The Dark Side of Christianity

“There has been no more organized effort by a religion to control people and contain their spirituality than the Christian Inquisition. Developed within the Church's own legal framework, the Inquisition attempted to terrify people into obedience. As the Inquisitor Francesco Pena stated in 1578, 'We must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others.' The Inquisition took countless human lives in Europe and around the world as it followed in the wake of missionaries. And along with the tyranny of the Inquisition, churchmen also brought religious justification for the practice of slavery.

The unsubmissive spirit of the Middle Ages only seemed to exacerbate the Church's demand for unquestioning obedience. The Church's understanding of God was to be the only understanding. There was to be no discussion or debate. As the Inquisitor Bernard Gui said, the layman must not argue with the unbeliever, but 'thrust his sword into the man's belly as far as it will go.' In a time of burgeoning ideas about spirituality, the Church insisted that it was the only avenue through which one was permitted to learn of God. Pope Innocent III declared 'that anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be burned without pity.'

Before the inquisition was fully underway, the Church welcomed heretics back into its fold under terms it considered reasonable. The following is an example of such terms:

Few heretics returned to the Church of their own accord.

The Church turned to its own canon law to authenticate an agency which could enforce adherence to Church authority. In 1231 Pope Gregory IX established the Inquisition as a separate tribunal, independent of bishops and prelates. Its administrators, the inquisitors, were to be answerable only to the Pope. Its inquisitional law replaced the common law tradition of 'innocent until proven guilty' with 'guilty until proven innocent.' Despite an ostensible trial, inquisitional procedure left no possibility for the suspected to prove his or her innocence; the process resulted in the condemnation of anyone even suspected of heresy. The accused was denied the right of counsel. No particulars were given as to the time or place of the suspected heresies, or to what kind of heresies were suspected. A suspected friendship with a convicted heretic was also a crime, yet no information was given as to which heretic the accused was to have 'adored.' The names of accusing witnesses were kept secret. One's only recourse was an appeal to the Pope in Rome, which was so futile as to be farcical. The friar Bernard Delicieux declared:

The inquisitor presided over inquisitional procedure as both prosecutor and judge. While he was technically to arrive at his decision after consulting with an assembly of experts of his choosing, this check to his power was soon abandoned. An inquisitor was selected primarily on the basis of his zeal to prosecute heretics. He and his assistants, messengers, and spies were allowed to carry arms. And in 1245, the Pope granted him the right to absolve these assistants for any acts of violence. This act rendered the Inquisition, which was already free from any secular jurisdiction, unaccountable to even ecclesiastical tribunals.

Inquisitors grew very rich. They received bribes and annual fines from the wealthy who payed to escape accusation. The Inquisition would claim all the money and property of alleged heretics. As there was little chance of the accused being proven innocent, there was no need to wait for conviction to confiscate his or her property. Unlike Roman law that reserved a portion of property for the convicted's nearest heirs, canon and inquisitional law left nothing. Pope Innocent III had explained that God punished children for the sins of their parents. So unless children had come forth spontaneously to denounce their parents, they were left penniless. Inquisitors even accused the dead of heresy, sometimes as much as seventy years after their death. They exhumed and burned alleged heretic's bones and then confiscated all property from the heirs.

Inquisitors rarely shared the money collected with the episcopal courts, the civil government, or spent it building churches as planned. One historian writes how the inquisitor was often able to 'seize everything for himself, not even sending a share to the officials of the Inquisition at Rome.' Inquisitors were reluctant to pay even for the cost of feeding their victims, encouraging the families or the community to pay such costs. It was hardly a coincidence that the eagerness of the Inquisition in any given region was proportionate to the opportunities for confiscation.

Ironically, inquisitors were most often chosen from Dominican and Franciscan orders, both of which originally professed vows of poverty. The Church did little to encourage their ideal of poverty. Although it regarded the Franciscan founder, Francis of Assisi, as a saint, the Church persecuted Francis's followers who upheld his ideas of poverty, those known as the Fraticelli, or 'Spiritual Franciscans.' The Church denounced the Fraticelli as 'false and pernicious' and in 1315 excommunicated them. Pope Martin V ordered their village of Magnalata leveled and every resident slain. The Franciscans who abandoned Francis's teachings, however, were often appointed as inquisitors. While it did not overtly endorse the Inquisition's avarice and corruption, the Church did little to stop it.

