Missing gospels hidden in the Vatican

[montanaman]

The Catholic Church’s response to this problem was the Inquisition, first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184. It was born out of a need to provide fair trials for accused heretics using laws of evidence and presided over by knowledgeable judges. From the perspective of secular authorities, heretics were traitors to God and the king and therefore deserved death. From the perspective of the Church, however, heretics were lost sheep who had strayed from the flock. As shepherds, the pope and bishops had a duty to bring them back into the fold, just as the Good Shepherd had commanded them. So, while medieval secular leaders were trying to safeguard their kingdoms, the Church was trying to save souls. The Inquisition provided a means for heretics to escape death and return to the community.

As this new report confirms, most people accused of heresy by the Inquisition were either acquitted or their sentences suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed. If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.

During the 13th century the Inquisition became much more formalized in its methods and practices. Highly trained Dominicans answerable to the Pope took over the institution, creating courts that represented the best legal practices in Europe. As royal authority grew during the 14th century and beyond, control over the Inquisition slipped out of papal hands and into those of kings. Instead of one Inquisition there were now many. Despite the prospect of abuse, monarchs like those in Spain and France generally did their best to make certain that their inquisitions remained both efficient and merciful. During the 16th century, when the witch craze swept Europe, it was those areas with the best-developed inquisitions that stopped the hysteria in its tracks. In Spain and Italy, trained inquisitors investigated charges of witches’ sabbaths and baby roasting and found them to be baseless. Elsewhere, particularly in Germany, secular or religious courts burned witches by the thousands.

(Cont’d)

 

[Scott_Waddell]

udral:

That’s your opinion.

It is also the opinion of the Vatican, which is the only one that matters.

There are some people who are very interested in those records, and in fact it would be the best way for the Church to dispel any anti-Catholic Inquisition myths, if they exist. Think about it, if the Inquisition really wans’t about torture, about boiling people in oil and burning them at the stake and imprisoning them for disagreeing with the Church, then there is such an easy way to prove it! Put those records on the internet, within a few weeks every person with an internet connection will see and judge for himself.

Nah. People will always find a stick to beat the Church with no matter what they do. If the Church spent all its time refuting every charge that came down the pipe, that would all it would be doing.

Right now the general view of the Inquisition is pretty much waht I outlined in the above paragraph. If this view is false, why doesn’t the Church make an effort to share the truth with the rest of the world?

Because it won’t satisfy people living in the world of suspicion.

 

[montanaman]

Compared to other medieval secular courts, the Inquisition was positively enlightened. Why then are people in general and the press in particular so surprised to discover that the Inquisition did not barbecue people by the millions? First of all, when most people think of the Inquisition today what they are really thinking of is the Spanish Inquisition. No, not even that is correct. They are thinking of the myth of the Spanish Inquisition. Amazingly, before 1530 the Spanish Inquisition was widely hailed as the best run, most humane court in Europe. There are actually records of convicts in Spain purposely blaspheming so that they could be transferred to the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition. After 1530, however, the Spanish Inquisition began to turn its attention to the new heresy of Lutheranism. It was the Protestant Reformation and the rivalries it spawned that would give birth to the myth.

By the mid 16th century, Spain was the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe. Europe’s Protestant areas, including the Netherlands, northern Germany, and England, may not have been as militarily mighty, but they did have a potent new weapon: the printing press. Although the Spanish defeated Protestants on the battlefield, they would lose the propaganda war. These were the years when the famous “Black Legend” of Spain was forged. Innumerable books and pamphlets poured from northern presses accusing the Spanish Empire of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities in the New World. Opulent Spain was cast as a place of darkness, ignorance, and evil.

Protestant propaganda that took aim at the Spanish Inquisition drew liberally from the Black Legend. But it had other sources as well. From the beginning of the Reformation, Protestants had difficulty explaining the 15-century gap between Christ’s institution of His Church and the founding of the Protestant churches. Catholics naturally pointed out this problem, accusing Protestants of having created a new church separate from that of Christ. Protestants countered that their church was the one created by Christ, but that it had been forced underground by the Catholic Church. Thus, just as the Roman Empire had persecuted Christians, so its successor, the Roman Catholic Church, continued to persecute them throughout the Middle Ages. Inconveniently, there were no Protestants in the Middle Ages, yet Protestant authors found them there anyway in the guise of various medieval heretics. In this light, the medieval Inquisition was nothing more than an attempt to crush the hidden, true church. The Spanish Inquisition, still active and extremely efficient at keeping Protestants out of Spain, was for Protestant writers merely the latest version of this persecution. Mix liberally with the Black Legend and you have everything you need to produce tract after tract about the hideous and cruel Spanish Inquisition. And so they did.

In time, Spain’s empire would fade away. Wealth and power shifted to the north, in particular to France and England. By the late 17th century new ideas of religious tolerance were bubbling across the coffeehouses and salons of Europe. Inquisitions, both Catholic and Protestant, withered. The Spanish stubbornly held on to theirs, and for that they were ridiculed. French philosophes like Voltaire saw in Spain a model of the Middle Ages: weak, barbaric, superstitious. The Spanish Inquisition, already established as a bloodthirsty tool of religious persecution, was derided by Enlightenment thinkers as a brutal weapon of intolerance and ignorance. A new, fictional Spanish Inquisition had been constructed, designed by the enemies of Spain and the Catholic Church.

