The Spanish Inquisition- MV

[Alan]

[Dawn Marie]

And … nobody understands it either. But … if you want to learn the truth about the inquisition … then
stick around.

Hello and welcome to this latest edition of CIA … the Catholic Investigative Agency … I’m Michael
Voris.
In this episode … we’re going to take a close look at one of the most popular arguments people make
against the Catholic Church.
Have you ever been talking to a coworker, friend or family member … trying to share your Catholic
faith with them … and they say something like …
“Well … look at the inquisition … it forced thousands of people to convert or die.”
But … is that true? Was the inquisition really as malicious as everybody says it was? And if it wasn’t
… then where did all the lies and myths come from?
Well … guess what. It’s time to debunk the myth that the inquisition used extreme methods of torture
… to force all non-Catholics to convert to Catholicism … or be burned alive at the stake.

There’s a whole spectrum of confusion about the inquisition … from serious academic critique … to
the comedy of the well known British troupe … Monty Python … that you saw earlier.
Let’s listen to what the “man-on-the-street” knows about the inquisition …
**PAUSE FOR SOTS**
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Well as you heard … none of them really knew anything about the inquisition. So … let’s look at our
thesis … as we begin to set the record straight …
The inquisitions were instituted to protect both guilty and innocent people from the gross injustice of
secular leaders and mob rule … thus initiating an unprecedented level of justice and order throughout
much of Europe.
So … before we dig into the specifics we need to lay out a few fundamental facts about the
inquisitions. First … the idea of a court of inquisition … a court inquiring into a certain matter … is not
a Catholic one.
Courts of inquisition had been held by secular rulers for a long time … and Protestants had their own
anti-Catholic inquisitions as well. Although the name inquisition may not have been used it was the
same thing.
The Catholic inquisitions existed in many places in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. However …
there never was one massive … pan-European Inquisition. The inquisitions were localized circuit
courts … with the inquisitors traveling around from place to place.
Another very important thing to understand about the inquisitions is that they always started in
response to a problem among the Church and the faithful.
A cleric or king would call for an inquisition because a situation was out of hand … and it needed the
formalized order of an inquisition in order to be resolved.
Unfortunately … the secular rulers would sometimes appropriate the ecclesiastical courts to further
their own disingenuous goals.
The last general point we’ll make here has to do with the most prevalent lie about the inquisitions …
which is that they forced millions of people to convert to Catholicism or be put to death.
The fact is that a minute fraction of people tried were executed … most people were found innocent.
For example … did you know that such intellectual giants of the Catholic Church as St. Teresa of Avila
… St. Ignatius of Loyola … and St. John of the Cross were all brought before the inquisition?
Obviously … they were all found to be innocent of heresy and allowed to go free. But that’s the point
… they were brought to an orderly trial without torture … the evidence was heard … they were found
to be innocent and then they were released.
The flip side to this is that some inquisition officials were unjust and cruel … and wrongly punished
both innocent and guilty people.
But … you have to understand something. While The Catholic Church is a divine institution …
founded by Jesus Christ … it’s made up of weak, sinful human beings … who don’t always do the will
of God and some have done very bad things.
The problem is that critics of the Church will shine a spotlight on those individuals in the Church who
have done bad things … and then make the argument that the ENTIRE church is bad because of the
actions of some. This is wholly unjust.
It’s a little like having someone who’s a criminal in your family … and your neighbors then saying
everybody in your family is a criminal.
We’re not here to say that the inquisitions were without blame … but what we’re going to show is that
… by and large … the courts of inquisition were the most just and humane legal systems that existed
anywhere in Europe at the time.
And … they were started to protect people from unjust treatment … not to harm them with unjust
rulings.
Alright … so let’s bust some of the more prevalent myths.