The Inquisition had devastating economic impact. Aside from directly seizing the property of successful merchants by accusing them of heresy, inquisitors crippled commerce by holding certain operations suspect. For example, maps and map-makers, so essential to navigating traders and merchants, were held in deep suspicion. Inquisitors believed the printed word to be a channel of heresy and so hampered the communication produced by the fifteenth century invention of the printing press. The mere suspicion of heresy annulled all rights of the suspended individual. When accused, all debts owed by the heretic and any liens which secured those debts became null and void. The historian Henry Charles Lea writes:

While inquisitors themselves prospered, their activity left communities impoverished.

The Inquisition was merciless with its victims. The same man who had been both prosecutor and judge decided upon the sentence. In 1244 the Council of Harbonne ordered that in the sentencing of heretics, no husband should be spared because of his wife, nor wife because of her husband, nor parent because of helpless children, and no sentence should be mitigated because of sickness or old age. Each and every sentence included flagellation.

Of the sentences, pilgrimages were considered the lightest. Yet, undertaken on foot, such penances could take years, during which the penitent's family might perish. Carrying a much greater stigma than pilgrimages was 'wearing the crosses,' also known as poena confusibilis or 'humiliating punishment.' The penitents were required to wear large saffron-colored crosses on the front and back, which subjected them to public ridicule and hindered every effort of earing a livelihood. A more frequent sentence was perpetual imprisonment, which always entailed a scant diet of bread and water, sometimes meant being kept in chains, and occasionally entailed solitary confinement. The life expectancy in all the prisons was very short.

The harshest sentence of burning at the stake was given to those who either failed in their previous penance, relapsed into heresy, or who would not confess to any crime. Although the Church had begun killing heretics in the late fourth century and again in 1022 at Orléan, papal statutes of 1231 now insisted that heretics suffer death by fire. Burning people to death technically avoided spilling a drop of blood. The words of the Gospel of John were understood to sanction burning: 'If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

The Church distanced itself from the killing by turning heretics over to secular authorities for the actual burning. Such secular authorities, however, were not allowed to decline. When the Senate of Venice in 1521 refused to approve such executions, for example, Pope Leo X wrote that secular officials were:

In practice, any secular authorities who refused to cooperate were excommunicated and subject to the same treatment as suspected heretics.

By far the cruelest aspect of the inquisitional system was the means by which confessions were wrought: the torture chamber. Torture remained a legal option for the Church from 1252 when it was sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV until 1917... Inquisitors easily avoided this rule simply by 'continuing' torture... They simply explained that the tortured had died because the devil broke their necks.

Thus, with license granted by the Pope himself, inquisitors were free to explore the depths of horror and cruelty... 'Glory be only to God'... Victims were rubbed with lard or grease and slowly roasted alive... Victims were thrown into a pit full of snakes and burned alive... Should a victim withstand such pain without confessing, he or she would be burned alive at the stake, often in mass public burnings called auto-da-fe.

Contemporary writings echo the terror created by the Inquisition. Juan de Mariana reported in the 1490s that people:

A writer in 1538 described life in the Spanish city of Toledo:

The Inquisition often targeted members of other religions as severely as it did heretics... In 1391 the Archdeacon of Seville launched a 'Holy War against the Jews'... By 1492 the Inquisition in Spain... Islamic countries offered far safer sanctuaries to escaping Jews than Christian lands.

Historians have often diminished Christian responsibility for the Inquisition... Pope Sixtus IV... In 1542 Pope Paul III reassigned the medieval Inquisition... Each phase was identical... God similarly requires unquestioning obedience.

The tyranny inherent in the belief in singular supremacy accompanied explorers and missionaries... Columbus described how he himself 'took [his] pleasure' with a native woman after whipping her 'soundly' with a piece of rope.

The Inquisition quickly followed in their wake... by 1570... 3,800 lives.

Before the coming of the Spaniards, there was no robbery or violence... In 1614 the Shogun of Japan, Iyeyazu, accused the missionaries...

With no understanding of shared supremacy and authority... In Japan and China, the Dominicans fought bitterly with the Capuchins... A Seneca chief asked in 1805:

Missionaries often took part in the unscrupulous exploitation of foreign lands... In Mexico... supported the enslavement of native inhabitants... A 1493 papal Bull justified declaring war... As Encisco claimed in 1509:

Orthodox Christians defended slavery... Passages in the Bible support the institution of slavery:

St. Paul instructed slaves to obey their masters [Ephesians 6:5; I Timothy 6:1; Titus 2:9–10]... St. John Chrysostom wrote:

And in City of God, St. Augustine wrote: