One thinks immediately of the Inquisitions (Roman, Medieval, and Spanish) which for centuries held Europe in their terrible grip. In his “History of the Inquisition,” Canon Llorente, who was the Secretary to the Inquisition in Madrid from 1790-92 and had access to the archives of all the tribunals, estimated that in Spain alone the number of condemned exceeded 3 million, with about 300,000 burned at the stake.17
17. R.W. Thompson, “The Papacy and the Civil Power” (New York, 1876), p.82.
A Catholic historian comments upon the events leading up to the suppression of the Spanish Inquisition n 1809:
When Napoleon conquered Spain in 1808, a Polish officer in his army Colonel Lemanouski, reported that the Dominicans [in charge of the Inquisition] blockaded themselves in their monastery in Madrid. When Lemanouski’s troops forced an entry, the inquisitors denied the existence of any torture chambers.
The soldiers searched the monastery and discovered them under the floors. The chambers were full of prisoners, all naked, many insane. The French troops, used to cruelty and blood, could not stomach the sight. They emptied the torture-chambers, laid gunpowder to the monastery and blew the place up. 18
To wring out confessions from these poor creatures, the Roman Catholic Church devised ingenious tortures, so excruciating and barbarous that one is sickened by their recital. Church historian Bishop William Shaw Kerr writes:
The most ghastly abomination of all was the system of torture. The accounts of its cold-blooded operations make one shudder at the capacity of human beings for cruelty. And it was decreed and regulated by the popes who claim to represent Christ on earth…
Careful notes were taken not only of all that was confessed by the victim, but of his shrieks, cries, lamentations, broken interjections and appeals for mercy. The most moving things in the literature of the Inquisition are not the accounts of their sufferings left by the victims but the sober memoranda kept by the officers of the tribunals. We are distressed and horrified just because there is no intention to shock us.19
The remnants of some of the chambers of horror remain in Europe and may be visited today. They stand as memorials to the zealous outworking of Roman Catholic dogmas which remain in force today, and to a Church which claims to be infallible and to this day justifies such barbarism. They are also memorials to the astonishing accuracy of John’s vision in Revelation 17. In a book published in Spain in 1909, Emelio Martinez writes:
To these three million victims [documented by Llorente] should be added the thousands upon thousands of Jews and Moors deported from their homeland…In just one year, 1481, and just in Seville, the Holy Office [of the Inquisition] burned 2000 persons; the bones and effigies of another 2000…and another 16,000 were condemned to varying sentences.20
Peter de Rosa acknowledges that his own Catholic Church “was responsible for persecuting Jews, for the Inquisition, for slaughtering heretics by the thousand, for reintroducing torture into Europe as part of the judicial process.” Yet the Roman Catholic Church has never officially admitted that these practices were evil, nor has she ever apologized to the world or to any of the victims or their descendants. Nor could Pope John Paul II apologize today because “the doctrines responsible for those terrible things still underpin his position.”21 Rome has not changed at heart no matter what sweet words she speaks when it serves her purpose.
18. De Rosa, op. cit., p. 172.
19. Kerr, op. cit., pp. 239-240
20. Emelio Martinez, “Recuerdos [Memoirs] de Antano” (CLIE, 1909), pp. 105-106.
21. De Rosa, op. cit., pp. 20,21.