The history of the different inquisitions comprises over 600 hundred years of convoluted and nuanced
details and events … but we’ll try to break everything down as best we can.
To start with … there were 3 major inquisitions … the Medieval Inquisition … the Spanish Inquisition
and the Roman Inquisition.
The Roman Inquisition began when the Holy Office was set up in Rome to deal with the Protestant
heresy in the 16th century.
We’re not going to spend much time on it here because … when most people talk about quote “The
Inquisition” … they’re really talking about some confused mix of the first two.
The Medieval Inquisition began in 1184 when Pope Lucius III sent a list of heresies to all the bishops
in Europe … telling them to oversee the judgment of accused heretics.
Thus … the initial courts of inquisition were conducted by the bishop of a particular diocese … there
was no centralized governance.
At the time … the secular courts had been harshly and somewhat indiscriminately punishing people
they believed were a threat. Pope Lucius recognized that the accused needed to be protected from
individual lords and even mobs.
These “lynch-mobs” were a significant problem … one example is of a man who was preaching the
Cathar heresy … and he made a bonfire then started preaching by it.
When he threw a crucifix into the fire and started preaching against Christ … the people listening
rushed him and threw him into the fire.
This sort of thing was quite common and … without institutionalizing the inquisition … this type of
behavior would have been allowed to run rampant for who knows how long.
Catharism … by the way … is one of the vaguely Gnostic heresies that sprang up in Medieval Europe.
The Cathars believed in a dualistic creation … they believed God had created the soul which was good
… but the Devil had created and ruled the physical realm including our bodies which our souls had
become trapped in.
Many people were very angry at these heretics … but it might be a bit hard for us to understand why as
we live in this modern age.
In a September 2003 Crisis Magazine article … renowned St. Louis University professor and Catholic
apologetic … Thomas Madden … wrote a top-quality explanation of the inquisitions.
At one point … he explains the cultural milieu that would cause someone to feel justified in burning a
fellow human being …

See … back then … religion wasn’t just a “personal preference” for people. It was real and it mattered.
It wasn’t something people “got involved in” to feel good about themselves … it was the way of life …
and if something came along to threaten that way of life … it had to be eradicated before it created
chaos.
Unfortunately … the common people often took the law into their own hands … usually ending in
grievous violence and bloodshed … and often the killing the wrong person anyway.
By the 13th century … the violence against the Catharists had grown so bad … that in 1231 … Pope
Gregory IX decided that he had to centralize the authority of all the individual inquisitions in his papal
authority at Rome.
The Holy Father normalized the inquisitions by making the Dominicans the official inquisitors and
making the inquisitions answerable to him.
The Dominicans had been specially trained in canon law and theology so they were uniquely suited to
handle the inquisitions. Highly detailed manuals were also printed up and dispersed … which defined
how an inquisition was to be conducted.
Stop and think about this situation for a minute. There are bands of angry people roving around Central
Europe, looking for someone to burn. They start burning supposed heretics because the kings and
nobles were all doing the same thing … and they think they have Church approval as well.
Finally … Pope Gregory realizes that the Church is the only one who can put a stop to this. So … he
sets up a new court system that is based on Catholic morality. Through the courts of inquisition … the
Holy Father is trying to ensure everyone will receive respect and justice.
That doesn’t really sound like a sadistic monster relishing the abominable torture of innocent people …
now does it?
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Now … keep in mind that Medieval European law was practically one and the same with Church law.
And the United States inherited bits and pieces of this legal code when the Founding Fathers used
English common law as the basis for the American legal system.
The justice of Church courts was so universally recognized … in fact … that the U.S. Supreme Court
Building has Pope Gregory the Great’s coat of arms on it.
Pretty interesting … huh? To find out more about the inquisition … we sat down in our
RealCatholicTV dot com studios … and interviewed Canadian author and TV show host Michael
Coren about his book … Why Catholics Are Right.
On our interview program … The Roman Forum … Mr. Coren weighed in with a brief overview of the
inquisition … have a listen …

