CON'T...
The Roman Inquisition
The criminal procedure of the Middle Ages was grosser than any man can imagine nowadays: as gross as the medical or any other procedure of the time. It has taken two hundred years of criminal and penal reform to give us the system we have today, and that is far from perfect. But the secular criminal procedure of the Middle Ages was innocent and refined in comparison with the procedure of the Holy Church. It tortured the accused, it is true; but no lawyer that ever lived, in the most imperfect civilization, would have admitted justice in the mixture of fanaticism, cupidity, and brutality which the Jesuit and the Canon have described for us.
This was the Roman Inquisition: the tribunal set up by the Roman Church in nearly every country except Spain. England never admitted it, except in one brief episode. The Scandinavian countries, which had few heretics, never had it. It failed also to get a firm foothold in the southeast (Bulgaria, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Roumania, and Hungary), where the heretics were too powerful to let it settle permanently or act considerably. In Bohemia and Poland it has not a great history. In the former kingdom, where four hundred and fifty nobles signed a protest against the burning of Hus, the Papacy had to use force on a larger scale -- war -- to murder heresy; and in Poland there was not much to be done.
In Italy itself rebels against Rome were extraordinarily numerous and strong by the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the specially Papal town of Viterbo the Pope found that nearly all the authorities and his own chamberlain were Cathari. In Florence heretics and skeptics were extremely numerous and outspoken. From the time of Frederick II and Gregory IX onward, therefore, there was a terrible struggle and large numbers were plundered, imprisoned, or burned. One fierce Inquisitor, Peter the Martyr, was assassinated in 1252. Venice, as I said, kept the profits of the business to itself and defied the Popes. In the north the Waldensians were so numerous that the decimating procedure of the tribunals could not check them. In 1488 the Pope flung a force of fifteen thousand soldiers upon them, and the soldiers were beaten. In 1510 the Inquisition moved further armies against them, but they survived in great numbers in the valleys of the Alps until the terrible Vaudois massacres of the year 1655 contributed their share to the "unity of the Church."
Catholics boast that in Rome itself, where the Popes directly controlled the tribunal, there was singularly little persecution. One Catholic writer who is occasionally quoted, goes so far as to say that no man was ever put to death by the Roman Inquisition. One can hardly believe that he never heard of Giordano Bruno! But the truth is that the Papacy has taken good care to keep the records of the Inquisition in Rome from the profane eye of the historian. Dr. L. Pastor, the Catholic historian of the Papacy, tells us that when Leo XIII, with a flourish of trumpets, threw open to the world the Secret Archives of the Vatican, he searched in them for the records of the Inquisition. They were not there. The Pope had had some documents removed before be threw open the Archives!
On the whole, we should not expect to find much burning of heretics in Rome itself, for the simple reason that a semi- Manichaean would hardly choose to go and propagate his gospel under the very nose of Gregory IX or Innocent IV, and in a city that had clerics in every second house. But let us make no mistake about the responsibility of the Popes. The Inquisition in Florence, in France, in Germany, or in Belgium was the Papal Roman Inquisition, as directly controlled and guided by the Popes as was the Inquisition of Rome itself.
In the south of France the activity of the Inquisition was almost as horrible as in Spain. I have in an earlier section referred to the Dominican monk Robert le Bougre (he was supposed to be a convert from the neo-Manichaean or Bulgar religion), and in glancing at the work of this man even the courtly Father Blotzer is moved to say that some of the Inquisitors "seem to have yielded to a blind fanaticism" and "deliberately to have provoked executions en masse." On May 29th, 1239, the brute burned one hundred and eighty heretics, including the bishop of the place, in a very small town of the province of Champagne. The "trial" of this immense number of denounced did not last a week. The bishops of central and northern France had reported that there was no heresy in their territory, but Robert found it everywhere. After a few years of gross and murderous activity he was himself deposed and imprisoned by the Pope.
