``Where
the Bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be;
even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church'' Ignatius of
Antioch, 1st c. A.D
The Spanish Inquisition
Most everything most people think they know about the Spanish
Inquisition is wrong. When most people hear the words "Spanish
Inquisition," they think of merciless torture, unspeakable acts of
violence, women being burned at the stake for being too independent,
Jews being persecuted, and numbers like "millions" of people perishing
under the cruelty of the medieeeeeevil Catholic Church. Or maybe they
think about Edgar Allan Poe's otherwise wonderful (and terrifying!)
"The Pit and the Pendulum," made into a movie starring the fantabulous
Vincent Price, or of Monty Python sketches.
But almost all of what people think about the Spanish Inquisition is
simply not true at all, which raises the question, "How did these
lies become so widespread and accepted?"
The answer to that is very interesting and demonstrates the incredible
power of
propaganda. But let's start at the beginning, shall we? Let's start
with a basic History of the Spanish Inquisition -- what it was, why it
was called for, etc.
The Whys of the
Spanish Inquisition
It's the late 15th century, and Spain under King Ferdinand II and Queen
Isabella I has a problem. 770
years earlier, Muslims had warred their way all through the Middle
East, parts of Africa, the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean areas),
and into Europe. It is these Muslim-instigated wars that were the
causes of the Crusades, which were
defensive
and just wars on the part of Christendom. For hundreds of years, ever
since Muslims conquered the various kingdoms of Spain in A.D. 770,
Christians had been fighting back.
The battles to take back Spanish land stolen by the Muslim invaders --
the "Reconquista" -- blessedly
ended in
1492, with the Christians emerging victorious.
Against this backdrop, Spain had another problem: growing animosity
between Jews and Christians. The reasons for this animosity weren't
religious in nature, at least not directly; they were due, in great
part, to usury, which Jews practiced against Christians (but not other
Jews), financially empowering themselves while leaving Christians
bankrupt. Jewish communities were also "stand-offish" and treated
Christians with contempt, mocking their religious processions, etc.
Before going further, it must
be understood that after the Temple fell
in the first century, practitioners of the religion of the Old
Testament went one of two ways: they either embraced the New Covenant,
which is the fulfillment of the Old Covenant, and became Christians, or
they followed the Pharisees who rejected Christ. The religion of the
Pharisees was an already-corrupted religion at the time of Christ, as
the Gospels indicate, and it changed radically over the years, becoming
a system of
beliefs based
not chiefly on the Old Testament, but on the Talmud, a collection of
rabbinical writings gathered together and written down by the Pharisees
around
A.D. 200. The priestly authority of the Old Testament passed on to
Catholic priests who offer to God the "once and for all times"
Sacrifice of Calvary; post-Temple Judaism has no priests, Pharisaic
rabbis became its leaders, and the Talmud became its most revered text.
Sadly, the Talmud and other Jewish "sacred" writings are very
explicitly anti-Christ, and teach a view of the world that sees only
Jews as humans to whom has been given a "divine spark" while non-Jews
have the souls of brute beasts. Whenever you hear, for example, that
Judaism teaches
something like "whoever saves the life of a single man saves the entire
world," you must replace "man" with "Jewish person" in order to
understand how Jews who are educated in their religion understand the
passage.
