5 Myths About the Inquisition Refuted by a PhD in Medieval History (Phd Marian Horvat)

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 03:52:19 +0000

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5 Myths About the Inquisition Refuted by a PhD in Medieval History
By Dr. Marian Horvat
PhD in Medieval History
Editor’s Note: Centuries of false propaganda have convinced most people – good Catholics included – that the Inquisition was one of the most evil institutions ever invented. What we present here is a defense in which Dr. Marian Horvat, PhD, professor of Medieval History, completely unmasks five of the most common myths about the Holy Inquisition.
INTRODUCTION
To the sensibilities of the twentieth century, speaking of “Holy” and “Inquisition” in the same sentence seems a contradiction. Never has there been a subject so written about – or whitewashed – as the Holy Inquisition. The modern mentality has a natural difficulty in understanding an institution such as the Inquisition, because the inquisitorial process was not based on liberal doctrines, such as freedom of thought, which became central in Western culture in the eighteenth century. The modern mind has difficulty in understanding religious belief as something objective, outside the scope of free private judgment. The modern mind cannot see the Catholic Church as a perfect and sovereign society, where orthodoxy must be maintained at any cost.
Religious intolerance is not an exclusive product of the Middle Ages: everywhere and at all times in the past, unbelieving men disturbed the common good and public peace as much as they caused religious dissensions and conflicts. In the Middle Ages, it became accepted that the most serious kind of crisis was that which threatened the unity and security of the Latin Church, and not to proceed against heretics with all the means at the disposal of Christian society was not only foolish, but a betrayal of Christ Himself. The modern concept of the secular State, neutral in relation to all religions, would have shocked the medieval mind.
Modern men experience difficulty in understanding this institution because they have lost sight of three facts. First of all, they have ceased to understand religious belief as something objective, as a gift of God and, therefore, outside the scope of free private judgment. Secondly, they no longer see in the Church a perfect and sovereign society, based substantially on a pure and authentic revelation, whose first and most important duty must naturally be to keep this original deposit of the faith immaculate. That orthodoxy should be maintained at any cost seemed self-evident to the medieval mind. Heresy, since it affected the soul, was a more dangerous crime than murder, since the eternal life of the soul was worth far more than the mortal life of the flesh.
Finally, modern man has lost sight of a society in which Church and State constitute a cohesive form of government. Spiritual authority was inseparably intertwined with the secular in the same way that the soul is joined to the body. To divide the two into separate compartments would have been unthinkable. The State cannot be indifferent to the spiritual well-being of its subjects without being guilty of treason to its first Sovereign, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Before the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, these views were common to all Christians.
As William Thomas Walsh observes in Characters of the Inquisition, the positive suppression of heresy by ecclesiastical and civil authorities in Christian society is as old as monotheism itself. (In the name of religion, Moses killed far more people than Torquemada condemned.) Nevertheless, the Inquisition, as such, as a distinct ecclesiastical tribunal, is of much later origin. Historically, it operated as a phase in the growth of ecclesiastical legislation that adapted certain elements of Roman legal procedure. In its own time, it certainly would not have been understood as it is presented today. For, as Edward Peters points out so well in his landmark study on the Inquisition, Inquisition, the legend of the inquisition was an “invention” of the religious disputes and political conflicts of the sixteenth century. It was later adapted to the causes of religious tolerance and philosophical and political enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This process, which was always anti-Catholic and generally anti-Spanish, became universalized. Thus, eventually, the Inquisition became representative of all repressive religions that opposed freedom of conscience, political liberty, and philosophical enlightenment.

