquisitors, both apologists say. Clement V
said that the accused must be tortured only once. Yes; and no Pope
moved a finger when, all over Christendom, the Inquisitors found
that, though torture could not be "repeated," it could be
"continued," on the next day and as many days as they thought fit.
Clement had spoken only of the accused. Then, said the Inquisitors,
we are quite free to torture witnesses, to make them denounce
people; and again not a single Pope rebuked or checked them. The
Popes at first said that no cleric, being of a holy estate, must be
present at the torture; and Alexander IV and Urban IV said that
they might be present so that everywhere the Inquisitor bent over
the writhing victim and shrieked his "Do you confess?" There was
generally a political reason when Popes restrained the local zeal
of the Inquisition anywhere.

     If the victim persisted in denying that he was a heretic, in
spite of torture, he was handed over to the secular arm; that is to
say, after Gregory IX had succeeded everywhere in having the
secular authorities adopt the death sentence for heresy. 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, the Jesuit says. They often had good cheer, saw their
friends, and so on. Yes -- sometimes. There were two kinds of
prisons, strict and less strict. Rich heretics generally got the
latter, and money will buy comforts and privileges in most places.
But it is disgusting even in their case to make light of their lot.
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.

     A word about this confiscation. It is, Professor Alphandery
rightly says, "of supreme importance for the economic history of
the Inquisition"; and Vacandard admits that it was Lea who first
brought out its importance. The goods of a fugitive or of a man
imprisoned for life or condemned to death were confiscated.
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 money-payments. 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.
Then there were the appeals to Rome against excessive sentences:
that merciful safety valve against injustice of which the
apologists make so much. It meant that you paid at Rome.



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     Is there even a Roman Catholic business man who does not now
see the Inquisition in a new and ghastly light? It was a scramble
for gold on a soil red with human blood. Who got the profit? We
know quite well. First the secular authority; and that is, in the
overwhelming majority of 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, which published no
balance-sheet, got its share. Oh, everybody hated heresy in those
pious days! Segni, a distinguished Catholic writer of the sixteenth
century, said: "The Inquisition was invented to rob the rich of
their possessions."

     By a refinement of this "humane" procedure, which did so much
for "the general civilization of mankind," the "Catholic
Encyclopedia" says -- look it up, article "Inquisition," if you
cannot believe me -- 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
dollar. Vacandard tells us of one famous Inquisitor, Bernard Gui,
who had eighty-eight of these posthumous cases in six hundred and
thirty-six! But, of course, they were on their guard against any
mere feeling of greed. The Popes warned them. Inquisitors and
secular rulers sternly resisted temptation. Yet Vacandard quotes
the Inquisitor Eymeric bemoaning: "There are no more rich heretics,
so that princes, not seeing much money in prospect, will not put
themselves to any expense."

     To finish with the prisons. The common sentence was "strict
prison": solitary confinement, often in chains, on bread and water
in the foulest dungeons conceivable. I have been in the medieval
dungeons at Venice -- into which those wicked Voltaireans of the
French Revolution let a little daylight -- and can imagine the
horror of life imprisonment in them. We shall see that 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.

     And now let us take a glance at the solemn ceremony which
closed the work of the Inquisitors. On a Sunday morning 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, and these modern Catholic apologists ask us to observe how
clean they were.



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                      THE ROMAN INQUISITION

     The criminal procedure of the Middle Ages was grosser than any
man can imagine nowadays: as gross as the medical or any other
procedure of the time. It has taken two hundred years of criminal
and penal reform to give us the system we have today, and that is
far from perfect. But 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 the mixture of fanaticism, cupidity, and
brutality which the Jesuit and the Canon have described for us.