It was mainly in the south of France that the Inquisitors were active. The fearful massacres of the Albigensians at the beginning of the thirteenth century had by no means extinguished the rebellion. In 1241 and 1242, especially, the Inquisitors provoked such anger by their conduct that one of them was assassinated. The Pope compelled the Count of Toulouse to lead his troops against them, and the war or "crusade" was resumed. They were, however, now not numerous enough to sustain the shock of armies. Their last town was taken from them, and thousands were added to the hundreds of thousands of their martyrs. It would be safe to estimate that there were at least a hundred times more semi-Manichaeans put to death for their religion in fifty years in the south of France than there had been Christians put to death in three centuries in the early Church. And that is the record of one small area in one half- century.
When the soldiers had made the land "safe for heroes," the Inquisitors set to work with redoubled brutality. Their excesses were so great that repeated complaints were sent to the king, Philip the Fair, and it depended entirely on the momentary color of his relations with the Pope whether he intervened or not, In 1290 they made a victim of a notoriously pious and charitable friend of the Franciscan friars, Fabri, finding him a heretic when his lips were sealed by death and confiscating his estate. In 1301 the king sent representatives to investigate the charges against the Inquisitors, and they found the prisons so foul and deadly, and the procedure so gross and unjust, that the king complained to Rome. Two of the Inquisitors were suspended, and their powers were curtailed in France. Later Pope Clement V got such complants from Bordeaux and Carcassonne that be had to send two cardinals, and they found a sordid system. Clement had, within the limits of the barbaric ideal of the Inquisition, some feeling of humanity. When he died, the Inquisitors resumed their work with more "zeal" than ever and, as a result of more than one hundred years of bloodshed, robbery, and vile treatment, they persuaded the southern provinces of France to become orthodox.
Unfortunately, says Vacandard, in extenuation of these crimes, heresy in the Middle Ages was generally associated with anti-social ideas. To prove this he devotes a long chapter of his book to the tenets of these heretics of southern France. He finds what I have already described: the inner circle, the elect, of the Albigensians were vowed to celibacy and voluntary poverty -- just as the monks were. He does not make it sufficiently clear that the mass of the Albigensians married and held property like all others, and I may add that their teaching the right to commit suicide, of which much is made, is now generally recognized. But the broad historical situation completely discredits this loathsome way of defending the Popes by libeling the rebels. These southern provinces of France were, after the Mohammedan kingdoms in Spain, the most prosperous and contented in Europe, and they were ruined when the "heresy" was ruined.
Two particular incidents, -- the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431 and the condemnation of the Knights Templars in 1312 -- fitly illustrate the spirit and procedure of the Roman Inquisition in France. Whether Joan was a witch or not, she was vilely drawn into a death-trap by having the use of male clothing practically forced upon her, and the recantation she signed was fraudulently replaced by another.
The crushing of the Order of the Templars is one of the grossest single exploits of the Inquisition. The king of France wanted their wealth, and, as Vacandard himself candidly says, the Pope "truckled" to him. This was Clement V, the one Pope in whom, up to the present, I have had to note some semblance of humanity. From the time he had bought the tiara, with the connivance of the French king, and his name is the one most frequently quoted by apologists when they would illustrate the liberality of the Popes, I may add that he lived a life of royal sensuality in the Papal palace at Avignon and is more than suspected of tender relations with the Countess de Talleyrand-Perigord. He died worth more than $2,500,000. This was the good Pope, the humane Pope, who permitted the Templars to be robbed and murdered after one of the grossest travesties of a trial in history. Large numbers of the Knights died under the fearful torture rather than lie about their own Order.
It was in connection with the trial of the Templars that the Inquisition had its one experience on English soil. It is hardly necessary to say that this does not mean that there was religious toleration in medieval England. The fearful persecution of the followers of Wyclif and the later hanging, burning, beheading and quartering of Protestant and Catholic rivals are well known. The death-sentence was decreed in 1400.