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So … what Coren’s basically saying is that … the courts of inquisition were way ahead of their time as
far as justice and fairness.
But … a lot of people try to claim just the opposite … there are many individuals who adamantly argue
that the inquisitions were institutions of rare atrocities and sadistic cruelties perpetrated by hooded and
drooling clerics.
Garbage like this is just that … garbage.
Let’s take an example … one of the reasons people give for why in the inquisition is so bad is that
when a person was accused of heresy he wasn’t allowed to know who his accuser was.
But the person who makes this assertion has no knowledge of the context. It’s true that accusers’ names
were usually kept secret … this was done because there had been times when the accuser and his
family were threatened … or even killed for reporting someone to the inquisition.
However… the court balanced this out by letting the accused person produce a list of all his known
enemies.
Then the court would investigate … to see if any of these people had falsely accused the defendant.
If the accuser was one of the defendant’s listed enemies … the court would take his accusations with a
HUGE grain of salt.
Inquisition courts also took a very dim view of false witness. If someone lied during an investigation …
they risked severe punishment for themselves … even death.
Besides the process of accusation … there’s something else that a lot of people like to get their pants in
knot over … although … like usual … they don’t have a clue of what they’re talking about.
People become livid over the inquisitions as they indignantly … read ignorantly … denounce the
inquisitors’ supposed practice of slinking around … forcing non-Catholics to convert or die.
Again … this is a load of hogwash.

The courts of inquisition were set up by the Catholic Church to inquire into whether members of the
Church were properly living out their faith.
The courts were also trying people for other grave sins … like adultery and fornication … severe
blasphemy … and immorality among the clergy.
Honestly now … does it make sense that the Church would tell another Catholic to convert or die?
Clearly that is not the case. The idea that inquisitors went prowling around Europe raping women and
children as they wrenched conversions out of humble non-Catholics is utterly ludicrous.
Remember … the inquisitions weren’t perfect … but the express intent and duty of the courts was to
provide people with objective justice and fairness … and most of the time the courts succeeded in
holding to a legal standard much higher than anywhere else in the world.
Even today .. injustice exists in our court systems and juries are rigged .. judges take bribes .. bad
lawyers provide bad defenses .. bad criminals get off on technicalities etc.
Despite all these injustices .. no one would sanely stand up and say the whole system is bad and all the
people who work in modern courts are crooks and thieves.

So …what really went on in the inquisitions? In his book … Why Catholics Are Right … once again
Mr. Coren spends some time talking about what the inquisitions were like … how they were run … and
what their goals really were.
He explains how a court of inquisition would have priests stay in a town or village for a month or so …
preaching … teaching … and hearing confessions. This was called the period of Grace. Anyone who
wanted to could confess and be forgiven during this period.
If the people accused of heresy repented … that was the end of the matter.
If they did not … they would be tried and … if found guilty … the inquisition officials would decide on
the method of punishment.
Incidentally … most people were not burned at the stake. Common punishments included being
required to perform certain good works …
… such as helping to build a church … visiting a church … going on a pilgrimage … or even
participating in a crusade.
Stricter punishments could be fines … whipping with rods … the pillory and wearing colored crosses.
A guilty person might also be imprisoned or excommunicated … in which case they would be handed
over to the secular authorities.
See … the inquisitions didn’t actually execute people … if someone’s sentence was quite serious …
they would be excommunicated and then punishment was up to the civil courts.
In those days … civil and canon law were pretty much united … to better serve justice … and to
protect the individual from abuse.
Remember … back then … our very modern and recent ideas about the separation of Church and state
did not exist at all.
Now … although these things are important to understand … we have yet to deal with the most
pernicious set of lies.

