I don't know how John Paul II feels about the Inquisition, but I haven't heard him defend it. The Inquisition wasn't genocide, though.
>>The modern historiography of the Inquisition, most of it by non-Catholic historians, has resulted in a careful, relatively precise, and on the whole rather moderate
image of the institution, some of the most important works being: Edward Peters, Inquisition; Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press;
John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy; and Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition.
Some of their conclusions are:
The inquisitors tended to be professional legists and bureaucrats who adhered closely to rules and procedures rather than to whatever personal feelings they may
have had on the subject.
Those rules and procedures were not in themselves unjust. They required that evidence be presented, allowed the accused to defend themselves, and discarded
dubious evidence.
Thus in most cases the verdict was a "just" one in that it seemed to follow from the evidence.
A number of cases were dismissed, or the proceedings terminated at some point, when the inquisitors became convinced that the evidence was not reliable.
Torture was only used in a small minority of cases and was allowed only when there was strong evidence that the defendant was lying. In some instances (for
example, Carlo Ginzburg's study of the Italian district of Friulia) there is no evidence of the use of torture at all.
Only a small percentage of those convicted were executed - at most two to three percent in a given region. Many more were sentenced to life in prison, but this was
often commuted after a few years. The most common punishment was some form of public penance.
The dreaded Spanish Inquisition in particular has been grossly exaggerated. It did not persecute millions of people, as is often claimed, but approximately 44,000
between l540 and l700, of whom less than two per cent were executed.
The celebrated case of Joan of Arc was a highly irregular inquisitorial procedure rigged by her political enemies, the English. When proper procedures were followed
some years later, the Inquisition exonerated her posthumously.
Although the Inquisition did prosecute witchcraft, as did almost every secular government, the Roman inquisitors by the later sixteenth century were beginning to
express serious doubts about most such accusations.
The Inquisition has long been the bete noir of practically everyone who is hostile to the Church, such as Continental European anti-clericals. But its mythology has
been especially strong in the English-speaking lands, including America.
Much of this is due to John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (commonly called his Book of Martyrs), which for centuries was standard reading for devout Protestants,
alongside the Bible and John Bunyan. Foxe, an Elizabethan, detailed numerous stories of Protestant martyrs, especially during the reign of Queen Mary. Ironically, in
view of the ways the book has been used, Mary's persecution of Protestants had nothing to do with the Inquisition, which did not exist in England.
But the English-speaking hatred of the Inquisition also stems from the unfamiliar legal system that institution employed. "Inquisition" of course means merely "inquiry,"
something which in itself is hardly sinister. But most Continental legal systems, in contrast to English common law, were derived from Roman law and used not the
adversarial system but one in which the judges were not neutral umpires of the proceedings but were charged with ferreting out the truth.
Foxe's work, along with other Protestant accounts of the Inquisition, ignored the fact that Catholics were not alone in inflicting religious persecution. Elizabeth I
burned heretics, as did her successor James I, as did virtually every Protestant government in Europe until the middle of the seventeenth century. What did give the
Inquisition greater impact was that it was well organized and at least in theory universal throughout the Church, whereas Protestant persecution of heresy tended to
be spasmodic and dependant mainly on local conditions.<<
catholic.net
Actually some of the worst religious persecution was done by Protestants. Someone mentioned here that the two men who translated the Bible into English from Latin were burned.
Not sure what you mean about Philistines. |