MYTH 1
Myth: The medieval Inquisition was a suppressive, all-encompassing, and all-powerful centralized organ of repression maintained by the Catholic Church.
Reality: Except in fiction, the Inquisition as a single all-powerful, terrible tribunal “whose agents worked everywhere to thwart religious truth, intellectual freedom and political liberty, until it was overthrown at some point in the enlightened nineteenth century” simply did not exist. The myth of the Inquisition took shape in the hands of “anti-Hispanic and religious reformers in the sixteenth century.” It was an image assembled from a body of legends and myths, which took shape in the context of the intense religious persecution of the sixteenth century. Spain, the greatest power in Europe, which had assumed the role of defender of Catholicism, became the object of propaganda that degraded “The Inquisition” as the most dangerous and characteristic weapon of Catholics against Protestantism. Later, critics of any kind of religious persecution would adopt the term.
In fact, there was not one monolithic Inquisition, but three distinct inquisitions. The Inquisition of the Middle Ages began in 1184 in southern France in response to the Cathar heresy, and dissolved at the end of the fourteenth century when Catharism died out. More recent studies show conclusively that there is no clear evidence that people in medieval Europe conceived of the Inquisition as a centralized governing body. The popes of the time had no intention of establishing a permanent tribunal. For example, it was only in 1233 that the title inquisitor haereticae pravitatis appeared when the Dominican Alberic was sent to Lombardy.
Pope Gregory IX did not establish the Inquisition as a distinct and separate tribunal, but appointed permanent judges who carried out doctrinal functions in the name of the pope. When they sat, there was the Inquisition. One of the most harmful legends spread over the centuries is the image of an omniscient, omnipotent tribunal whose fingers reached into every corner of the earth. The small number of inquisitors and their limited reach thoroughly belie the exaggerated rhetoric. At the end of the thirteenth century, there were two inquisitors for the whole of Languedoc (one of the centers of the Albigensian heresy), two for the province of Provence, and four to six for the rest of France.
As for the accusation that the Inquisition was an omnipresent body throughout Christendom, the Inquisition did not even exist in northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, or in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The vast majority of cases in the thirteenth century were directed against the Albigensian heretics in southern France. It was not yet established in Venice until 1289, and the archives of that city show that the death penalty was inflicted by the secular power on only six occasions in total.
El Santo Oficio de la Santa Inquisición, better known as the Spanish Inquisition, began in 1478 as an institution of the State designated to uncover heresy and deviations from the true Faith. But Ferdinand and Isabella also instituted it to protect the conversos or new Christians, who had become victims of popular outrage, prejudice, fears and envy. It is important to note that the Inquisition had authority only over baptized Christians, and that the unbaptized were completely free from its disciplinary measures unless they violated natural law.
Finally, the Holy Office in Rome, initiated in 1542, was the least active and most benign of the three. A recent study carried out by John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy, deals with the Roman Inquisition and the procedures that followed after its constitution in the mid-sixteenth century in its struggle to preserve the faith and to eradicate heresy. The value of Tedeschi’s study is that it subverts long-held assumptions about the corruption, inhuman coercion, and injustice of the Renaissance Roman Inquisition, assumptions that Tedeschi admitted he himself harbored when he began his extensive work in the documents. What he “gradually” began to find was that the Inquisition was not a “rigid tribunal, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible.” Tedeschi points out that the inquisitorial process included the provision of a defense attorney. Moreover, the accused was given the right to counsel and even to receive an authenticated copy of the entire trial (with the names of prosecution witnesses excluded) so that he could prepare a response. In contrast, in the secular courts of the time, the defense attorney was still assigned only a ceremonial role, and the criminal was denied the right to counsel (until 1836), and the evidence against the accused was read only in court, where he would have to make his defense on the spot. Tedeschi concluded that the Roman Inquisition dispensed legal justice in terms of early modern European jurisprudence and went even further to say:
“perhaps it is not too much to say, indeed, that in several respects the Holy Office was a pioneer in judicial reform.”

