Bible Heaven/Bible Heaven.iso/misc/answers/answers.016

Text File | 1990-07-10 | 11KB | 187 lines

                         The Inquisition

     Sooner or later, any exchange of views with fundamentalists
will come around to the Inquisition.  To non-Catholics it is a
scandal; to Catholics, an embarrassment; to both, a confusion.
At the least, it is a handy stick with which to engage in
Catholic-bashing because most Catholics seem at a loss for a
sensible reply.
     In 1184 the Inquisition was established in southern France
in response to the Catharist heresy.  In this phase it was known
as the Medieval Inquisition.  It died out as Catharism disappeared.
     Quite separate was the Roman Inquisition, begun in 1542. It
was the least active and most benign of the three variations.
Under it Galileo was tried. (By the way, Galileo's has been the
only case--which is why it is so celebrated--in which the Church
prosecuted someone because of his scientific theories.)
     Separate again was the famed Spanish Inquisition, started in
1478, a state institution used to ferret out Jews and Moors who
converted to Christianity not out of conviction but for purposes
of political or social advantage.  It was the Spanish Inquisition
that had the worst record.
     Fundamentalists writing about the Inquisition rely on books
by Henry C. Lea (1825-1909) and G.G. Coulton (1858-1947).  Each
man got most of the facts right, and each made progress in basic
research.  Proper credit should not be denied them.  The problem
is they could not weigh facts well because they harbored fierce
animosity toward the Church--animosity which had little to do
with the Inquisition itself.
     The contrary problem has not been unknown.  A few Catholic
writers, particularly those less interested in digging for truth
than in giving a quick excuse, have glossed over incontrovertible
facts and done what they could to whitewash the Inquisition. This
is as much a disservice to the truth as exaggerating the
Inquisition's bad points.
     These well-intentioned, but misguided, apologists are, in
one respect at least, much like Lea, Coulton, and the present
strain of fundamentalist writers.  They fear, as the others hope,
that the facts about the Inquisition might prove the illegitimacy
of the Catholic Church.
     But the facts won't do that at all.  The Church has nothing
to fear from the truth.  No account of foolishness, misguided
zeal, or cruelty by Catholics can undo the divine foundation of
the Church, though, admittedly, these things are stumbling blocks
to Catholics and non-Catholics alike.  What must be grasped is
that the Church contains within herself all sorts of sinners and
knaves, and some of them obtain responsible positions.  The wheat
and chaff co-exist in the Kingdom until the end, which was how
the Founder intended it.
     Fundamentalists suffer from this problem: they believe the
Church includes only the elect.  For them, sinners are outside
the doors.  Locate sinners, and you locate another place where
the Church is not.  It seems easy to demonstrate sin operating
through the Inquisition--at least to the extent dry records allow
us to perceive sin at the remove of centuries--and for
fundamentalists this proves the Inquisition, if it was the arm of
a church, was the arm of a false church.
     Thinking that fundamentalists might have a point, Catholics
tend to be defensive.  That's the wrong attitude.  The right
attitude for Catholics is to learn what really happened, to
understand events in light of the times, and then to explain to
anti-Catholics (hard though this may be) why the sorry tale does
not prove what they think it proves.
     How should a Catholic answer charges about the Inquisition?
He should not deny the undeniable; history cannot be wished away.

On the other hand, he should not, out of embarrassment, acquiesce
in each fundamentalist slander.  What he should try to do is give
his challenger a little perspective.  If he is able, the Catholic
should learn enough about the Inquisition to give his opponent
some sort of overview and to demonstrate that while much of what
he knows about the Inquisition is true, much is fantasy.
     Many fundamentalists believe, for instance, that more people
died under the Inquisition than in any war or plague, but in this
they rely on phony "statistics" generated by one-up-manship among
anti-Catholics, each of whom, it seems, tries to come up with the
largest number of casualties.  But trying to straighten out such
historical confusions can take one only so far.  As Ronald Knox
put it, we should be cautious, "lest we should wander
interminably in a wilderness of comparative atrocity statistics."