But England dealt with its own heretics; and, in fact, when Edward II was informed of the false and incredible stories told of the Templars, be bluntly refused to believe them. Pope Clement V assured him that the Knights had confessed these things -- he probably omitted to describe the tortures -- and in 1309 two Inquisitors were admitted into England to conduct a trial. They were refused the right to torture, and, as they could find no proof of guilt without that barbarous instrument, they complained to the Pope. Clement the Humane angrily demanded that the king should permit torture, claiming that Church law was higher than English civil law. In the end he bribed the king, in the customary Papal manner, and the Templars were tortured and destroyed. A pretty record for almost the one Pope who is quoted as "checking the zeal of the Inquisitors."
In southern and western Germany the Inquisitors were at first as had as in France. Conrad of Marburg, the ascetic friend of St. Elizabeth, was almost as brutal as Robert le Bougre. An accused person was harshly ordered to reply simply "yes" or "no" to the charge, and if he did not at once say "yes," he was condemned and sent to the stake. We read with pleasure that Conrad was one of the many Inquisitors whom the people assassinated, and that the bishops of Germany angrily protested against his Inquisition. When Frederick II died the Inquisition was checked, but later the Popes re-imposed it, and large numbers of rebels were put to death.
With the growth of heresy on a very large scale, at the Reformation, the Roman Church had to reorganize its Inquisition. What is now called the Holy Office is its reconstructed successor. It was created in 1542 by Paul III with the title of The Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, or the Holy Office. Humor is a thing unknown in the Vatican. Its permanent court of six (later eight, and eventually thirteen) cardinals was supposed to be the final court of appeal on charges of heresy. But the times are evil, and the "sacred" machinery is stored away in the Papal furniture repository, awaiting the dawn of that more religious age which (the Italians say) American Catholics are going to inaugurate.
The Spanish Inquisition
But few of my readers will be under any illusion as to why I recognize the distinction. It is little more than a geographical convenience. The Inquisition in Spain was so characteristic, so rich in its opportunities, so successful in the total number of its murders, that it deserves to be considered separately. As to this plea of political and secular character, even Catholic priests sometimes reject the subterfuge with disgust. Bishop Hefele, one of the most resolute Catholic apologists of the nineteenth century, naturally adopted it in his "Life of Cardinal Ximenes." But when the work was translated into English (1860) and had to face the fire of British scholarship, it had a preface of Canon Dalton entirely repudiating this theory. "The Inquisition originated not so much in political as in religious motives," he says, and "no contemporary authority asserts the contrary." It is mild language. The Spanish writers he quotes emphatically represent it as a purely religious tribunal, and the shades of Ferdinand and Isabella, if there are such shades, must have warmed the atmosphere of cloud- land with their language -- which was vigorous -- when the first modern apologist raised this mendacious plea that the Spanish Inquisition was anything but strictly religious.
What I said about the economic side of the Inquisition supplies an explanation which will occur at once to the reader. It was a question of the division of the spoils. Sixtus IV and his successors greatly disliked the Spanish Inquisition because all the confiscated wealth remained in Spain. The Popes raised a little by receiving at Rome appeals -- those humane and beneficent appeals -- from the sentences of the Spanish Inquisitors, and remitting penances for a money-payment. But the Spaniards retorted by refusing to recognize the Pope's dispensations, and there was an unholy struggle.
The Spanish people, every historian tells us, were tolerant and disinclined to quarrel, but the preachers lashed them, especially against the Jews, and from the fourteenth century onward there were frequent pogroms. In 1391 four thousand Jews were killed in Seville alone. But Jews, unless they had once embraced Christianity, did not come under the cognizance of the Inquisition, and, merely reminding the reader that the final expulsion of the Jews in 1492, when (on a very moderate estimate) two hundred thousand were driven abroad with every circumstance of brutality and impoverishment, must be added to the ghastly account of the Christian religion, we must here ignore them. It is an ironic comment on the supposed "anti-social" doctrines of heretics that these expulsions of Jews and Moors ruined the brilliant civilization they had created in Spain just as the massacre of the Albigensians ruined Languedoc and the massacre of the Hussites ruined Bohemia.