MYTH 2
Myth: The Inquisition was born of the intolerance, cruelty, and bigotry of the medieval world, dominated by the Catholic Church.
Reality: The Inquisition found its beginning in a calm, measured environment and sought to create a juridical instrument of conformity that would eliminate the caprice, anger, and intolerance of revolutionaries. Moreover, the medieval inquisitors were combating a social danger and not merely a theological one.
At the end of the twelfth century, the Inquisition was created in southern France in response to the Albigensian heresy, which found particular strength in the cities of Lombardy and Languedoc. It is important to emphasize the social dangers presented to the whole of society by this group, which was not merely a prototype of modern Protestant fundamentalism, which is the popular view of our day. The term Albigensian derives from the city of Albi in southern France, a center of Cathar activity. The Cathars (the name referring to the designation of their adherents as cathars, the Greek word for the “pure”) held that two divinities, one material and evil, and the other immaterial and good, were contending for the souls of men. All material creation was evil, and it was man’s duty to escape from it and to reject those who acknowledged it as good. The God of the Old Testament, who created the world, was evil and was repudiated. It was the New Testament, as interpreted by the Cathars, that acted as a guide for man to free his spiritual soul from evil matter, the body. A thirteenth-century authority, Rainier Sacconi, summarized the belief of the Cathars thus:
“The general beliefs of all the Cathars were as follows:
The devil made this world and everything in it. Moreover, all the sacraments of the Church, namely real water baptism and the other sacraments, are useless for salvation and they are not the true sacraments of Christ and His Church, but are deceptive and diabolical and belong to the Church of the wicked. . . . Also a common belief among all the Cathars is that carnal marriage has always been a mortal sin and that in the future life one will not suffer a greater penalty for adultery or incest than for legitimate marriage, nor even among them would anyone be more severely punished in this matter. Furthermore, the Cathars deny the future resurrection of the body. They also believe that eating meat, eggs, or cheese, even in pressing necessity, is a mortal sin; this for the reason that they are generated by coition. Also, taking an oath is in no case permissible; this consequently is a mortal sin. Also that secular authorities commit mortal sin in punishing heretical wrongdoers. Also that no one can attain salvation except in their sect.”
The Cathars thus asserted that the Mass was idolatry, the Eucharist a fraud, marriage evil, and the Redemption ridiculous. Before death, adherents received the consolamentum, the only sacrament permitted, and this allowed the soul to be free from matter and to return to God. For this reason, suicide by strangulation or by starvation was not only permitted, but could even be praiseworthy.
By preaching that marriage was evil, that all oaths were forbidden, that religious suicide was good, that man had no free will and therefore could not be held responsible for his actions, that civil authority had no right to punish criminals or defend the country by force, they struck at the very root of medieval society. For example, the simple refusal to take oaths would have undermined the entire fabric of feudal legal structures, in which the spoken word carried equal or greater weight than the written. Even Charles Henry Lea, an amateur Protestant historian of the Inquisition who strongly opposed the Catholic Church, had to admit:
“This was the belief whose rapid diffusion in Europe filled the Church with fully justified terror. However much horror the means employed to combat it may inspire in us, however much pity we must feel for those who died victims of their convictions, we cannot hesitate to recognize that, under the circumstances, the cause of orthodoxy was that of civilization and progress. If Catharism had become dominant, or even equal to Catholicism, there can be no doubt that its influence would have been disastrous.”
In response to the severity and frequent brutality with which the northern French waged the Albigensian Crusade, in which many heretics were killed without formal trial or hearing, Pope Innocent III instituted a process of investigation to expose the secret sects. Another problem faced by the papacy was the willingness on the part of the laity to take the harshest measures against heresy without much concern for the conversion and salvation of the heretics. Pope Gregory IX is considered the true father of the medieval institution, a friend of both St. Francis and St. Dominic. He would call upon the newly founded mendicant orders to assume the dangerous, arduous, and undesired task of inquisitors.
What Pope Gregory IX instituted was an extraordinary tribunal to investigate and judge persons accused of heresy. The unprecedented growth of the Albigensians in southern France certainly influenced his decision. In northern France as well, the Church was facing sporadic mob violence, which often fell upon the innocent. The practice of putting heretics to death by burning at the stake was assuming the force of an established custom. The Pope was also concerned about reports coming from Germany about a sect known as the Luciferians, a secret society with fixed rituals that profaned the sacred Host.
On the secular plane, the Pope was facing a formidable power, the emperor Frederick II, the supposedly “modern” and “liberal” Hohenstaufen, a ruler completely indifferent to the spiritual well-being of the Church and continually at odds with the Papacy. A Christian ruler in name only, Frederick II was strongly influenced by astrologers and Muslim customs (he kept a harem); he ruined two crusades and was excommunicated twice. As early as March 1224, he ordered that any heretic condemned in Lombardy should be burned alive (the ancient Roman penalty for high treason) or, as a lesser punishment, have their tongues torn out. Pope Gregory was concerned that Frederick was sending to the flames men who were not heretics, but merely his own personal enemies, and he sought to find a more measured way to deal with the problem.
In 1233, Pope Gregory IX responded with his own solution: to replace lynch law with a regular legal process, directed by the mendicant Dominicans and Franciscans. They would be specially trained examiners and judges for the detection and conversion of heretics, protected from avarice and corruption by their vow of poverty, and devoted to justice.
The first point, therefore, to be noted in connection with the mendicant Inquisition is that it arose in response to a definite need. In matters of heresy, it introduced law, system, and even justice where there had been unlimited scope for the satisfaction of political jealousy, personal animosity, and popular hatred. When we find a historian describing the introduction of the Inquisition as a “step forward in legal theory,” we must understand it in this sense. “Inquisitio” means investigation, and this was the Pope’s concern: a real investigation, a judicial process, instead of immediate lynching, instead of acts motivated by irrational emotions and private vengeance.
The second point is that the mendicant orders were entrusted with the task of preserving the integrity of the Faith as well as the security of society. The inability to contain the tide of this heresy would have allowed a collapse in Western Christendom. One of the most successful tribunals in all of history, it succeeded in extirpating the anti-social poison of the Albigensians and thus preserved the moral unity of Europe for more than three hundred years.