By far the most serious misconception … is that the inquisitions hideously tortured, maimed and
murdered tens of thousands of people … merely because the Church was trying to force them to
become Catholic. This is an outrageous falsehood.
Yes … the courts did sometimes use torture … just like our U.S. government uses torture … or …
excuse me … “enhanced interrogation techniques” to obtain desired information. Anyone ever hear of
water boarding?
Anyway … what modern man has to understand … is that torture was NOT used as a form of
punishment … but for getting at the truth.
Inquisitors were keenly sensitive to the need for ironclad proof of an individual’s guilt or innocence …
and eye witnesses were considered one of the best ways of securing such proof.
But … if that proof wasn’t easily obtainable … the inquisitors would have to resort to other means of
proof.
Very infrequently … that meant that the defendant and sometimes even the witnesses were tortured for
a short period … not to exceed 15 minutes … to make sure the inquisitors made the correct judgment.
Although it was sometimes ignored … the rule was that no one was allowed to be tortured more than
once … and the type of torture could not cause maiming or death … or even the risk death.
Incidentally .. this may sound very similar to the US government’s practice of water-boarding .. which
is still highly debated in the US. So it seems a little disingenuous for modern man to accuse the
Catholic Church of unspeakable heinous practices when similar practices occur today and are still
being debated.
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You need to remember that torture existed long before the courts of inquisition … and the Church was
always leery about allowing it at all.
Pope Innocent IV was the first to allow the use of torture in inquisition trials. He made the concession
in his bull … “Ad Exstirpanda” in 1252. Torture was used as a last resort when guilt seemed probable
… but there was no other way of being certain of the truth.
But … many judges recognized that innocent people would sometimes confess to things they didn’t do
while being tortured just so the pain would end. So … a lot of the judges would not attach too much
weight to testimony received under torture.
In his 2003 Crisis Magazine article … Professor Thomas Madden gives some specifics of how torture
was handled … specifics that … obviously … blow anti-Catholics’ false conceptions of the inquisitions
right out of the intellectual cesspool they like to wallow in.
Let’s take a listen …

Torture was only used in 2% of cases? And yet … somehow … the only thing the people in our manon-
the-street interviews could tell us was that the inquisitions tortured and killed people. How
ridiculous.
An ignorance and stupidity of this magnitude can only be chalked up to deliberate lies and deceit on the
part of those who hate the Church and want to destroy Her.
Speaking of modern myths and lies about the inquisition … remember the Monty Python sketch we
opened with? Unfortunately … it’s always been in vogue to mock the Church and the Spanish
Inquisition.
But … jokes like these are very hurtful … because many people form their opinions of the inquisition
based on these fairytales.
To show you what we mean … let’s check out another man-on-the-street interview with a young fellow
… whose sole knowledge of the inquisition comes from Monty Python …

Pretty sad, huh? See … the problem is that almost everything most people now know about the
inquisitions is a convoluted mess of myths and lies.
Now … stop and think about all this for a minute. What many people have done is form a radically
biased opinion about the Catholic Church … and consequently Her teachings … based on ridiculous
accusations about the Inquisition … while knowing next to nothing about the facts.
To better understand all this … we need to look at some history to really see why the inquisitions were
seen as necessary … and why they operated like they did.

When people mention the word “inquisition” … they’re almost always talking about the Spanish
Inquisition … this is probably the most complicated of the three … but it’s also the one that needs the
most explanation.
If you remember from earlier … we talked about the Cathar heresy … and how it provided much of the
impetus for the institutionalizing of the inquisition.
In the 13th century … there was a great deal of fighting between the Cathars and the Catholic laity who
couldn’t stand the heretics.
Eventually … King James I of Aragon asked Gregory IX to institute an inquisition there to stop the
violence … by providing the Cathars with a due process of law. The pope acquiesced with the decree
of his bull "Declinante jam mundi" … that he issued on May 26, 1232.
Technically … this was the start of the Spanish Inquisition … but it reached its maturity when King
Ferdinand the second … and Queen Isabella the first assumed the throne over 2 hundred years later.
In 1478 … Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull giving Ferdinand and Isabella the permission to establish an
inquisition in Spain. It was run by priests … but in the king and queen maintained ultimate control over
the court.
The first two inquisitors were unscrupulous men so … in the mid 1480s … Ferdinand asked Fray
Tomas de Tork ay mada>> Torquemada to step in and become the Grand Inquisitor.
He’s the priest who’s popularly thought to be the devil-incarnate leader of a sadist cult … founded on
the idea that torture is good … and more torture is even better.
In reality … nothing is further from the truth. He had a lot more power than most inquisitors … and he
was much more thorough … but he rarely used torture.
He also worked incredibly hard … to make sure that everyone received justice.

