“What made one a case for the Inquisition”?
I am not a historian. I just read a bit. My impression is that it depended a great deal on time and place. The one that is the most noted, the Spanish Inquisition was, at least initially, instituted in order to provide an alternative to indiscriminate slaughter. Rightly or wrongly, the Spanish monarchs, who had just reconquered Spain from Moslem rule, were deeply suspicious of people who converted from Islam or Judaism after the reconquest, being concerned that they would provide a “fifth column” in the event of a new Islamic attempt to conquer.
Some of such converts, it was believed, continued in their former religious practices; that being taken as evidence of an attempt to conceal their true allegiance for nefarious reasons. Jews had been very prominent in the former Moslem government, many being highly skilled administrators and scholars in the pay of Moslem authorities, and, rightly or wrongly, were suspected of being potentially in cahoots with the Islamists for that reason.
The “identification” of the false converts was widespread among the populace. The Inquisition was, at least in original purpose, set up for the purpose of investigating the truth of allegations against such people; all of whom would probably have been killed by the government or populace otherwise. It may be noted that people who remained Jews or Moslems openly, were not, by definition, subject to the Inquisition at all. Some fared well under Spanish rule at different times and places, and some did not.
It is for this reason (responding to a lady’s earlier thread) that refusal to eat pork was a suspect bit of evidence, but ONLY if the person purported to have converted from Judaism or Islam to Catholicism. Jews and Muslims do not eat pork, but Christians do. Therefore, if a person purporting to have converted from Judaism or Islam to Catholicism refused to eat pork, it was taken as ONE PIECE of evidence that the “conversion” was false.
Since the government viewed all false converts as potential traitors (like an underground Al Quaeda cell would be viewed today; something like the terrorist doctor group in Britain) it was inclined to execute them as traitors. The government, being very new, did not have a good tribunal system or people learned in the law. The Church did. The vast majority of the accused were freed by the Spanish Inquisition. None were executed by the Church or by the Inquisition itself. The ones believed guilty were turned back over to the State, which would have killed them all anyway without trying to distinguish.
Again, I do not condone the use of torture or excessive involvement between Church and State. But people who want to talk about the Inquisition ought to learn of it from unbiased historians, not from someone with an ax to grind. Most of what I know about the Inquisition was written by historians who are not Catholic.
In response to the person who was not persuaded that the crimes of the 20th Century were equivalent to “torture”, I invite him/her to read all volumes of “Gulag Archipelago” and Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow”, plus a good historical account of the goings-on in the Nazi death camps, with a good measure of Dith Prang’s account of the Cambodian genocide, and then come back and compare. In doing so, remember that torture, reprehensible as it was, was limited to 15 minutes in the Spanish Inquisition, and no blood could be shed. Likely, some broke the rules, of course.
My entire purpose in my previous post was not to justify the Inquisition, though some have made a fairly persuasive argument in its defense as a “lesser evil” to what would have happened in its absence. My purpose was to try to disabuse people who have lived in the rights-rich environment of the U.S. all their lives, of the notion that moderns have a legitimate claim to moral superiority over those who went before us, and to caution them that it’s a mighty thin veneer, this thing we call “civilization”. I grew up Catholic in a place where the KKK reigned supreme when I was young. My ancestors came from Ireland during the Famine. Savagery and religious persecution is never very far from us.
