Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia
Choose a topic from Vol 4:
A genuine understanding of the Spanish Inquisition would never permit that remark.
During my twenty-five years on the radio I have dealt with the Spanish Inquisition a hundred times to every one mention I have made of Martin Luther's activities. As a matter of fact Martin Luther was not in a position to persecute others. He encouraged the German princes to establish his new religion by force, and many of them did so because the propagation of the new religion fitted in with their own political ambitions. Protestant historians themselves admit that. As for the Spanish Inquisition, I turn no blind eye to that. But not every subject can be dealt with at once. When called upon to discuss Martin Luther, rarely enough, I do so without mentioning the Inquisition. When called upon to deal with the Inquisition, I do so without bringing in Martin Luther. Neither subject demands treatment of the other. If I set out to write a book about the North Pole, that is not evidence that I turn a blind eye to the South Pole.
The Church did not act as many people imagine it did. The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1480, during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was finally abolished in 1820. What gave rise to it was the fact that, in 1480, Spain was over-run by both Moors and Jews, many of whom falsely professed to be Catholics and loyal Spaniards, whilst in reality they were engaged in subversive activities against both Church and State. The Spanish Inquisition was established to cope with this danger. This Inquisition was a mixed tribunal, with ecclesiastical and secular departments. The ecclesiastical section had jurisdiction only over baptized Catholics, not over anyone who had never been received into the Catholic Church. Its duty was to decide whether those brought before it were genuine in their profession of the Catholic Faith. It had no authority to inflict any temporal penalties. The secular courts dealt with crimes against the State, and punished them accordingly. That abuses occurred in the administration of the Spanish Inquisition is. certain. But they were not nearly as numerous nor as bad as prejudiced writers have made them out to be. The Popes themselves frequently protested against such abuses, and the Catholic Church as such accepts no responsibility for them. It should be added that the religious and political conditions then prevailing in Spain more than justified the establishing of the Inquisition, and good results far outweighed any bad results occasioned by it.
Most certainly. In one form or another it is necessary, as modern States themselves are fully aware. England has its own Secret Service, from whose activities the atomic-spy trials were made possible. That means an Inquisition. In Australia there is a special department of the Police Force known as the C.I.B., or Criminal Investigation Branch. That is an Inquisition. In U.S.A. they have the F.B.I., and have also appointed special Committees such as that for the Investigation of Un-American Activities. They are based on the same idea of the Inquisition. As regards the Spanish Inquisition, the only legitimate criticism could be of the way in which it was administered. But that has to be judged in its right historical perspective according to the conditions of the times. Even so, as I have said, that abuses occurred no one would deny. But they were abuses, not examples of normal procedure.
Whatever Spaniards did to prisoners of war in the 15th and 16th centuries had no more to do with the Inquisition than the fearful tortures inflicted on so-called convicts in the 18th century by Englishmen in the convict settlements in Australia, to which the poor victims had been transported. The Spanish Inquisition was a tribunal concerned, not with prisoners of war who were left to the military and naval authorities, but with purely internal problems within Spain itself, problems which arose chiefly from the religious and political activities of the Moors and the Jews who had worked their way into official positions by pretending to believe in Christianity and fictitiously receiving baptism. The ecclesiastical tribunal examined suspects on their orthodoxy as Catholics, and could inflict only spiritual penalties, excommunicating those found guilty of insincerity and unbelief. The State tribunal alone had the right to inflict temporal and physical penalties for offenses in so far as they had political or civil consequences; and these penalties were in accordance with the rough and what we would consider even brutal methods of those times, not only in Spain but also in England and other European countries. It could be disputed, of course, that our own times are more humane than then, in the light of the Nazi atrocities in the 1940's, with their concentration camps and gas-ovens; or of the fearful sufferings inflicted upon their victims by Communists in countries behind the Iron Curtain.
We must beware of unguarded and sweeping statements. For example, it is certain that the State has the right to judge and punish those guilty of violating civil laws. Wherever there is a lawful authority, that authority must possess in some way not only the power to make laws, but also the power to enforce the observance of them and to punish violators of them. Of course you are thinking of merely religious matters. But even in that restricted sense your statement would not be correct.
It is certain that Christ gave to His Church religious authority to make necessary laws when He said: "Whatever you bind on earth will be bound also in heaven." Matt., XVI, 19. He also gave His Church the power to judge its own members and to punish them by excommunication if they deserved it, when He said: "If a man will not hear the Church, let him be as the heathen." Matt., XVIII, 17. St. Paul certainly knew that he had the power both to judge and to punish in the name of Christ and of the Church. To the Thessalonians he wrote: "If any man obey not our word . . . note that man and do not keep company with him, that he may be put to shame." II Thess.,111,14. To Timothy: "Them that sin reprove before all, that the rest may also have fear." I Tim.,V,20. We cannot, therefore, deny to the Church the right to judge and to punish, where religious delinquency demands such action.
There is no need to bring the Jesuits into everything! The Jesuit Order was not established until 1540. The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1480, and the Dominicans were placed in charge of the ecclesiastical tribunal connected with it. The civil tribunal was entrusted to civil judges, Any abuses that occurred were to the discredit of the individuals guilty of them, whether among the ecclesiastical officials or the civil magistrates. But these abuses are no more an argument against the truth of the Catholic Church than defaulting lawyers, guilty of embezzlement, are an argument against the legal profession as such.