MYTH 3
Myth: The heinous procedures of the Inquisition were unjust, cruel, inhuman, and barbarous. The Inquisition burned its victims at the stake, walled them up to languish for all eternity, broke their joints with hammers, and flayed them on wheels.
Reality: Despite the compelling Gothic fictions, the evidence leads us to an entirely different conclusion. The procedures of the Inquisition are well known through a whole series of papal bulls and other official documents, but chiefly through such formularies and manuals as were prepared by St. Raymond of Peñafort (1180–1275 A.D.), the great Spanish canonist, and Bernard Gui (1261–1331), one of the most celebrated inquisitors of the early fourteenth century. The inquisitors were certainly interrogators, but they were theological specialists who followed the rules and instructions meticulously and were dismissed and punished when they showed too little regard for justice. When, for example, in 1223, Robert de Bourger joyfully announced his aim of burning heretics, and not converting them, he was immediately suspended and imprisoned for life by Gregory IX.
Inquisitorial procedures were surprisingly fair and even lenient. In contrast with other secular tribunals throughout Europe at the time, they appear almost enlightened. The process began with a summons of the faithful to the church where the inquisitor preached a solemn sermon, the Edict of Faith. All heretics were urged to come forward and confess their errors. This period was known as the “time of grace,” which generally lasted between 15–30 days, during which all transgressors had nothing to fear, since they were promised readmission to the communion of the faithful with a suitable penance after confession of guilt. Bernard Gui stated that this time of grace was a most wholesome and valuable institution and that many persons were reconciled in this way. For the principal aim of the process was to restore the heretic to the grace of God; only by persistent obstinacy would he be cut off from the Church and abandoned to the mercy of the State. The Inquisition was first and foremost a penitential and proselytizing office, and not a criminal tribunal. Unless this is clearly recognized, the Inquisition appears as an unintelligible and senseless monstrosity. In theory, it was a sinner, and not a criminal, who stood before the Inquisitor. If the lost sheep returned to the fold, the Inquisitor was successful. If not, the heretic died in open rebellion against God and, insofar as the inquisitor was concerned, his mission was a complete failure.
During this time of grace, the faithful were ordered to provide full information to the inquisitor about any heretics known to them. If he thought there were sufficient grounds to proceed against a person, a warrant was issued for him and ordered his appearance before an inquisitor on a specified date, always accompanied by a written statement full of the evidence held by the Inquisitor against him. Finally, a formal order of arrest could be issued. If the accused did not appear, which rarely occurred, he became excommunicated and an outlaw; that is, he could not be sheltered or fed by anyone under penalty of excommunication.
Although the names of witnesses against the accused were suppressed, the accused was given the opportunity to protect himself from false accusations by giving the inquisitor a detailed list of the names of personal enemies. By this, he would conclusively invalidate certain testimony against him. He also had the power to appeal to a higher authority, even to the papacy if necessary. The final advantage of the accused was that false witnesses were punished without mercy. For example, Bernard Gui describes a father who falsely accused his son of heresy. The innocence of the son quickly came to light, and the father was imprisoned and sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 1264, Urban IV further added that the inquisitor must submit the evidence against the accused to a body of periti [experts] or boni viri [good men] and await their judgment before proceeding to sentence. Acting more or less in the capacity of jurors, this group could consist of 30, 50, or even 80 persons. This served to lessen the enormous personal responsibility of the inquisitor. Again, it is important to emphasize that this was an ecclesiastical tribunal, which neither claimed nor exercised any jurisdiction over persons outside the family of the faith, that is, the professed infidel or the Jew. Only those who had been converted to Christianity and had subsequently reverted to their former religion were under the jurisdiction of the medieval Inquisition.
Torture was first authorized by Innocent IV in the bull Ad Extirpanda of May 15, 1252, with limits that it could not cause the loss of a limb or endanger life, could be applied only once, and only if the accused already appeared virtually convicted of heresy by multiple and certain proofs. Certain objective studies carried out by recent scholars have argued that torture was practically unknown in the medieval inquisitorial process. The record of Bernard Gui, the inquisitor of Toulouse for six years, who examined more than 600 heretics, shows only one instance in which torture was used. Moreover, in the 930 sentences recorded between 1307 and 1323 (and it is worth noting that meticulous records were kept by paid notaries chosen from civil courts), the majority of the accused were sentenced to imprisonment, or to the wearing of crosses, and penances. Only 42 were abandoned to the secular arm and burned.
Legends about the brutality of the Inquisition with regard to the number of persons sentenced to imprisonment and those abandoned to the secular power to be burned at the stake have been exaggerated through the years. Working carefully from existing records and available documents, Professor Yves Dossat estimated that in the diocese of Toulouse 5,000 persons were investigated during the years 1245–1246. Of these, 945 were found guilty of heresy or heretical involvement. Although 105 persons were sentenced to imprisonment, 840 received lesser penances. After careful analysis of all available data, Dossat concluded that in the mid-thirteenth century, only one out of every hundred heretics condemned by the Inquisition was abandoned to the secular power for execution, and only 10–12 percent received prison sentences. Moreover, inquisitors often reduced sentences to lesser penances. The large numbers of burnings detailed in various histories are generally unauthenticated, or are a deliberate invention of anti-Catholic propagandists of later centuries. From the growing body of evidence, it seems safe to affirm that the overall integrity of the Holy Office was maintained at an extraordinarily high level, far higher than that of contemporary or later secular tribunals.