     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,
Roumania, 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 force on a larger scale -- 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, therefore, there
was a terrible struggle and large numbers were plundered,
imprisoned, or burned. One fierce Inquisitor, Peter the Martyr, was
assassinated in 1252. Venice, as I said, 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 who is occasionally quoted, goes so far as to
say that no man was ever put to death by the Roman Inquisition. One
can hardly believe that he never heard of Giordano Bruno! But the
truth is that the Papacy has taken good care to keep the records of
the Inquisition in Rome from the profane eye of the historian. Dr.
L. Pastor, the Catholic historian of the Papacy, tells us that when
Leo XIII, with a flourish of trumpets, threw open to the world the
Secret Archives of the Vatican, he searched in them for the records
of the Inquisition. They were not there. The Pope had had some
documents removed before be threw open the Archives!




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     On the whole, we should not expect to find much burning of
heretics in Rome itself, for the simple reason that a semi-
Manichaean would hardly choose to go and propagate his gospel under
the very nose of Gregory IX or Innocent IV, and in a city that had
clerics in every second house. But let us 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. I have in an earlier section
referred to the Dominican monk Robert le Bougre (he was supposed to
be a convert from the neo-Manichaean or Bulgar religion), and in
glancing at the work of this man even the courtly Father Blotzer is
moved to say that some of the Inquisitors "seem to have yielded to
a blind fanaticism" and "deliberately to have provoked executions
en masse." On May 29th, 1239, the brute burned one hundred and
eighty heretics, including the bishop of the place, in a very 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.

     It was mainly in the south of France that the Inquisitors were
active. The fearful massacres of the Albigensians at the beginning
of the thirteenth century had by no means extinguished the
rebellion. In 1241 and 1242, especially, 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 color 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


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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.

     Unfortunately, says Vacandard, in extenuation of these crimes,
heresy in the Middle Ages was generally associated with anti-social
ideas. To prove this he devotes a long chapter of his book to the
tenets of these heretics of southern France. He finds what I have
already described: the inner circle, the elect, of the Albigensians
were vowed to celibacy and voluntary poverty -- just as the monks
were. He does not make it sufficiently clear that the mass of the
Albigensians married and held property like all others, and I may
add that their teaching the right to commit suicide, of which much
is made, is now generally recognized. But the broad historical
situation completely discredits this loathsome way of defending the
Popes by libeling the rebels. 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, as Vacandard himself candidly says, the
Pope "truckled" to him. This was Clement V, the one Pope in whom,
up to the present, I have had to note some semblance of humanity.
From the time he had bought the tiara, with the connivance of the
French king, and his name is the one most frequently quoted by
apologists when they would illustrate the liberality of the Popes,
I may add that he lived a life of royal sensuality in the Papal
palace at Avignon and is more than suspected of tender relations
with the Countess de Talleyrand-Perigord. He died worth more than
$2,500,000. 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.

     It was in connection with the trial of the Templars that the
Inquisition had its one experience on English soil. It is hardly
necessary to say that this does not mean 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, in fact, when
Edward II was informed of the false and incredible stories told of
the Templars, be bluntly refused to believe them. Pope Clement V


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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. A pretty
record for almost the one Pope who is quoted as "checking the zeal
of the Inquisitors."

     In southern and western Germany the Inquisitors were at first
as had as in France. Conrad of Marburg, the ascetic friend of St.
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. We read with pleasure that Conrad was one of the
many Inquisitors whom the people assassinated, and that the bishops
of Germany angrily protested against his Inquisition. 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 very 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. Humor is a thing 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 (the Italians say) American Catholics are going
to inaugurate.

                     THE SPANISH INQUISITION

     Every good Catholic will note with satisfaction how clearly I
differentiate between the Roman and the Spanish Inquisition. His
"Catholic Encyclopedia" informs him that the latter was rather a
"political" or semi-political institution; that the kings of Spain
jealously controlled it; that the Popes repeatedly protested
against it. The Protestant historian Ranke more or less yielded to
the Catholic writers of the last century who made this distinction.
It is very convenient. Most people know nothing about the horrors
of the Inquisition except in connection with Torquemada and the
Spanish tribunals. Shocking, you tell them; but, of course, that
was a Spanish state-institution, and the Popes earnestly protested
against its excesses.

