I’m reading Church History by Fr. John Laux, and he says that the abuses of the Inquisition were of the state, not the church. All the Church did was to judge people heretics or not, but the state took it too far.
Is this accurate?
Technically true in at least the majority of the cases. The Church did not torture or execute. The ecclesial penalty for heresy was simply excommunication, and this was all that the Church applied. Its agents did not (to my knowledge) have authority in any jurisdiction to torture. In both cases, it was the civil power that acted. Civil law at the time held heresy to be a mortal threat to the social fabric, so the civil penalty was death. And civil authorities were happy to perpetrate the excesses of the Inquisition, and the extent to which those involved torture is still debated.
However, in both cases, it is clear that Church authorities were aware and often quite cooperative with and supportive of Church efforts. So the fact that we kept the blood off our actual ecclesial hands does
not give us a free pass.
However, the history of the Inquisition has been horribly twisted by propaganda, especially here in the English speaking world, where our whole sense of civilization and most of our literature has come down to us via the British. The British, of course, had a HUGE motivation to cast aspersions on the Inquisitors – namely, they wanted to distract people from their own (infinitely bloodier) history of religious persecution of Catholics by Anglicans. So don’t trust anything you read at first glance. Instead, get a couple nice big histories of the Inquisition, preferably from diverse perspectives, read up, and see what you learn.
Knowing real facts about the Inquisition, and being able to refute common mistruths about it, is a huge boon for apologetics.