MYTH 4
Myth: The Spanish Inquisition surpassed all barbarities, terrorizing the whole of society with its tyrannical and cruel practices.
Reality: On November 6, 1994, the BBC of London broadcast an incredible testimony against the falsity of these claims in a documentary entitled “The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition.” In it, historians admitted that “this image is false. It is a distortion disseminated for 400 years and accepted ever since. Every case that came before the Spanish Inquisition in its 300-year history had its own file.” Now, these files are being gathered and properly studied for the first time. Prof. Henry Kamen, a specialist in the field, candidly admitted that the archives are detailed, exhaustive, and bring to light a very different version of the Spanish Inquisition.
Protestant antipathies fueled this campaign of propaganda against the Catholic Church and the powerful leader of the Habsburg dynasty who commanded the most powerful armies in Europe, Charles I of Spain. Their fears intensified especially after the battle of Mühlberg in 1547, where Charles’s enemies were virtually annihilated. The succession of Philip II to the Spanish throne and his own dedicated opposition to Protestantism spread such fears. As Philip wrote to his ambassador in Rome in 1566:
“You may assure His Holiness that rather than suffer the least damage to religion and the service of God, I would prefer to lose all my states and a hundred lives if I had them. For I do not propose nor desire to be ruler of heretics.”
Yet while the Spanish often triumphed on the battlefield, they were abject losers in the propaganda war. They made no defense against the legend of Spanish cruelty and barbarity created so that Europe would sympathize with the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands. Defaming the Inquisition became the most natural weapon of choice to achieve this end.
Many pamphlets and brochures, too numerous and too horrendous to enumerate here, have been written since the sixteenth century. It suffices to mention only a few: The Apology of William of Orange, written by the French Huguenot Pierre Loiseleur de Villiers in 1581, enshrined all the anti-Inquisition propaganda of the previous forty years in a political document that “validated” the Dutch revolt. In 1567, Reinaldo González Montano published his Sanctae Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes aliquot detectae ac palam traductae, which was soon translated into all the major languages of Western Europe and widely disseminated. It contributed decisively to what became known as the “Black Legend,” which associated the Inquisition with the horrors of the torture chamber. These accounts were elaborated upon by other Protestant writers, such as Rev. Ingram Cobain in the nineteenth century, who described one of his fictitious torture devices: the beautiful life-sized doll that cut the victim with a thousand knives when he was forced to embrace it. The myth was created and assumed proportions bordering on the ridiculous in literature, travelers’ accounts, Masonic narratives, satires (Voltaire, Zaupser), plays and operas (Schiller, Verdi), histories (Victor Hugo), and Gothic novels of later centuries.
With regard to torture, Prof. Kamen recently said:
“In fact, the Inquisition used torture very rarely. In Valencia, I discovered that out of 7,000 cases, only two percent suffered any form of torture at all and generally for no more than 15 minutes… I did not find anyone suffering torture more than twice.”
Prof. Jaime Contreras agreed:
“We have found, in comparing the Spanish Inquisition with other tribunals, that the Spanish Inquisition used torture far less. And if we compare the Spanish Inquisition with tribunals in other countries, we see that the Spanish Inquisition has a virtually clean record with respect to torture.”
During this same period in the rest of Europe, heinous physical cruelty was common. In England, transgressors were executed for damaging shrubs in public gardens, poaching deer, stealing a woman’s handkerchief, and attempted suicide. In France, those who stole sheep were disemboweled. During the reign of Henry VIII, the recognized punishment for a poisoner was to be boiled alive in a cauldron. As late as 1837, 437 persons were executed in England in one year for various crimes, and until the passage of the Reform Act, death was the recognized penalty for forgery, horse theft, robbery, arson, burglary, interference with the postal service, and sacrilege. It is clear that in accusing the Spanish Inquisition on specific charges of physical cruelty and senseless brutality, we must proceed with some caution.
The myth of unlimited power and control exercised by the Spanish Inquisition is also unfounded. In sixteenth-century Spain, the Inquisition was divided into twenty tribunals, each covering thousands of square miles. Yet each tribunal had no more than two or three inquisitors and a handful of administrative officials. Prof. Kamen observed:
“… These inquisitors did not have the power to control society in the way historians have imagined they did. They had no power. They had no function; they did not have the tools to do the job. We, by reinforcing this image, have given them tools that never existed.”
In reality, the Inquisition’s limited contact with the population forms part of the reason why it did not attract the hostility of the Spanish people. Outside the large cities, villages saw an inquisitor once every ten years or even once in a century. One reason people supported the Inquisition was precisely because it was rarely seen, and even less frequently heard. Kamen also records that, in every period of history, there are records of strong and bitter opposition. Nevertheless, based on the exploration of inquisitorial documents first by Llorente, and later by Henry Charles Lea, scholars made the mistake of studying the Inquisition in isolation from all other dimensions of Spanish culture and society, as if it had played a central role in religion, politics, culture, and the economy, and as if no opposition or criticism had been permitted. The satire of Menéndez y Pelayo on those who blamed the tribunal for all the evils of Spain underscores this point of view:
“Why was there no industry in Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why are we Spaniards lazy? Because of the Inquisition. Why are there bullfights in Spain? Because of the Inquisition. Why do Spaniards take a siesta? Because of the Inquisition.”
The Inquisition cannot be held responsible for the “decline of Spanish learning and literature,” asserts Peters in his acclaimed objective study Inquisition, despite the claims of the Protestant historian Charles Lea or the Catholic historian Lord Acton. “After the thunder of the Index of 1559,” he states, “which was directed primarily against vernacular piety, no attack was made against Spanish literature and no more than one hundred Spanish writers came into conflict with the Inquisition. In fact, long after the measures of 1558–1559, Spain continued to have an active intellectual life based on an experience of the wider world greater than that of any other European country.”
A final and most important myth remains to be examined.