Until the second half of the fifteenth century the Inquisition set up there by Gregory IX had comparatively little influence. Neither people nor rulers wanted its bloody work. With the accession of the fanatical Ferdinand and Isabella, however, and the fall of the last great Moorish city, Granada, a new era opened.
Even in the case of Isabella it is an historical fact that the priests compelled her to act. For a long time she refused the solicitation of the Dominican monks, but she yielded at last to the grim and overbearing Torquemada.
The details of the work of the Inquisition in Spain must be read in Sabatini's "Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition" (1913): a work strangely lacking in picturesqueness and, in its effort at impartiality, falling short of the truth in the general impression it gives. A small history of the Inquisition has still to be written -- Lea's seven volumes are sound, but no one today reads a work in seven volumes.
Let us keep a sense of proportion. The record of Christianity from the days when it first obtained the power to persecute is one of the most ghastly in history. The total number of Manichaeans, Arians, Priscillianists, Paulicians, Bogomiles, Cathari, Waldensians, Albigensians, witches, Lollards, Hussites, Jews and Protestants killed because of their rebellion against Rome clearly runs to many millions; and beyond these actual executions or massacres is the enormously larger number of those who were tortured, imprisoned, or beggared. I am concerned rather with the positive historical aspect of this. In almost every century a large part of the race has endeavored to reject the Christian religion, and, if in those centuries there had been the same freedom as we enjoy, Roman Catholicism would, in spite of the universal ignorance, have shrunk long ago into a sect. The religious history of Europe has never yet been written.
It is unnecessary to add that the Reformers followed for a time in the bloody footsteps of the Popes. But when Catholic apologists eagerly quote the sentiments of Reformers and the executions of Catholics by Protestants, they betray the usual lack of sense of proportion. A twelve-century-old tradition of religious persecution is not likely to be abandoned in a few decades. This particular kind of savagery, the infliction of a horrible death for opinions, had been introduced into Europe by the Christian leaders -- ancient Rome never persecuted for opinion or had any standard of orthodoxy -- and it had got into the blood. The killing of men for their beliefs by the early Protestants was murder just as was the killing of men by the Inquisition. It is a mockery to ask us to detect any divine interest in Churches during those fourteen centuries of ghastly injustice and inhumanity.
And there is this further difference. Protestant Churches have abandoned the principle that you may slay a man for heresy. The English law "De Haeretico Comburendo" (for the burning of heretics), framed and inspired by Roman Catholicism, was abandoned two and a half centuries ago, though the English Church retained absolute power in the land. One may speculate as to whether a Protestant Church might at some time revert to the old ideal, if it had the old power. I think not; but, as no Church ever again will have the power, it is idle to speculate.
But death for heresy is the actual law of the Roman Catholic Church today. Vacandard and others convey to their non-Catholic readers that Rome has repented like every other Church. Not in the least: it has not sacrificed one syllable of its teaching about heretics. I am under sentence of death in the Canon Law of the Roman Church. I have in my popular work, "The Popes and Their Church, shown that about the end of the last century, when the new generation of apologists were busy with their glosses on the past and their pretty appeals for universal tolerance, a new manual of Church Law, specially authorized by Leo XIII, written by a Papal professor, printed in a Papal press, was published. It was in Latin; and probably few Catholics in America will fail to be astonished to learn that the author states, and proves at great length, that the Church claims and has "the right of the sword" over heretics, and only the perversity of our age prevents it from exercising that right! More recent manuals of Church Law have the same beautiful thesis. It is today the law of the Roman Church. Remember it when you read these subtle Jesuits and eloquent Paulists and unctuous bishops on the "blunders" of the past and the right and duty of toleration today, The Inquisition (the Holy Office) exists. The law exists. And you and I may thank this age of skepticism that we keep our blood in our veins. |
