It’s difficult, particularly in the U.S. and now, to justify a great deal of what the Inquisition did and countenanced. But, for example, Spain, during the Inquisition, was not the U.S. and it did not enjoy the (very precarious) rights ensured by the U.S. Constitution.
Picture the U.S. having just emerged from being ruled by Al Quaeda through the military efforts of Christian dictators who had every reason to believe a substantial portion of the population would, without hesitation, aid invading armies or commit acts of terror. Picture that U.S. with no constitution and no judiciary, and picture semi-independent, victorious generals strutting about the countryside making certain that no opposition of any kind arose again, and hadn’t forgotten a single wrong, real or imagined.
Picture as well a long-suffering populace bent on revenge and looting, with nobody at all willing to stop them from exercising mob justice when and where they chose.
The Church somehow persuaded the Spanish rulers to allow the Church’s educated jurists to “inquire” into the real guilt or innocence of people who, without that inquiry, would have all been tortured, looted and killed. For the first time in history, the accused had an absolute right to be represented by a trained lawyer. It didn’t happen again until the 1970s in the U.S., and many Americans, possibly most, would do away with that right even now. Most accused were released. Very few were actually executed. Those determined to truly be guilty were simply sent back to the state, as required by the state, which would have killed them without inquiry anyway.
I am not justifying a single second of torture any of the accused went through. Nor am I justifying an uncomfortably close alliance of Church and State in such matters. But if moderns in the U.S. think the Inquisition was somehow an unprecedented atrocity perpetrated by the Church, they don’t realize what people can be like if they are not held in check by something. And they don’t know how rare a thing it is to live under the U.S. Justice System (Which nevertheless regularly imparts injustices, despite all intentions to the contrary. Likely the Inquisition did a better job.). And they don’t know how woefully thin civilization really is.
We who live in a “more enlightened” time, in which 100 million or more were murdered in the last century, mostly for no good reason, and in which millions are murdered abroad to this very moment, with almost nobody willing to lift a finger to stop it, should humbly refrain from being too judgmental about a past that does not even remotely compare in brutality to our own time.
