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Historical Documentation Notice

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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.

Source Information
Original Publication: 2004-06-16
Digital Archive: Focal Point Publications
Accessed: June 3, 2026