Please note: Of course, there are many religious Jews who reject such
ideas, but they do so in spite of what their religion classically
teaches. And, of course, there are many Jews who are simply ignorant
about what orthodox post-Temple Judaism teaches, or who reject religion
altogether. It is the same with Islam: there are good-willed Muslims
who possess great natural virtue and who practice their religion in a
manner Mohammad would disapprove of and that the Qur'an and
hadith wouldn't condone. These "good Muslims" are, in fact, "bad
Muslims" in terms of their orthodoxy to the religion they profess. In
other
words, the behaviors of naturally virtuous Muslims and Jews are
inversely proportional to the extent to which they accept the tenets of
their
proclaimed faiths. It is the opposite case with traditional
Christianity. There
are
Christians who know their religion, its History,
its doctrines, and if those doctrines are embraced and practiced, virtue will be
evident. There are
also, though, those who call themselves "Christians" but who reject
basic Christian
teachings. And, of course, all Christians are sinners and are prone to
concupiscence, that failure not being a matter of "hypocrisy," but of
being weak (it's only hypocritical if a Christian judges another's soul
for engaging in the same sins he does, or if he truly doesn't believe
Christianity's moral teachings but professes them anyway). All of this
is
just human nature. But the three great "religions of the Book" have
their founders, dogmas, doctrines, teachings, authorities, and History,
and they're there for all to see, as are the fruits of those who
practice those religions in an orthodox manner.
Now, Jews rose to prominence in Spain, gaining powerful civic
positions. That this power derived from the financial influence gotten
through the usury that impoverished Christians understandably
caused resentment. And then there's the manner in which religious Jews
perceive the "goyim," or non-Jews. You can come to an understanding
about Jewish
attitudes toward Christians, about how Christians were treated by Jews
in power, by reading "A Quo Primum," an Encyclical given by
Pope Benedict XIV in 1751. The same social phenomena that the Pope
wrote about in 1751 were happening in 15th century Spain as well -- and
typically happened all throughout Christendom wherever Jews and
Christians lived together,
ever since the Gospel era. You can read about what is happening yet
today in a little town in Iowa after a large group of Jews moved there
to open a meat-processing plant. A fascinating book that describes the
culture clash that ensued -- "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America"
-- inadvertently demonstrates one of the main causes of "anti-semitism."
In any case, it was this sort of problem, and
not religion in se, that was the root cause of the expulsions
of Jews
from countries all over the then known world, throughout History. Jews
have
been expelled from Assyria,
Babylon, Greece, pagan Rome, Venice, England, France, various provinces
of Germany, the Netherlands, Russia --- one hundred and nine places in
all. Contrary to how these these expulsions are spoken of in classrooms
and in the mainstream media today, they didn't happen because of some
irrational "virus" of antisemitism, and, quite obviously -- given that
Jews were expelled from Assyria, Babylon, ancient, pagan Greece and
pagan Rome -- they weren't because of the
teachings of the Christian Faith; they were a direct result of how the
Jewish people treated their host populations and, perhaps most
importantly,
because of how they engaged in usury, thereby gaining power, and
then using that power to harm the people and the cultures
of the places in which they lived. This happened in Catholic Europe as
well. It is these things, and
not religion,
that were also the root of periodic mob violence against Jews
throughout European History -- violence which the Church spoke strongly
against.
Even worse than all that, in Spain at that time, many Jews feigned
conversion to Catholicism, rising up
through the hierarchy and gaining prominence. These false converts,
known as "conversos" or, very
disparagingly, as "marranos,"
preached heresy from the
pulpits of Catholic churches. They were "Judaizing," subverting the
Faith from within. The Spanish monarchs' Edict of Expulsion says about
the Judaizers that they were trying
to steal
faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and to separate them
from it, and to draw them to themselves and subvert them to their own
wicked belief and conviction, instructing them in the ceremonies and
observances of their law, holding meetings at which they read and teach
that which people must hold and believe according to their law,
achieving that the Christians and their children be circumcised, and
giving them books from which they may read their prayers and declaring
to them the fasts that they must keep, and joining with them to read
and teach them the history of their law, indicating to them the
festivals before they occur, advising them of what in them they are to
hold and observe, carrying to them and giving to them from their houses
unleavened bread and meats ritually slaughtered, instructing them about
the things from which they must refrain, as much in eating as in other
things in order to observe their law, and persuading them as much as
they can to hold and observe the law of Moses, convincing them that
there is no other law or truth except for that one.
