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Real History and the Inquisition The Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech Alphabetical index (text) London, 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. ©