     But few of my readers will be under any illusion as to why I
recognize the distinction. It is little more than a geographical
convenience. The Inquisition in Spain was so characteristic, so
rich in its opportunities, so successful in the total number of its
murders, that it deserves to be considered separately. As to this
plea of political and secular character, even Catholic priests


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sometimes reject the subterfuge with disgust. Bishop Hefele, one of
the most resolute Catholic apologists of the nineteenth century,
naturally adopted it in his "Life of Cardinal Ximenes." But when
the work was translated into English (1860) and had to face the
fire of British scholarship, it had a preface of Canon Dalton
entirely repudiating this theory. "The Inquisition originated not
so much in political as in religious motives," he says, and "no
contemporary authority asserts the contrary." It is mild language.
The Spanish writers he quotes emphatically represent it as a purely
religious tribunal, and the shades of Ferdinand and Isabella, if
there are such shades, must have warmed the atmosphere of cloud-
land with their language -- which was vigorous -- when the first
modern apologist raised this mendacious plea that the Spanish
Inquisition was anything but strictly religious.

     What I said about the economic side of the Inquisition
supplies an explanation which will occur at once to the reader. It
was a question of 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 -- those humane and beneficent appeals --
from the sentences of the Spanish Inquisitors, and remitting
penances for a money-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,
and, merely reminding the reader that the final expulsion of the
Jews in 1492, when (on a very moderate estimate) two hundred
thousand were driven abroad with every circumstance of brutality
and impoverishment, must be added to the ghastly account of the
Christian religion, we must here ignore them. 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 details of the work of the Inquisition in Spain must be
read in Sabatini's "Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition" (1913):
a work strangely lacking in picturesqueness and, in its effort at


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impartiality, falling short of the truth in the general impression
it gives. A small history of the Inquisition has still to be
written -- Lea's seven volumes are sound, but no one today reads a
work in seven volumes.

     Let us keep a sense of proportion. The record of Christianity
from the days when it first obtained the power to persecute is one
of the most ghastly in history. The total number of Manichaeans,
Arians, Priscillianists, Paulicians, Bogomiles, Cathari,
Waldensians, Albigensians, witches, Lollards, Hussites, Jews and
Protestants 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. I am concerned rather with the
positive historical aspect of this. In almost every century a large
part of the race has endeavored to reject the Christian religion,
and, if in those centuries there had been the same freedom as we
enjoy, Roman Catholicism would, in spite of the universal
ignorance, have shrunk long ago into a sect. The religious history
of Europe has never yet been written.

     It is unnecessary to add that 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 ghastly injustice and inhumanity.

     And there is this further difference. Protestant Churches have
abandoned the principle that you may slay a man for heresy. The
English law "De Haeretico Comburendo" (for the burning of
heretics), framed and inspired by Roman Catholicism, was abandoned
two and a half 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. I think not; but, as no Church ever again will
have the power, it is idle to speculate.

     But death for heresy is the actual law of the Roman Catholic
Church today. Vacandard and others convey to their non-Catholic
readers that Rome has repented like every other Church. Not in the
least: it has not sacrificed one syllable of its teaching about
heretics. I am under sentence of death in the Canon Law of the
Roman Church. I have in my popular work, "The Popes and Their
Church, shown that about the end of the last century, when the new
generation of apologists were busy with their glosses on the past
and their pretty appeals for universal tolerance, a new manual of
Church Law, specially authorized by Leo XIII, written by a Papal
professor, printed in a Papal press, was published. It was in


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Latin; and probably few Catholics in America will fail to be
astonished to learn that the author states, and proves at great
length, that the Church claims and 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 beautiful thesis. It is today the law of the Roman Church.
Remember it when you read these subtle Jesuits and eloquent
Paulists 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. And you and I may thank this age of
skepticism that we keep our blood in our veins.








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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1929








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