Now, before you might start thinking, "so what if they were Judaizing! Freedom, man!",
consider that deceit was involved in the above (pretense of having
converted, lying about what the Church teaches, etc.), and that the
medieval worldview was very different from that of
modern secular societies. Christendom's "cities of man" attempted to
shape their laws so they reflected the "city of God," and religion was
what held societies together and informed their ideas of the True,
Good, and Beautiful. The divine hierarchy above was mimicked below.
Christians weren't forced to live "schizophrenic," dual lives, with
their public selves
coming off as secular, and their religious selves kept hidden away at
home, in private, as they're forced to now. Israel
today acts in a manner similar to that of Catholic Europe, protecting
its identity as an overtly Jewish nation -- and it's considered
"antisemitic" to point out the double standards that allow Israel to
incorporate religion into its identity while European nations aren't
"allowed" to without being called "theocratic," "fascist," "racist,"
and what not. Israel's "Law of Return," for
example, does not apply to non-Jews or to persons of Jewish descent who
have converted to another faith, and though evangelizing isn't
technically illegal (though a law has been proposed to make it so), you
can and may very well be hauled in to a police station and threatened
with arrest if you engage in it. Further, according to the U.S. State
Department, proselytism has been used as a "reason to deny student,
work, and religious visa extensions, as well as to deny permanent
residency petitions." Orthodox rabbis have total control over
marriages, divorces, and funerals in Israel -- whether the people
marrying, divorcing, or in need of burial are religious or not. I could
go on and on about how Israel acts to preserve its identity as a
Jewish country even as Christian nations are denied that same
sort of "privilege." Christians who fight for the ability to
protect their own cultures in their own lands, who fight to be able to
pass their cultures on to their children as Jews do in Israel, are
accused of being "on the wrong side of history," at best, for even
thinking such a
thought, most often by Jewish groups such as the ADL.
Anyway, in Spain at that time were also Muslims, known as "Moriscos," who feigned
conversion. And, of course, too, there were many genuine converts from
post-Temple Judaism and Islam. St. Teresa of Avila, for example, was
the granddaughter of a converso.
Now, there was another big problem, too: from the beginning of the
Islamic
onslaughts, Jews had also been cooperating with Muslims in their
attempt to conquer Spain. The Spanish Historian and
Orientalist Pascual de Gayangos y Arce put it very simply by saying
that "the Jews opened the gates of the city to the Moslems." Given what
most people think about the
state of Jewish-Muslim relations today, that might sound surprising,
but in that
time, before the rise of Zionism which has been the source of grave
injustices against the Christian and Muslim Palestinian people --
murder, being forced from the lands their families had lived on for
thousands of years, etc. -- Muslims and Jews got along very well. They
thrived
together in lands conquered by Muslims, especially in North Africa.
Post-Temple Judaism teaches utter contempt for Jesus Christ, treating
the worship of Him as "idolatry," and Islam sees Jesus as a mere
Prophet,
thereby escaping the "idolatry" charge. Muslims and Jews became allies,
with Jews seeing Islam as a force to wipe out their greatest perceived
enemy: the Christians (just as many religious
Jews and Jewish leaders
do today). On pages 207-8 of the first
volume of Henry
Coppee's "History of the Conquest of Spain by the Arab-Moors" says
about the Jews of Spain,
What rendered
them dangerous to the Gothic Christians gave them new value in the eyes
of the Arab-Moors, who were making ready to invade the Peninsula. These
disaffected and confederate Jews formed a band of intelligent and
useful auxiliaries in the scheme of the Moslem conquest. The martial
sounds of the Moslem hosts made pleasant music in their ears. National
allegiance had they none... ...[A]nd thus the readers of later Spanish
history will find that, in troublous times, they often, like soldiers
of fortune, changed sides, and not unfrequently held the balance of
power through the influence of their unity and wealth.
