Beyond The Myth Of The Inquisition I

Long did old-fashioned English Protestants and other anti-Catholics put their attention upon words such as “jesuitical,” “popish,” “jansenistic,” and “inquisitorial” in their polemics. But possibly the most odious, and the most successfully repromoted, is the idea of the hated Inquisition as the cruel tool of the Catholic Church to crush its enemies. By this means, especially for English-speakers, Catholic Spain was portrayed as the arch-enemy of all Protestantism. In the United States, whether it be the vulgarized Chick comics, or the sophisticated Ivy League intellectuals in 1960 who feared the Kennedy campaign, the Inquisition is generally assumed to be the Roman part of the triad denounced by clergyman Samuel Dickinson Burchard in 1884 in the famed expression “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” American Know-Nothings and John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs constantly reprinted, or even the purveyors of the post-1968 sexual revolution or abortion-on-demand today, bring up the ghost of the Inquisition to suit their diverse purposes. But what do they know of its history? Are they aware the Inquisition was never primarily an anti-Protestant body, and that Philip II of Spain never had a consistently anti-Protestant foreign policy? Is it clear that most countries had their own equivalent structure for judging heresy, with no need to import anything similar from Spain, whether the would-be importer were Catholic or Protestant? How many remember that anti-Spanish feeling ran high in Italy where the Spanish Inquisition was ridiculed — and where Italian Catholics scorned the idea of racial purity? “It is one of the features of inquisitorial history that its practitioners have consistently failed to compare the Spanish Inquisition to comparable courts elsewhere in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe.”Distinctions are still often not made between the Roman (and purely ecclesiastical) Inquisition, and the Spanish secular-ecclesiastical “dual” Inquisition whose famous administrator was the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada. His career as Grand Inquisitor (sole control was never his — he shared it with other “heads”) ended with his death in 1498, well before the advent of Luther and Calvin. Most often with no elucidating context, the Inquisition is assumed to be a weapon of the Catholic Church against all heretics, in whatever age, even though its somewhat mild ecclesiastical form was originally set up after 1232 to deal with the Cathars or Albigensians in late medieval France. Or, it is seen as the sole reason for the downfall of Spain itself in later centuries.