MYTH 5
Myth: Man is more free and happy when the state or nation makes no public profession of any true religion. Therefore, true progress lies in the separation between Church and State.
Reality: This is the heart of the matter. The most dynamic element, the most essential question, is found in the attitude of the human spirit in relation to questions of religion and philosophy. To understand the answer completely, it is necessary to assume several presuppositions.
The Catholic concept of history is based on the fact that the Ten Commandments are fundamental norms of human behavior that correspond to natural law. To assist man in his weakness, to guide and direct him and preserve him from his own tendency toward evil and error resulting from original sin, Jesus Christ gave the Church an infallible magisterium to teach and guide the nations. Man’s adherence to the Magisterium of the Church is the fruit of faith. Without faith, man cannot know and entirely practice the Commandments.
Therefore, as man elevates himself in the order of grace by the practice of virtue inspired by grace, he elaborates a culture, a political, social, and economic order in consonance with the basic and immutable principles of natural law. These institutions and this culture thus formed in their entirety may be called Christian civilization. Furthermore, nations and peoples can only attain a perfect civilization, a civilization in complete harmony with natural law, within the framework of a Christian civilization and by means of correspondence with grace and the truths of faith.
For this reason, man must give his firm recognition to the Catholic Church as the one true Church of God and to its authentic universal Magisterium as infallible. Therefore, man must know, profess, and practice the Catholic faith.
Historically, one must ask when this Christian civilization came into existence. The answer may shock and even irritate many. There was a moment when a great part of humanity knew this ideal of perfection, knew it and tended toward it with fervor and sincerity. This period, sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of Christianity, is the era of the 12th and 13th centuries, when the influence of the Church in Europe was at its height. Christian principles then dominated social relations more completely than in any other period before or since, and the Christian State then came closer to its full development. Leo XIII refers to this period in his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885) in the following terms:
“There was a time when the philosophy of the Gospel governed the States. In this period the influence of Christian wisdom and its divine virtue penetrated the laws, institutions, and customs of the peoples, all classes, all the relations of civil society. The religion instituted by Jesus Christ, solidly established in all the dignity that was due to it, flourished everywhere, due to the favor of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates. At that time, the Priesthood and the Empire were united in a happy concord and the friendly exchange of good offices. Organized in this way, civil society produced fruits superior to all expectations, and its memory persists and will continue to persist, and no artifice of its enemies will be able to corrupt or obscure it.”
A portrait of Catholic society implies above all an exact idea of what the relationship between the Church and temporal society should be. The State, in principle, has the obligation to profess officially the truth of the Catholic faith and, as a consequence, to prohibit the functioning and the proselytism of heretics. Not only the Church, but all temporal society was created for the salvation of our souls, as Saint Thomas Aquinas showed conclusively in De Regimine Principum. In it, Saint Thomas shows us how absolutely all things created by God were created for the salvation of our souls and must be means that serve positively for our sanctification. Men themselves were created for the salvation of one another. That is why they live together in society. Thus, both temporal and spiritual society must contribute to the principal end of man’s existence, the salvation of his eternal soul.
This exposition of society implies an understanding of the hierarchy of values, in which spiritual values have a greater patrimony than material ones. For example, in the Summa Theologica (II, II, ii, 3), Saint Thomas observes that, if it is permissible to condemn counterfeiters to death, then certainly it is necessary to condemn to death those who have committed the much worse crime of falsification of the Faith. For eternal salvation must be regarded as greater than temporal property, and the good of all must be regarded as greater than the good of the individual.