So, to understand the situation Spain was in, imagine that your country
were being invaded by a group that wanted for you to live under their
laws, to usurp your culture,
and to treat you as a second-class citizen, imposing taxes on you,
demanding that you comply with all this or be beheaded. This
group has already warred its way through country
after country, ruthlessly raping and slaughtering your spiritual
brothers and sisters by the hundreds of thousands, and are now warring
their way into yours. In your midst
is another group that is cooperating with that first group, going
behind the backs of your fellow citizens in order to subvert your
society and hand it over to the invaders. This second group is
powerful, having obtained its power through riches acquired by
impoverishing your people. Their religion teaches them to hate you, but
some pose as members of your own people, falsely adopting your religion
publicly while secretly practicing a different religion at home. To
top all that off, they gain ecclesiastical power in your Church and
preach heresy from its pulpits. How would you feel about that second
group? What would you want your country to do in order to fight them
and restore a social order that honors your own culture and your own
religion in your own land? And as you answer, keep in mind that in the
medieval world, religion wasn't merely a private affair as it's treated
today; it was the glue that preserved social order, the "stuff" that
shaped how one saw world and from which secular
law derived its vision of the True, Good, and the Beautiful, just as
post-Temple Judaism works in Israel today.
What the Spanish monarchs did was expel that second group from its
borders and, instead on kicking out anyone who was Hebrew, call for an
Inquisition in order to determine who among
the conversos were
truly converted to the Christian Faith, and who were the poseurs,
subverting the religion they claimed to profess, and subverting the
nation itself. It was only by some
sort of an inquisition that true converts from Judaism could be kept
safe while the
false converts could be dealt with as the traitors they were --
traitors not to the Church, which they were as well, but to
Spanish society and the
Spanish people, which the king and queen had the duty to protect. Thatlast is what the Spanish
Inquisition was about, what it was for.
The Hows
and Whats of the Spanish Inquisition
To weed out the false from the true converts, an inquisition was asked
for, by King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella, of Pope Sixtus IV, who granted their request, issuing a bull
in 1478 that allowed for a
small tribunal to proceed. In 1480,
that tribunal began. But things quickly went crazy. Many of the
conversos gloated about being "blood relatives" of Jesus Christ
(Who, in reality, also has many non-Jewish ancestors as well, such as:
Tamar, a Gentile Canaanite prostitute; Rahab, another Gentile
prostitute; Ruth, a Moabite; Bathsheba, who may have been Gentile,
etc.). And they
still
had plenty of wealth to flaunt. Many saw themselves as superior to the
"Old Christians" and, of course, many weren't truly converted at all.
Further, the tribunal came to be used, by both "Old Christians" and
conversos, as a weapon against enemies, a means to seek
revenge and settle old scores. So accusations based on personal
conflicts flew, so many that the
small tribunal in place couldn't handle them all.
Pope Sixtus IV responded to all this by ordering that Bishops be put in
charge to make sure things proceeded in an orderly way and so that the
rights of the accused were honored. But King Ferdinand rejected that
plan, and made Tomás de Torquemada the inquistor-general, a move the
Pope eventually approved.
But the manner in which the inquisitions were conducted were, at that
time, in no way
up to the Church's standards of fairness and justice. Spain's Bishops
and the Pope himself pleaded for an end to trials that could include
hearsay, in which the accused had no lawyers to represent them, etc.,
but their pleas went unheeded for fifteen years.
After that period of time, though, Torquemada was succeeded by
Archbishop Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, who thoroughly reformed how
the inquisitions' proceedings went. Gone was the admission of hearsay.
The accused were given legal representation. The Spanish Inquisition
became known for the fairness with which it operated, so much so that
some people would actually commit blasphemy so that they'd be tried by
the Inquisition rather than by other courts of the day.
Know, too, that
the Inquisition only had jurisdiction over self-proclaimed Christians,
not Jews or Muslims or anyone else. So many lies are told about this!