OK … before we go on … we need to back pedal a bit and explain the background and lead-up to the
institution of the Spanish Inquisition.
Remember that the first inquisitions were started in Central and Western Europe to address the
problems surrounding the Catharism heresy.
This time … in 15th century Spain … the inquisition was instituted to look into the matter of the
conversos … or Jewish and Muslim converts to Catholicism.
The point is … none of the inquisitions were arbitrarily started just to round people up … and forcefeed
them the Catholic Faith or barbeque them. Inquisitions were always begun in response to a
specific problem that was being very poorly handled.
You see … throughout the entirety of Medieval and Early Modern Europe there was a vibrant and
vicious anti-semitism.
England and France had expelled all of their Jews in the late 13th and early 14th centuries … and many
people in Spain were resentful and distrustful of the Jews …
… and sometimes formed mobs to attack the Jews and force them to convert or die … many converted,
but their conversions were regarded with suspicion because they had been forced.
These forced conversions were neither handled nor endorsed by the Catholic Church … and yet today
the impetus for them is laid solely at the feet of the Church.
Now … by the time Ferdinand and Isabella took power … the original conversos had been dead for
centuries … and their decedents were ethnically and culturally Jewish … while devout Catholics at the
same time. There were also still a lot of Jews and Muslims in Spain as well.
Because they were Catholic … these conversos were able to own land and businesses and began to
amass wealth. Unfortunately … they also gained the envy and resentment of the so-called “pure”
Catholics in Spain.
People began to spread rumors that the conversos were part of a huge Jewish plot to infiltrate and
destroy the nobility and the Church.
Accusations began to swirl and escalate until the king and queen finally asked Pope Sixtus IV to allow
the crown to set up an inquisition in Spain … which he did in 1478.
The court almost immediately became submerged under a deluge of accusations against the conversos
In his interview … Michael Coren also talked about the unstable environment in Spain at this time …

So … because of all the fear and unrest at the time … Spain decided … independently of the Catholic
Church … that the inquisition would be the tool used to ensure the loyalty of the conversos.
Remember … Spain and Portugal had just recently kicked the Muslim forces out of the Iberian
Peninsula during the Reconquista … but there were still a lot of Muslims … and Muslim converts to
Catholicism living in Spain.
The Spanish were suspicious of these Muslims … as well as of the large Jewish population … because
sometimes the Jews had fought with the Muslims against the Catholics … and endangered the stability
of the Spanish state.
What you see here … is that the inquisition was used by the state … Ferdinand and Isabella … to
promote Spanish loyalty through the religion of the state.
Interestingly though … even in this heyday of the supposedly dreadful Spanish Inquisition … there was
only a fraction of the executions all those modern … uninformed intellectuals tell us there were.
Here’s the point. The peak of the Spanish Inquisition was during Queen Isabella’s thirty year reign …
from 1474 to 1504.
And … Torquemada’s time as Grand Inquisitor mostly coincided with Queen Isabella’s reign. So …
under Isabella’s rule … about fifteen thousand people were convicted of heresy but repented … and
were accepted back into the Church.
Unfortunately … about two thousand people were convicted of heresy … and burned at the stake.
Now … am I saying that those two thousand don’t matter? No. Am I saying that it’s OK to burn people
who teach lies? No.