     In fact, no one knows how many people perished through the
Inquisition.  We can determine for certain, though, one thing
about numbers given by fundamentalists: they are simply
fabrications.  One book popular with fundamentalists claims that
95,000,000 people died under the Inquisition.  The figure is so
grotesquely off that one immediately doubts the writer's sanity,
or at least his grasp of demographics.  Not until modern times
did the population of those countries where the Inquisition
existed approach 95,000,000.  It did not exist in Northern
Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or England.  It was confined
mainly to southern France, Italy, Spain, and a few parts of the
Holy Roman Empire.  The plague, which killed a third of Europe's
population, is credited by historians with major changes in the
social structure.  The Inquisition is credited with few--
precisely because the number of its victims was, by comparison,
small.
      Don't waste time fruitlessly arguing about statistics.
Instead, ask fundamentalists just what they think the
Inquisition's existence demonstrates.  They wouldn't bring it up
in the first place unless they thought it proves something about
the Catholic Church.  Just what is that something?
     That Catholics are sinners?  Guilty as charged.  That at
times people in positions of authority have used poor judgment?
Ditto.  That otherwise good Catholics, afire with zeal, sometimes
lose their balance? True, all true, but such charges could be
made even if the Inquisition never existed.
     Fundamentalist writers claim the existence of the
Inquisition proves the Catholic Church could not be the church
founded by our Lord.  They use the Inquisition as a good--perhaps
their best--bad example.  They think it makes the Catholic Church
look illegitimate.  And at first blush it might, but there's only
so much mileage in a ploy like that; most people see at once that
the argument is weak.  The real reason fundamentalists talk about
the Inquisition is that they imagine it was established to
eliminate (yes, you guessed it) fundamentalists.
     They identify themselves with the Catharists (also known as
the Albigensians), or perhaps it is better to say they identify
the Catharists with themselves.  They think the Catharists were
twelfth-century fundamentalists and that Catholics did to them
what they would do to fundamentalists today if they had the
means.  This is a fantasy.  Fundamentalist writers take one
point--that Catharists used a vernacular version of the Bible--
and conclude from it that these people were, well, "Bible
Christians."  In fact, they were hardly Christians at all.
     Theirs was a curious religion that apparently (no one knows
for certain) came to France from what is now Bulgaria.  Catharism
was a blend of Gnosticism, which claimed to have access to a
secret source of religious knowledge, and of Manichaeanism, which
said matter is evil, and Catharism had serious --truly
civilization-destroying-- social consequences.
     Marriage was scorned because it legitimized sexual
relations, which Catharists identified as the Original Sin.  But
concubinage was permitted because it was temporary and secret and
was not given formal approval, while marriage was permanent,
open, and publicly sanctioned.  The ramifications of such
theories are not hard to imagine.  In addition, ritualistic
suicide was encouraged (those who wouldn't take their own lives
were "helped" along), and Catharists refused to take oaths,
which, in feudal society, meant they opposed all governmental
authority.  Thus, Catharism was both a moral and a political
evil.
     Even Lea, so strongly opposed to the Catholic Church, said
"the cause of orthodoxy was the cause of progress and
civilization.  Had Catharism become dominant, or even had it been
allowed to exist on equal terms, its influence could not have
failed to become disastrous."  Whatever else might be said about
Catharism, it was certainly not the same as modern
fundamentalism, and fundamentalist sympathy for the heresy is
sadly misplaced.
     Most discussions about the Inquisition get bogged down in
numbers.  Many Catholics fail to understand what fundamentalists
are really driving at, and they restrict themselves to secondary
matters.  Instead, they should discover what fundamentalists are
trying to prove with their talk about hecatombs.
     Granted, there is a certain utility--but a decidedly limited
one--in demonstrating that the kinds and degrees of punishments
inflicted by the Inquisition were similar to (or even lighter
than) those meted out by secular courts.  It is equally true
that, despite what we consider the Inquisition's lamentable
procedures, many people preferred to have their cases tried by
ecclesiastical courts because the secular courts had even fewer
safeguards.  And, as some have pointed out, it does not hurt to
remember that only fifty years ago torture ("the third degree")
was routinely used by American police.
     But such arguments are better suited to quiet discussions
with reasonably informed people than with fundamentalists who
think they can injure Catholicism by talking about judicial
practices that are universally acknowledged to be unjust. "The
Inquisition was punctilious in its adherence to law," wrote
Donald Attwater, "but after full allowance has been made for
'other times, other manners,' some of its procedure and
punishments must be set down as utterly unreasonable and in
consequence cruel."
     One should not try to justify them, but to understand them.
They need to be explained, but not explained away.  The crucial
thing for Catholics, once they have obtained some appreciation of
the history of the Inquisition, is to explain how such an
institution could have been associated with a divinely-
established Church and why it is not proper to conclude, from the
fact of the Inquisition,  that the Catholic Church is not the
Church of Christ.  This is the real point at issue, and this is
where any discussion should focus.

                                        --Karl Keating
                                          Catholic Answers
                                          P.O. Box 17181
                                          San Diego, CA 92117