Church tribunals for the detection and punishment of heresy · from Verona in 1184 to the last Spanish decree of 1834 · the stake reserved for those who would not recant.

The Inquisitions were judicial institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, set up to find, try, and punish those accused of heresy. The Church examined and sentenced; the state carried out the sentence. Over six centuries they took several forms, from the bishop’s court of the twelfth century to the royal tribunal of Spain and the permanent congregation of cardinals in Rome, which survives today under another name.

Background

Since the fourth century, when the empire made Christianity its religion, heresy had been treated as a crime against the state as well as a sin against the Church. Augustine, wearied by the Donatists, came to defend the use of force, reading the master’s word in the parable, “compel them to come in” (Luke 14:23), as warrant for coercion. In the twelfth century the spread of the Cathars in southern France and northern Italy, and of the Waldensians, who preached the Scriptures without license, alarmed the hierarchy. In 1184 Lucius III issued Ad abolendam at the Council of Verona, requiring bishops to search out heretics and hand the unrepentant to the secular power. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) then admonished rulers “to exterminate in the territories subject to their jurisdiction all heretics pointed out by the Church,” that is, to drive them out, on pain of excommunication (canon 3).

Development

The bishops proved slow and uneven inquisitors, so the papacy took the work into its own hands. From 1231 Gregory IX appointed papal inquisitors, chiefly Dominican and Franciscan friars, for France, Italy, and parts of Germany, answerable to Rome rather than to the local bishop. This was the medieval or papal Inquisition. Two centuries later Ferdinand and Isabella obtained from Sixtus IV the bull Exigit sincerae devotionis affectus (1478), creating a Spanish Inquisition under the crown. It held its first auto-da-fé at Seville on February 6, 1481, and in 1483 Tomás de Torquemada became its inquisitor general. Portugal followed in 1536. Finally, in the bull Licet ab initio of July 21, 1542, Paul III made a commission of cardinals in Rome the supreme tribunal of the faith for the whole Church: the Roman Inquisition, or Holy Office.

Methods

An inquisitor arriving in a district preached a sermon and proclaimed a period of grace, during which those who confessed and informed on others received lighter penances. Then came denunciations, summonses, and interrogation. The accused was presumed guilty, was rarely told the names of his accusers, and had little or no counsel. In the bull Ad extirpanda (May 15, 1252) Innocent IV authorized torture to extract confession, provided it stopped short of danger to life or limb. Sentences ranged from fasting, pilgrimage, and the wearing of yellow crosses or the penitential sanbenito, to confiscation of property and lifelong imprisonment. The obstinate and the relapsed were “relaxed” to the secular arm, which burned them, often at a public auto-da-fé. The Church did not itself pronounce the death sentence, but it knew the sentence that would follow.

The number of victims is disputed. Older Protestant writers relied on the figures of the Spanish historian Juan Antonio Llorente (1817), who counted more than thirty-one thousand burned in Spain alone; modern study of the surviving records has rejected them as exaggerated. Henningsen and Contreras found that of 44,674 trials in Spain between 1540 and 1700, 826 ended in execution in person, about 1.8 percent. Estimates for the whole life of the Spanish Inquisition run from about three thousand to several thousand executions, the greater part before 1530, and Andrea Del Col estimates some 1,250 death sentences by the Roman Inquisition in Italy. The figures are lower than legend, but they number real men and women, many of whom, as McCarthy notes, “were Christians trying to practice a simple biblical faith.”

Justification

Rome’s theologians defended the Inquisition by reasoning from the gravity of heresy. Thomas Aquinas argued that if counterfeiters are put to death, “it is a much graver matter to corrupt the faith which quickens the soul, than to forge money,” and so heretics deserve “not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death” (Summa Theologica II-II, q. 11, a. 3). When Luther denied it, Leo X condemned his proposition among the errors of Exsurge Domine (1520):

That heretics should be burned is contrary to the will of the Spirit.

Exsurge Domine, condemned proposition 33

Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa, who pressed Paul III to found the Roman Inquisition and later reigned as Paul IV, is reported to have said, “If our own father were a heretic, we would carry the faggots to burn him!” Yet the Lord who gave the parable of the feast also told His servants to let the tares grow with the wheat until the harvest (Matthew 13:29–30), rebuked the disciples who would call down fire on a Samaritan village (Luke 9:54–56), and declared, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36). “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4).

The Inquisition and the Reformation

The first martyrs of the Reformation were sent to the stake by an inquisition. On July 1, 1523, two Augustinian friars of Antwerp, Hendrik Vos and Jan van Essen, examined by the inquisitor Jacob van Hoogstraten and others, were burned in the marketplace at Brussels for holding Luther’s doctrine. Luther answered with his first hymn, “A New Song We Raise.” In On Secular Authority that same year he gave the evangelical principle: “Heresy is a spiritual thing; it cannot be struck down with steel, burnt with fire, or drowned in water.”

The Roman Inquisition of 1542 was aimed at the Protestant movement in Italy. Within weeks of its founding the preacher Bernardino Ochino and the scholar Peter Martyr Vermigli fled across the Alps, and others who stayed, among them Pietro Carnesecchi (1567) and Aonio Paleario (1570), were put to death. In Spain the small evangelical circles of Valladolid and Seville were destroyed in the autos-da-fé of 1559 and 1560; at Valladolid on May 21, 1559, the preacher Agustín de Cazalla was put to death and Antonio Herrezuelo burned alive. The Inquisition also enforced the Index of Prohibited Books, and its inquisitors licensed, or refused, every Bible in the common tongue. Spain, as Geisler and MacKenzie note, came to be called “the hammer of heretics” and “the sword of Rome.”

The Roman Inquisition was never abolished. Renamed the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908 and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965, it is today the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 2004 John Paul II acknowledged that the Church’s children must repent of the “intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of the truth” (Letter of June 15, 2004), but the canons of Trent that anathematized the gospel of the Reformers remain in force.

The Inquisitions

Roman Catholicism   The Counter-Reformation