For example, the website jewfaq.com, in an article about the Kol Nidre
prayer which religious Jews pray on Yom Kippur, says this:
This prayer has
often been held up by anti-Semites as proof that Jews are untrustworthy
(we do not keep our vows), and for this reason the Reform movement
removed it from the liturgy for a while. In fact, the reverse is true:
we make this prayer because we take vows so seriously that we consider
ourselves bound even if we make the vows under duress or in times of
stress when we are not thinking straight. This prayer gave comfort to
those who were converted to Christianity by torture in various
inquisitions, yet felt unable to break their vow to follow
Christianity. In recognition of this history, the Reform movement
restored this prayer to its liturgy.
This is a lie. A straight-out lie. In fact, there are three
lies told in just these sixteen words "This prayer gave comfort to
those who were converted to Christianity by torture in various
inquisitions." The lies are: 1) that the Inquisition had jurisdiction
over self-admitted Jews, 2) the intimation that torture was used
extensively and in order to "force conversions," and 3) that forced
conversion happened in the first place. These sorts of assertions are
very commonly heard, however. (It's also not true that the Kol Nidre is
prayed for the reasons stated, either, but that matter is beyond the
scope of this page.1)
Anyway, back to the story: During the 350-year long Spanish
Inquisition, those found guilty of treason were put to death, just as
they are in the United States and in Israel today. The execution rate
was similar to that of modern day Texas, with a total of between
3,000 and 5,000
people having received the death sentence over the three and a half
centuries it lasted -- a rate of 8.57 to 14.2 per year. Ironically,
given the way so many people have been propagandized to think about the
Catholic Church, while these measured trials were going on in Spain,
the great frenzied
and hysterical witch hunts were happening in Protestant lands,
resulting in the slaughter of around 150,000 people.
Sadly, as with other courts of the day (and, incredibly, as in modern
America and Israel), torture was used, but extremely
rarely; it was used "only" in 2% of the cases and "only" for a maximum
of fifteen minutes. Further, a person could only be subjected to such
means only twice and no more -- a much more
humane approach to the use of torture than the American and Israeli
governments have today, by the way. There were no
such things as
"Iron Maidens," those casket-shaped objects in the form of a woman,
lined inside with spikes that would, when the "casket's" door was
closed, pierce the unfortunate ordered inside. That is a 19th century
invention and had nothing whatsoever to do with the Spanish
Inquisition.
Nonetheless, the popular imagination is filled with images such as the
following --
-- but the
reality is that such things are so often wrongly associated with
the Spanish Inquisition due to Protestant and anti-Spain propaganda
that became
known as "The Black Legend."
The Black
Legend
After the expulsion of the Jews, Spain entered into a great "golden
age." The
year of their expulsion, 1492, was the same year that Columbus
discovered the New World, bringing untold riches to the old one. The
arts
flourished, with Diego Velázquez, El Greco, Francisco de
Zurbarán,
and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo exhibiting their brilliance in paint
while Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega wrote classics of
literature. Musically, there were Tomás Luis de Victoria, Francisco
Guerrero, and Alonso Lobo, and some of Spain's most beautiful buildings
were built then as well, including the Palace of Charles V, El
Escorial, Madrid's
Plaza Mayor, and the cathedrals of Granada and Valladolid.
All of this made England very nervous.
Now, England became Protestant when King Henry VIII, wanting a male
heir and possessing a wandering eye,
went against the Church and divorced his wife, Queen Isabella's
daughter, Catherine of Aragon. He had his heart set on Anne
Boleyn and married her. This breach with the Church was catastrophic
and ended in the misery and martyrdom of English Catholics who remained
faithful to Christ's Church. Priests were driven underground, and
Catholics had to practice their religion secretly (for a fascinating
account of life during these times, see Eamon Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in
England, 1400-1580"). The Church's properties were seized, Her
parishes plundered. There was a brief reprieve for Catholics when
Mary I, unfairly remembered as "Bloody Mary," the Catholic daughter of
Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, took the throne. She did have
Protestant blood on her hands, mind you, but her half-sister, Elizabeth
I, came to have much more Catholic blood on hers. Those with the most
power write History, however, so it is the Catholic Mary who got the
word "Bloody" attached to her name (and who has a tasty cocktail named
for her).