What I am saying … is that the lies you’ll hear from your ignorant … run-of-the-mill, anti-Catholic are
COMPLETELY unsubstantiated by the facts of the matter.
So … here’s some quick statistics we made … using those same numbers.
Under Queen Isabella … 12% of the people convicted … not the people tried but the people convicted
… were burned at the stake.
The other 88% of the people convicted of heresy … repented and were sent away free.
These numbers prove that the inquisition officials weren’t bloodthirsty devils … who were craving
violence and death.
What the percentages show … is that the Spanish Inquisition was much more interested in getting
Catholics to live out their faith … than in killing them.
And … you have to remember … life in the fifteenth century was filled with uncertainties regarding
personal safety, political upheaval and just having enough food to feed your family.
People were trying to survive in a period of time fraught with ignorance … deprivation … and fear of
conquest.
And … although the courts of inquisition helped hold some of that danger back … the inquisition
officials were still affected by their culture and society … which had a very black and white
understanding of survival … and justice.
Let’s listen again to Michael Coren … as he talks about the relationship between the Church … and the
European society She had built.
He explains why people who belong to the divinely founded Catholic Church … sometimes still do
very bad things …
**PAUSE FOR SOT**
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Here’s the point … the inquisition officials and state rulers were violent … but this begs the question
… are we any less violent today?
Back in the Middle Ages … violence was common and people often settled disagreements by killing
each other … and sometimes with little cause according to modern day standards. This was the
prevailing attitude of both monarchs and the common folk.
In the 20th and 21st centuries … however … there is just as violent an approach among leaders and
common people as there was 600 years ago.
Communist regimes … for example … executed over 100 million of their own citizens and still
counting … AND in the west … hundreds of millions of people have been killed through abortion and
euthanasia.
The question can fairly be asked – are we REALLY that much more advanced than those who abused
their inquisition powers? We could actually be looking back to the inquisitions as models of restraint
and how to mete out justice.
Now … in case these comparisons seem a bit far removed … let’s look at some much more proximate
examples.

Something a lot of people don’t know … is that while the Catholic inquisitions were going on … there
were also many Protestant inquisitions … although they didn’t use that name … that hunted down and
killed anyone who wouldn’t convert. A far different story than the Catholic Inquisitions.
These happened after the Protestant Rebellion in some of the German and Low countries.
There were also inquisitions in England under King Henry the eighth … and Queen Elizabeth the first.
After Henry made himself the supreme head of the church in England … and started FORCING
everyone to convert to Anglicanism … a lot of his subjects refused … so Henry simply taxed them …
or took all of their property and killed them.
It was like the Catholic inquisitions on steroids.
Even after Henry’s daughter … Elizabeth the first … took the throne … there were still a great many
Catholics secretly practicing their faith.
So … Elizabeth commanded her soldiers to seek out … arrest … torture and butcher the Catholics…
for such minor offenses as attending Mass, hiding a priest or refusing to attend Protestant services.
Here’s Michael Coren again … to give us a little better idea of the “religious tolerance” Catholics got
from “Good Queen Bess” …

You see … thousands of Catholic bishops … priests … nuns … and laymen were tortured and killed
because they did not profess England’s state religion.
These people were hunted down … and dragged before the Protestant courts to be tried for … quote
“heresy.”
The only thing was … their “crimes” of “heresy” were that they believed in the Catholic Faith … and
refused to follow Henry’s man-made religion.
There are a great many English martyrs … at least a few of their names should be familiar to you.
Veritable giants of the faith like St. Thomas More … who refused to trample on his Faith for Henry the
eighth’s nonsense … and St. Edmund Campion … a young priest who brought the sacraments to his
spiritual children until he was finally apprehended and slaughtered.
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So … let’s think about this for a second. Henry and Elizabeth told all non-Anglicans to convert or die.
The Catholic inquisitions told other CATHOLICS that … if they were going to call themselves
Catholic … they just had to live out their faith.
And yet … as the myth goes … Catholics are the evil ones and Queen Elizabeth will forever be
remembered as “Good Queen Bess”.
This makes absolutely NO SENSE … and it is the result of the same propaganda that made the Spanish
Inquisition remembered as “infamous”.