An "Auto da Fe" was not a punishment at all. Those Spanish words mean "Act of Faith." The "Auto da Fe" was a public gathering, usually held on a Sunday, when those who had been found innocent by the Inquisition, or who had renounced their errors, publicly professed their Catholic Faith. That is why it was called an "Auto da Fe," or public "Act of Faith." Those condemned by the Inquisition as guilty and unrepentant, and who had been handed over to the civil authorities for punishment, were not punished at the "Auto da Fe," but at another time and place altogether. There is a lot of confusion on this subject, caused by writers who have not taken the trouble to get their facts right.
No. Research has shown that about 4000 deaths occurred owing to the Spanish Inquisition over a period of almost three centuries. The biased historian Llorente said that during the peak period of about 18 years nearly 8,800 people were put to death. That would average about 500 a year. The average number of people put to death in England during the early period of the Protestant reformation was about 800, according to Sir James Stephens' "History of English Criminal Law." To talk of millions is an unwarranted extravagance. Populations were much smaller then than today. For example, England's total population was then between four and six millions, as contrasted with nearly fifty millions today. The phenomenal rise in the population of Europe dates from the beginning of the 18th century. Certainly, under the Spanish Inquisition it was not possible to have a purge on the grand scale as in Russia in 1929, when the Communists took as their slogan "The liquidation of the Kulaks," with the result that over three millions of the peasant farmers as a class were exterminated.
However wicked and cruel they may imagine the Spanish Inquisition to have been, they cannot logically use it as an argument against the truth of the Catholic Church. At most they could use it as proof of the bad behavior of some of the Spanish Officials, despite the fact that they were Catholics. But in reality your non-Catholic friends talk about the Inquisition with only an inadequate and distorted knowledge of it, based on prejudiced books about it.
Their attitude is not very intelligent. One cannot prove that the Church does not inspire justice and charity by pointing to any individuals, or group of individuals, who have been wanting in those virtues in any given age. Also how would they account for the Saints of all the ages, a St. Bernard, a St. Thomas More, a St. Vincent de Paul and thousands of others, who manifested justice and charity in the highest degree, and who acknowledged that they owed the inspiration to do so to their Catholic religion?
That is the only sensible way to view things. After all, if in reading history we come across examples of others who have been bad Catholics and have not served God as they should, that is no reason why we should not serve God faithfully ourselves. Were we to make their example an excuse for abandoning our religion in practice, that would make no difference to them. We would not convert them. We would not even punish them. Their lives are over and done with and they have already answered to God for the way in which they lived. All that we would do by imitating them would be to offend God ourselves and do harm to our own souls. The more others are unfaithful to their religion, the greater our obligation to be faithful, avoiding the infidelities we have to condemn in them. It is each man's personal duty to serve God according to the dictates of his conscience; and each will be judged by God accordingly. It is no excuse to say that others offended God and that therefore we offended Him also!
The matter is not really one for the Church at all. It is a matter for i historians. And thousands of books have been published by Catholic historians dealing with different phases of the subject, rectifying the garbled accounts published by prejudiced writers who foolishly imagined that they were proving the Catholic religion to be false. Catholics who have not taken the trouble to study the subject must not take it for granted that it has not been thoroughly written up by Catholic historians.
Surely one should not expect anything else. At school, the text-books give only an elementary knowledge of history, stressing mainly our own national interests. Even where a general review of the course of historical events in European countries is given, as in Germany, France, Holland, Spain and Italy, the Inquisition in Spain would be but an episode meriting no more than passing mention. Only with prejudiced people has the Spanish Inquisition obtained a fictitious importance out of all proportion to its real significance; and that, not for historical, but for purely religious reasons.
You should simply tell them so; and either offer to study the subject for their benefit, or advise them to study it for themselves. If they are really interested in the subject for its own sake and you are not, then they are the ones who should devote to it the time necessary for such research.
If a man were to ask whether the F.B.I, were still carrying out its deadly work, you would suspect him to be a gangster. The criminal regards the F.B.I, as a deadly institution, whilst the normal citizen regards it as necessary for the preservation of the general good. If, instead of putting your question in a partisan way which tries to work in a point of view, you were to put the legitimate question as to whether the Inquisition still exists, I would then have to ask you which Inquisition you mean. The Inquisition established in the 12th century? Or the Spanish Inquisition organized in the 15th century? Or the Roman Inquisition set up in the 16th century? If you intend either of the first two of these Inquisitions, they have long since been abolished. If you intend the Roman Inquisition, that tribunal still exists under the name of the Holy Office, although it operates on very different lines from those of the first mentioned institutions, having little in common with them except the name.
We have been discussing the Spanish Inquisition in the light of the conditions then prevailing in Spain, and prevailing there even now to a' great extent. In countries where the same conditions do not prevail, one must expect the relationship between Church and State to differ accordingly, in practice at least, whatever may be the theoretical ideal. But we shall see more of these things as we go along.
"THAT CATHOLIC CHURCH
A Radio Analysis"
- Book Title