Mary I reigned for only five years and was succeeded by Henry
VIII's and Anne Boleyn's daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. It was under
Elizabeth's reign that England became an empire as Spain had,
establishing colonies in the New World. And it was at this time that
the Protestant anti-Catholic, anti-Spain propaganda that later became
known as "The
Black Legend," was loosed upon the world.
After Elizabeth came James I. And then Charles I. And then England blew
up, erupting into a series of three Civil Wars led by the odious Oliver
Cromwell, who led his "Roundhead" Parliamentarians against the
"Cavaliers," those loyal to the Catholic-friendly King Charles I and
his Catholic wife. King Charles made peace with Spain and
France, ending the Thirty Years War, and tried to unify the country
religiously by attempting to bring about a more sacramental, "high
liturgy" faith. But he acted much of the time without consulting his
Parliament, enraging them in the process. Because of this, Charles was
executed by the Roundhead faction, with some believing
that his executioner was Cromwell himself.
Cromwell
then allowed Jews to re-enter England, after their having been expelled
by
King Edward I in A.D. 1290 for the same old reasons (usury,
anti-Christianism, etc.). He was approached by a Dutch Jew, Menasseh
Ben Israel, who implored him to allow Jews to re-enter the country,
and,
so, "the resettlement" proceeded. Thereafter, the English, Jewish,
and Dutch-run trans-Atlantic slave
trade arose, and Jews helped to quash the Jacobite attempt to restore
the rightful, Catholic monarchy. Within 150 years, the Rothschilds had
set up their banking system in England, and soon engaged in fractional reserve banking, all leading
eventually, later, to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank which plague our economies today.
Financially supported by Jewish merchants, most especially by Antonio
Fernandez Carvajal of London, Cromwell wreaked havoc, invading
Ireland and slaughtering Catholics there, soldier and civilian alike,
deporting over 50,000 Irish Catholic men, women, and children to forced
labor
in the New World as indentured servants (i.e., slaves in all but name),
and instigating a famine that
resulted in the deaths of a third to half of Ireland's
population.
The hatred of Catholicism and of rival Spain on the part of
the elites
brought forth an outpouring of literature filled with lies and
exaggerations. Among the most influential of this sort of writing was
"Foxe's Book of Martyrs," formally titled "Acts and Monuments," and
written by John Foxe. Published in 1563, this book was filled with
gruesome depictions of innocent Protestants being "martyred" by the
Catholic Church. Ugliness filled page after page after page of this
book, whose writer was described by the Encyclopedia Brittanica as
being guilty of "wilful falsification of evidence." Foxe even had the
gall to use the
early Catholic martyrs as examples of those martyred for Protestantism.
The book was read from in Protestant "churches," alongside Sacred
Scripture, and was used by Cromwell to incite his soldiers to rage.
The myth of the Spanish Inquisition was born. And it endures. Please
watch this video of a BBC-made documentary to learn just how most of
what most people think they know about the Spanish Inquisition is
nothing but propaganda.
Footnotes:
1 The Kol Nidre is at least 1200 years
old. See Spector, Johanna, The Kol Nidre - At Least 1200 Years Old,
Journal of Synagogue Music, vol. 38 (Fall 2008), page 156, citing a
Cairo Geniza letter by Palto Gaon (fl. 857) "that Kol Nidre was recited
by popular demand in the Geonic Academy at the Babylonian city of
Pumbadita long before the practice was introduced to the larger and
better-known Academy at Sura." See also the entry "Kol Nidre" at the
Jewish Encyclopedia which affirms that the Kol Nidre was around at
least as early as the "Geonic period," which lasted from A.D. 589 to
1038:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9443-kol-nidre#ixzz1DSnakw1X