Dear Rev. Know-It-All,

It is with great distress that I read your two columns whitewashing the Inquisition to an "inquisitive" member of your flock in your May 20 and 27 columns.  It does a tremendous disservice to the community to downplay one of the great historical atrocities of European, and yes, Catholic history.

To substitute "Wikipedia" for serious historical sourcing is intellectually questionable to start. 

But your selective "facts" would have one conclude that comparative to Nazis and Stalin, the Church's actions of slaughtering communities, forcing conversions through torture, burnings at the stake, exiling supposed enemies, and crushing Jewish and Muslim citizens, many of whom had already converted to Christianity and formed the intellectual, business and merchant classes of Spanish society wasn't so bad!

The Church and the Pope at the time viewed themselves as ruling-class warriors, and fought throughout the period to crush opposition to Church rule through merciless Crusades and witch hunts for heretics.

To compare and characterize such violence as a bulwark against "Bin Laden's agenda" is to feed into the fear mongering already used by our political leaders to justify their illegal (and immoral) war, and by you to confuse people about the truth of the Church's complicity in the horrifying violence committed in its name.

Certainly other historians in your parish must have called you to task for such egregious errors of fact.

Soft-pedaling violence and injustice, just because its committed by "your side", invites moral relativism, and prevents a true accounting of where the Church has erred and where it needs to go if its goal is truly to build a peace-loving Kingdom of God.

Sincerely,

Ben D. Facts

I don’t think you understood my point.

In your kind letter you list the old, much loved anti-Catholic chestnuts so dear to those who hate Catholicism.  Some of them are documentable and some are not.

Making a list is not documentation.

I did my best to document, even if my source is something as pedestrian as Wikipedia.  It agrees with other sources and I have never found an inaccuracy in a Wikipedia article.  Admittedly, I am clearly not the scholar you are, having only taught in a university for 24 and a half years, not to be compared to your 26 years of teaching in the schools of New York City, that beacon of truth, that city set on a hill.

I wish to clarify that I never said that the Spanish Inquisition was a bulwark against Bin Laden’s agenda.  But, facts are facts.  Bin Laden would very much like to take Spain back for Islam.  I really don't have the time in this small space to discuss all your points so I will simply concede.

You are right that the burning of witches, Muslims and heretics etc. is a bad thing.  I am also opposed to wars of religion.  To the extent that the Spanish Inquisition gave in to the spirit of the times, it was evil.

My point is that compared to the rest of Europe and the world, including modern Texas, the Spanish Inquisition doesn't live up to its reputation. 

The Inquisition in Germany, well that was pretty horrific, as was the English and French versions thereof.  Why is this so hard to admit?  Do a Google search on the Black Legend.  Hispanic culture is defamed to this day by the myth of the evil Catholic Spaniards and perhaps you’re just one more who has not looked at the matter critically.

My point is this: We are no better than those who have gone before us. 

We somehow think that we are enlightened and competent to judge the past by our own standards.  Quite the opposite is the case.  We are not nearly as moral as the Spanish inquisitors.  It is the past that judges us.

If it is true that the unborn child is a human being with God-given rights, we need to remember that in the United States we kill at least 1,300,000 infants annually.  The inquisitors managed to kill 15 a year.  We get a lot more huffy about whitewashing the sins of the Inquisition than the whitewashing of the wholesale murders of defenseless millions.  No nation can survive that, like some jungle creature, devours its young.

Add to this, our debasement of women, our hostility to marriage, our wars fought for economic advantage and our economic encouragement of slavery in China, India and elsewhere and our mindless waste of the world’s resources, the Spanish Inquisition begins to pale in comparison.

We might well say well, “I’m not guilty of these things.”  No, we merely benefit from them and go silently, merrily on our way.

God save me from the smarmy moralism of the modern world.

Rev. Know-It-All
 

Editorial Note:
this question refers to two Q&As:
Is the History Channel correct about the evil Spanish Inquisition?
published on May 20, 2007
and the folow-up
How was the Spanish Inquisition a 'real life saver' ?
published on May 27, 2007