These affirmations have painful consequences for the liberal spirit of our day. For, if the State proclaims that a single religion is the true one, it has the obligation in principle to prohibit the diffusion of sects of a heretical character. It is understood that in Catholic society the highest purpose of the State lies in recognizing the Catholic Church, in defending it, in applying its laws, in attending to it. In a Catholic society, the Pope has an indirect authority over everything that touches the interests of the Church. In this way, the Pope is elevated above all temporal powers. When a head of State is heretical, the Pope has the right to depose him, as in the case of Henry IV of France, the legitimate claimant to the French throne. In other words, a heretic does not have the right to govern a Catholic country.
As Father Denis Fahey points out, in the kingship of Christ, in the Middle Ages, the State fulfilled its obligation to profess the religion that God Himself had established and through which He wished to be adored and worshiped—the Catholic religion. When Catholics respond to the objections of non-Catholics concerning the Inquisition, they sometimes seem to lose sight of the formal principle of order animating the civilization of the Middle Ages. If a State proclaims a religion as being the true religion, it has an obligation as a matter of principle to prohibit the diffusion of heresy and heretical sects. This obligation is very painful for the liberal mentality to accept. Heresy was considered a crime because the State recognized the Catholic religion for what it objectively is, the true religion established by God, and not a simple temporary arrangement, here today, finished tomorrow.
In presenting the principles of the Social Reign of Christ, Father Denis Fahey says:
“The truth is that the State, then, grasped the formal principle of ordered social organization in the real world and that the Inquisition was created to defend the security of the world in order against the fomenters of disorder… That same principle is intended by God to shape the new matter and the new circumstances of all succeeding ages. Socially organized, man in the world redeemed by Our Lord is not as God wants him to be, unless he accepts the supernatural, supra-national Catholic Church.
The modern world has deviated from order and is suffering for its apostasy and disorder. This great truth must be proclaimed unequivocally, so that the interior life with which we celebrate the feast of the kingship of Christ may be deepened. It is infinitely better to fall fighting for the integral truth than to gain an apparent victory by half-truths.”
Darkening the name of the Holy Inquisition has, obviously, found root in this generalized tendency, even among the princes of the Church, to “gradually reduce” these principles of Catholic social order. While, at base, the problem of the Holy Inquisition must be examined at the philosophical level, there is also no doubt that over the centuries the “Inquisition” has assumed a monstrous dimension out of proportion with the facts.
The pens of Protestant propagandists during the Reformation began the process of creating the myth, describing the Inquisition as just another example of the evils of Rome. In their works the tribunal was presented as the supreme instrument of intolerance. Wherever Catholicism triumphed, according to them, not only religious freedom, but civil freedom, was extinguished. The Reformation, according to this interpretation, brought the liberation of the human spirit from the shackles of darkness and superstition. Propaganda along these lines proved surprisingly effective.
However, as scholars of the last decade began to examine the archives, studies showed that the interests of truth require that the Inquisition be reduced to its proper dimensions. Its importance can be greatly exaggerated if we rely on the highly fictitious images presented by propagandists, philosophers of the Enlightenment, and of the age of Romanticism and Liberalism that followed. These writers, which still include Lord Acton, falsely assume that the Inquisition was an integral part of a special philosophy of blatant intolerance and cruelty. In reality, it evolved as a product of the society that it served. In sum, objective Catholic minds that are militant against the errors of liberalism and modernism of our own era and that look with admiration upon the spirit and institutions of the Age of Faith may remain with a healthy admiration for the Holy Inquisition.

