London, Wednesday, June 16, 2004 Inquisition
wasn't quite as bad as people think, says Pope
By Bruce Johnston
in Rome THE Vatican sought to play down
the terrors of the Inquisition yesterday, claiming
that far fewer people were tortured and executed
for heresy than was popularly believed. The
reassessment by Church historians was seized on by
the Pope to qualify the apology he made for the
Inquisition during the Church's millennium
celebrations.  David
Irving comments: TWO OR three years ago a history
teacher at Oundle School, where I had
spoken, told me that English historians
now accepted that far fewer witches were
burned at the stake in Britain in the
Middle Ages than had long been
believed.
He prophesied that the
more unlikely Jewish Holocaust figures
would suffer a similar revision in decades
to come. |
The research emerged from a conference of scholars
convened in 1998 to help the Pope assess the impact
of the Inquisition, which often used brutal methods
to suppress alleged witchcraft and doctrinal
unorthodoxy.Church officials said that statistics and other
data demolished myths about the Inquisition,
including that torture and executions were commonly
used. "For the first time we studied the
Inquisition in its entirety, from its beginnings to
the 19th century," said Agostino Borromeo, a
professor of history of Catholic and other
Christian confessions at Rome's Sapienza
University. Prof Borromeo said that while there were some
125,000 trials of suspected heretics in Spain,
research found that about one per cent of the
defendants were executed, far fewer than commonly
believed. Many of the burnings at the stake were carried
out by civil rather than religious tribunals.
Yesterday, the Pope reiterated his mea culpa but
stressed that actions which had "disfigured the
face of the Church" had to be viewed in their
historical context. © Copyright of
Telegraph Group Limited 2004. |
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