Now a bit more of the real Inquisition has come back into view. The question remains, will anyone take notice?

— Thomas F. Madden is professor and chair of the department of history at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author most recently of Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice and editor of the forthcoming Crusades: The Illustrated History.

 

[thistle]

udral:

Haha, well, you know, I think if the Vatican was willing to do so they would suddenly find a great number of volunteers willing to help. It’s amazing what many people can do when they put their minds to it.

They could at least start the process.

The Inquisition is pretty big on the list of criticisms people make against the Church. It could very well be the thing that tips some people away from Catholicism, they could even be losing their souls!!!

If all those popular conceptions of the Inquisition are wrong, why not prove them wrong?

Why don’t you want to investigate instead the Protestant Inquisition against the Catholics in England and the torture and murder of thousands of Catholics.

 

[Nicene]

Right now the general view of the Inquisition is pretty much waht I outlined in the above paragraph. If this view is false, why doesn’t the Church make an effort to share the truth with the rest of the world?

Is it? OK let me ask you a question: What can you tell me about the protestant and secular Inquisitions? If you have a true interest in truth and balance you should be able to answer this question.

By the way, they aren’t all available, for example England, the tower of London (where it was a death sentence by law to be catholic). Some records aren’t open to the public.

Peace and God Bless
Nicene

 

[udral]

montanaman:

Yeah, maybe they could cut it down to 500 years.

Okay, let’s approximate. Let’s focus on 100 years of the Roman Inquisition, that’s 36500 days. Let’s say 10 people were tried on each of those days, that’s 365, 000 accounts.

Let’s say each trial is about 20 pages, how long does it take to scan 20 pages? Say 5 minutes. That means 1825000 minutes required to scan the 365, 000 accounts. That means 30417 hours.

Let’s say there are 100 volunteers to do this job, this means each person has to spend 304 hours scanning. Let’s say he is going to do it full time, working normal 8 hour days, with weekends and everything (i.e. 40 hour weeks). This means he will be done in approximately 8 weeks. That is just under two months.

In two months 365, 000 twenty page accounts can be scanned into a computer and presumably put online for the world to see.

Let’s make some changes to the approximation, say each account is actually 50 pages (and it takes 15 minutes to scan each account) and there were 100 of them each day over 100 years?

Let’s say now instead of 100 volunteers there are 500 volunteers.

It takes 46 weeks, which is still less than a year.

And in this new scenario there would be 3,650,000 50 page records.

 

[montanaman]

udral:

Okay, let’s approximate. Let’s focus on 100 years of the Roman Inquisition, that’s 36500 days. Let’s say 10 people were tried on each of those days, that’s 365, 000 accounts.

Let’s say each trial is about 20 pages, how long does it take to scan 20 pages? Say 5 minutes. That means 1825000 minutes required to scan the 365, 000 accounts. That means 30417 hours.

Let’s say there are 100 volunteers to do this job, this means each person has to spend 304 hours scanning. Let’s say he is going to do it full time, working normal 8 hour days, with weekends and everything (i.e. 40 hour weeks). This means he will be done in approximately 8 weeks. That is just under two months.

In two months 365, 000 twenty page accounts can be scanned into a computer and presumably put online for the world to see.

Sure, bring math into it.

I was actually speculating about the time it would take to handle such fragile, old documents.

Even so, I wish the Vatican WOULD make the contents of the archives more available–even if just to scholars. As JPII said, the Church has nothing to fear from the truth. Nutcases would try to make a big deal about sins committed in the Church’s name, but it would be much easier to classify them as nutcases.

 

[Scott_Waddell]

We are getting off the subject over whether something can be done vs. whether something ought to be done. My argument is that it ought not to be done. That does not mean I don’t want to see more vatican documentation in general–it means I don’t think the Church ought to be running around spending enormous money and manpower trying to cut off every Hydra-head accusation that pokes its nose through the door.

Scott

 

[udral]

montanaman:

Sure, bring math into it.

I was actually speculating about the time it would take to handle such fragile, old documents.

Even so, I wish the Vatican WOULD make the contents of the archives more available–even if just to scholars. As JPII said, the Church has nothing to fear from the truth. Nutcases would try to make a big deal about sins committed in the Church’s name, but it would be much easier to classify them as nutcases.

Okay, taking the original scenario and adjusting the scanning time for 20 pages from 5 minutes to 60 minutes:
it takes 100 volunteers 91 weeks, which is still under two years.

But if the number of volunteers is increased to 500 it goes to 18 weeks which is less than half a year.

The Church could make this work. If each Catholic pitched in a dollar toward this enterprise we’d have a billion dollars to run the whole show.

If there’s a will there is a way, they say. Look at what determined human beings have accomplished, do you really think they can’t put those records online?

 

[udral]

thistle:

Why don’t you want to investigate instead the Protestant Inquisition against the Catholics in England and the torture and murder of thousands of Catholics.

Are there records of the Protestant Inquistion being kept in secret archives? If so, I would read them as well, but sure, my interested in those would be much less than in the Catholic Inquisition.

I don’t have much interest in Protestantism or in what Protestants did or didn’t do. Who knows, maybe part of the reason why I am so curious about what’s in the archives is the Church’s secrecy about it.

 

[udral]

Nicene:

Is it? OK let me ask you a question: What can you tell me about the protestant and secular Inquisitions? If you have a true interest in truth and balance you should be able to answer this question.

By the way, they aren’t all available, for example England, the tower of London (where it was a death sentence by law to be catholic). Some records aren’t open to the public.

Peace and God Bless
Nicene

I don’t know very much, but I would like to learn. As it stand there really isn’t much good information available. Scholars have biases. I would love to read first hand accoutns, but as it stands I don’t know where to get them.

I know one place that has them is the Catholic Church.

 

[Scott_Waddell]

udral:

Scholars have biases.

Yes, that is why there is peer review.

 

[udral]

Scott Waddell:

Yes, that is why there is peer review.

Which is really hard to do without first hand accounts that are found in the Catholic archives.

They were opened to scholars in 1998. Is that enough time for large numbers of scholars to have gone through them and written about them? I don’t know. Personally I am not too interested in reading historian’s works, I want to see what actually happened, I wnat to read the transcripts of trials and whatever else they had.

That’s the best way to learn the turth. Especially given that the Inquisition is connected to the Church which is connected to religion. Chances are that Catholic people will give a good view of the inquisition, while anti-Catholic people will give a bad view, and without seeing the records I really won’t know what’s what.

 

[Nicene]

udral:

Okay, taking the original scenario and adjusting the scanning time for 20 pages from 5 minutes to 60 minutes:
it takes 100 volunteers 91 weeks, which is still under two years.

But if the number of volunteers is increased to 500 it goes to 18 weeks which is less than half a year.

The Church could make this work. If each Catholic pitched in a dollar toward this enterprise we’d have a billion dollars to run the whole show.

If there’s a will there is a way, they say. Look at what determined human beings have accomplished, do you really think they can’t put those records online?

You are assuming that all those documents can be handled without falling apart. There are vast amounts of documents in the Vatican, some forgotten and others not even catalogued yet. Some are scrolls that if you tried to open them would fall to dust.

Your focus is on one period that you think should be focused on, when priority may be required in other areas concerning other documents to preserve those. Are you willing to foot the bill for the Vatican for all the manpower needed?

The library isn’t small by any means, it is one of the largest in the world, one museums would give their eye teeth to have for their antiquity.

Personally I would rather see that same money spent where it should be, which is the true focus of the church.

Peace and God Bless
Nicene

 

[montanaman]

If there’s a will there is a way, they say. Look at what determined human beings have accomplished, do you really think they can’t put those records online?

I’m not saying it’s impossible. It’s just a level of technical difficulty whose costs far outweigh the benefits, or so it seems. Like Scott said, the Church has better things to do–particularly when the ecumenical hand of the Church is extended just to be bitten off.

 

[udral]

montanaman:

I’m not saying it’s impossible. It’s just a level of technical difficulty whose costs far outweigh the benefits, or so it seems. Like Scott said, the Church has better things to do–particularly when the ecumenical hand of the Church is extended just to be bitten off.

Well, what if non-Catholics were going to provide the volunteers and foot the bill? What then?

 

[Scott_Waddell]

udral:

Which is really hard to do without first hand accounts that are found in the Catholic archives.

They were opened to scholars in 1998. Is that enough time for large numbers of scholars to have gone through them and written about them? I don’t know. Personally I am not too interested in reading historian’s works, I want to see what actually happened, I wnat to read the transcripts of trials and whatever else they had.

That’s the best way to learn the turth.

Fine. But the Church is simply under no obligation to make every shred of document available yesterday. Like I said, I would like to see more available and I believe they will do this–ON THEIR TIME-TABLE and not on other’s who want the Church to prove it is not a bunch of jerks.

Scott

 

[Nicene]

udral:

Well, what if non-Catholics were going to provide the volunteers and foot the bill? What then?

I have no problem with that at all, and would in fact welcome it. Are you going to start the ball rolling? Here is your chance to start a foundation to aquire the funds and ask for donations from those interested.

Please post your links to the non catholics whom you will be asking the money from so we can see this is on the up and up, and post and keep us updated on the money’s collected.

Peace and God Bless
Nicene

 

[The_Iambic_Pen]

Thanks for all the information! The discussion seems to have moved on a bit, but carry it where you will. God bless!

 

[ComradeAndrei]

Scholars have biases.

Like you don’t?

If you are a Catholic, why not accept what we’ve been saying-basically that the Inquisition wasn’t that bad, dare I say it was probably actually good. Why be all bent out of shape because some folks from First National Baptist still believe all that protestant propaganda? Do you think you could prove to them that the Inquisition wasn’t so bad? I doubt it, unless you just say that the Church was all wrong about everything, her enemies will ALWAYS find something to whine about.