Alright … so … now we know that the popular ideas about the inquisitions have little or nothing to do
with reality. But … where did all these lies come from? Well … they came from several different
sources.
The first people who spread lies about the inquisitions were other European countries. Think about it
… Spain’s inquisition began in 1478.
Just fourteen years later … in 1492 … Christopher Columbus … who was sponsored by Isabella and
Ferdinand … discovered the New World … that was rich with all sorts of treasures.
As the Sixteenth Century dawned … Spain entered her Golden Age … a period of great wealth …
influence … prosperity … and military power.
All of the surrounding countries … who had similar desires of conquering the New World and
advancing their kingdoms … were both really jealous and really fearful of Spain’s rise to power.
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So … the newly minted Protestant countries of Germany and England … helped by the printing press
… began to wage a propaganda war against Spain … and thus created the Black Legend.
The Black Legend is a set of myths … basically saying that the Spanish were a superstitious people still
stuck in what is sometimes erroneously called the “Dark Ages”.
On his website … dedicated to the promotion of the faith … Catholic musician and apologist David
MacDonald presents an in-depth analysis of the inquisitions. At one point … he explains how the Black
Legend was developed and promoted … listen to this …

These early lies were continued in the mid-eighteen hundreds by Protestant writers … and we’ve
inherited these same myths and prejudices today … from grammar school history classes on up.
You see … the Protestant authors really only wanted to attack the Catholic Church and not Spain.
So … they took advantage of the myths and lies about the Spanish Inquisition … and just redirected
them from a mainly anti-Spanish focus … to an anti-Catholic one.
It eventually became chic for liberated … nose in the air… enlightened modern men … to hold in a
dignified horror … the base atrocities committed by fanatical papists … several hundred years earlier.

Of course now … after decades of having mainstream culture caving in to the myths and lies …
Muslims and Jews are loudly protesting the supposedly gross cruelties … committed against them
during the inquisition.
It’s ridiculous to hold onto all these lies about the inquisition … just like it’s ridiculous for people to
bash the Spanish for taking back their lands … that had been stolen by the Muslims.
I mean … after all … the poor Muslims had only “peacefully” conquered much of the Iberian
Peninsula … and “lovingly” slaughtered, burned and raped entire towns. Uh … the travesty of it all.

So … the next time you’re having lunch with coworkers … or holiday or family dinners with your anti-
Catholic family members …
… what are you going to say when someone brings up the inquisition?
Well … here’s a few points you’re going to want to remember:
Number 1 … There were a lot of LOCAL inquisitions … that tried baptized Catholics for grave sins
against their faith.
Number 2 … The inquisitions introduced a new … and much more just legal structure … that our own
court system actually borrowed from.
And point number 3 … The Spanish monarchy used the inquisition to protect its national security … at
a time when it was in great danger from Muslim aggression.
Remember … just like in Anglican England and Lutheran Germany … Catholic Spain saw religion as
inseparable from patriotism and loyalty to the crown.
Catholic monarchs saw religious belief as protecting the political stability of the country … because
they knew that their stability relied on the bedrock of natural law … established by GOD and delivered
to them by Christ and His Catholic Church.
As we’ve seen … it’s clear that there is a huge amount of misinformation that was purposefully spread
among the public … to twist popular opinion against the Catholic Church.

But you know the truth … and understand the arguments about the inquisitions.
You are now armed with the real facts needed to combat the nefarious assaults … that people love to
hurl against the Catholic Church.
The ultimate thing to take away from all this is that you should always cherish your faith … love your
Church … and never cease to work to spread Her message to the world. For the Faith is our pearl of
great price … our life … and our hope.

So now you know … thanks for watching this edition of CIA – Catholic Investigative Agency … I’m
Michael Voris …coat> so, let’s hit the streets.