NOTES
The Lutheran ideal, recognized at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, allowed each Protestant State to organize its particular form of religion as a department of State. This “peace,” said Rev. Denis Fahey, “has been aptly termed the funeral of the Catholic order of the world. Luther’s separation of the Christian from the Citizen prepared the way for the building of the State, accomplished in modern times, and the social influence of Protestant society thus facilitated the advent of the modern public man who may, as a private citizen, be Catholic, but as a public man be represented at a Protestant service or even participate on occasion.” The Kingship of Christ, 3rd ed. (Palmdale, Ca: 1990), 40–41.
(Rockford, Ill: 1987), pp. x–xi.
Around 1230 a substantial revolution in legal thought and procedure had occurred throughout most of Western Europe, which included the introduction of the Roman-inspired inquisitorial process, which in many respects could be considered a modernization of the legal practices of the time. Edward Peters, Inquisition (New York, London: 1988), pp. 52–57.
Peters, Inquisition, pp. 231, 3.
Kieckhefer noted that it would not even be appropriate to speak of an “Inquisition” in a medieval context. The sources themselves show that even the regional and local institutionalization of inquisitorial procedure was partial and fragile, depending chiefly on the dedication and organizational power of the individual inquisitor and on the concrete need for action perceived at a specific time and place. Richard Kieckhefer, “The Office of Inquisition and Medieval Heresy: The Transition from Personal to Institutional Jurisdiction,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (January 1995), 59; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Philadelphia-Liverpool: 1979), p. 5.
A. L. Maycock, The Inquisition from Its Establishment to the Great Schism (New York: 1969), 117.
Ibid., 100.
There were incidents of popular violence in Toledo in 1449, civil riots in 1470 in Valladolid, and the murders of conversos in Jaén and Córdoba three years later. The direct instrument of violence in all these cases was the populace. Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain (Bloomington, Ind.: 1985), pp. 30–31.
Until the eighteenth century, the Congregation of the Holy Office had virtually no power or influence outside the Papal States. Its principal tasks were the censorship of the clergy and of printed books, which coincided with the Congregation of the Index. It was closed during the exile of the pope from Italy in 1809–1814; afterward it was restored with powers even further diminished. In 1965, Pope Paul VI changed its name to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and in 1966 abolished the Index.
The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Vol. 78 (Binghampton, NY: 1991), XI–XIV, 7–9.
Albert Clement Shannon gives a detailed explanation of Cathar beliefs and their biblical proofs drawn from one of the Albigensian treatises written toward the end of the century. For example, to prove that man comes from the devil, the Cathars cited John 8:44: “Your father is the devil” and 1 John 3:8: “He who commits sin is of the devil” – The Medieval Inquisition (Washington, D.C.: 1983), 2–19.
Summa of Rainerius Sacconi, trans. in Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: 1969), 330.
H. C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, Vol. I (New York: 1906–08), 1064.
Maycock, The Inquisition, pp. 77, 52–53; Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition, 41–43.
Gustav Schnürer, Kirche und Kultur im Mittelalter (Paderborn, 1926), II, p. 434.
Maycock, The Inquisition, 128–29.
In 1323, the inquisitor Bernard Gui (unjustly defamed in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose) produced the Practica officii Inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, an elaborate and balanced inquisitorial manual. The doctrines and procedures of the inquisitors derived both from theology and canon law, as well as from earlier works of the Church Fathers, general councils, and popes. Peters, Inquisition, pp. 60–64.
Despite the apparent prohibition of appeals (appelatione remota), Gregory IX and his successor Innocent IV repeatedly received appeals made by the author of the denunciation and overturned unjust decisions. Throughout this entire period it appears that appeals found their way to Rome for redress. In fact, following the model of the long-forgotten regulations of the Justinian Code, through the inquisitorial process the Church introduced the process of appeal into medieval legislation, since appeals were made outside the local feudal seignorial courts. The success of the Church’s system of justice was not lost on secular rulers, who eventually adopted appeals as a regular procedure in their own reorganized and centralized judicial systems. Shannon, The Medieval Inquisition, pp. 139–40.
Hamilton, Inquisition, pp. 150–51, 130–33, 140–41.

Ibid., p. 160.

Ives Dossat, Les Crises de l’inquisition toulousaine au XIIIe siècle (1233–1273) (Bordeaux: Imprimerie Bière, 1959), 247–268.

Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, pp. 252–54.

Peters, Inquisition, 131.

Foxe, The Book of Martyrs (London: 1863), p. 1060; Peters, Inquisition, 133; Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, p. 254; Peters, Inquisition, 152–54.

For a more detailed description of how the myth took shape in literature, see Peters, Inquisition, pp. 152–262.

“The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition,” BBC documentary, Nov. 1994.

Maycock, The Inquisition, p. 41, 259.

“The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition,” BBC documentary, Nov. 1994.

Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, pp. 257–58.

La Ciencia Española (Madrid: 1953), pp. 102–3.

Peters, pp. 260–61.

Kingship of Christ according to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas (Palmdale, Ca: 1931; 1990 repr.), p. 38.

HORVAT, Marian. 5 Mitos sobre a Inquisição refutados por uma PHD em história. Disponível em: <http://apologistascatolicos.co....m.br/index.php/idade Desde: 18/02/2016. Traduzido por: Rafael Rodrigues.