Category Archives: Catholic Church

If you are a Trump voter who is sick of being portrayed as evil by the lying left, then you know exactly how I feel about the lies that are commonly believed about the Catholic Inquisition.

Excerpt from “Seven Lies About Catholic History” by Diane Moczar (pp. 95-96, altered slightly for clarity only) [TAN, 2012]:

Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V came to his thrones as a young man just as Luther was getting going nicely.  He was understandably anxious that the appalling disorder and loss of life caused by Protestants in the German lands not spread to his realm of Spain.  

Thus he had the Office of the Spanish Inquisition keeping a lookout for Protestant missionaries trying to infiltrate Spain from the north.  The very presence of this court seems to have had the desired effect: in the whole of the sixteenth century, the century of the Reformation, the Spanish Inquisition executed 182 heretics, or less than two per year.

By comparison the Protestant persecutions of Catholics in England, Ireland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in northern Europe, together with the wars fought between Catholics and Protestants on the European continent, took tens of thousands of lives.

BBC: De-mythologizing the Spanish Inquisition

This video is long, but it is VERY much worth watching!  What most people think they know about the Spanish Inquisition is based on anti-Catholic slander published by Protestants in the 16th c.  This so-called “Black Legend” has been repeated ever since. The Spanish Inquisition kept meticulous records which have now, finally, been opened up and really studied by serious historians.  The story they tell is very different from the “Black Legend.”

The last five minutes is particularly compelling. A fellow I believe is a Spanish historian explains why the myths about the Inquisition became so popular and pervasive. His insights speak loudly to our own political myths. One point he makes is that a myth is simple; it is easier to believe a simple lie than to wrap our minds around the complexities of reality. The other point is that we don’t like to face the ugliness within our own natures; it is more comfortable to project that ugliness on to some “other” who is sufficiently distant to be safely demonized.

Read more.

http://fisheaters.com/spanishinquisition.html

Catholic theologians used Catholic doctrine to condemn mistreatment of New World natives during the Age of Discovery. Their writings formed the basis of international law, a concept that did not exist at the time.

An excerpt from How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (p. 153) [Regnery, 2005] —

That injustices were committed in the conquest of the New World no serious person will deny, and priests at the time chronicled and condemned them.

But it is natural that we should wish to find some silver lining, some mitigating factor, amid the demographic tragedy that struck the peoples of the New World during the Age of Discovery.

And that silver lining was that the encounters between these peoples provided an especially opportune moment for moralists to discuss and develop the fundamental principles that must govern their interaction.

In this task they were aided enormously by the painstaking moral analysis of Catholic theologians teaching in Spanish universities.

As Hanke rightly concludes,

“The ideals which some Spaniards sought to put into practice as they opened up the New World will never lose their shining brightness as long as men believe that other peoples have a right to live, that just methods may be found for the conduct of relations between peoples, and that essentially all the peoples of the world are men.”

These are ideas with which the West has identified for centuries, and they come to us directly from the best of Catholic thought.

Thus do we have another pillar of Western civilization constructed by the Catholic Church.