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The boss is back, and this time he’s taking on the big daddy of Catholic misbehavior: the Spanish Inquisition. Our president, Chris Check, wraps up our three part series on inquisitions with a sober look at an iconic time in Catholic history. And if this piques your interest, take Chris’s class on the Inquisition at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. schoolofapologetics.com
Cy Kellett:
Trying to make sense of the Spanish Inquisition, Chris Check is next.
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host.
This is the third part of a three-part series where we’ve been discussing with our president, Chris Check, the inquisitions of the Catholic Church, the various inquisitions in the history of the Catholic Church. It all comes from a course that he has done for the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics. I highly recommend that you take that course, or at least check out the courses that are being offered there in the School of Apologetics. You can do that by visiting schoolofapologetics.com.
This time, we tackle the Spanish Inquisition. Frankly, when we Catholics talk about the Inquisition, or when anyone talks about the Inquisition, they’re usually talking about the Spanish Inquisition. It has produced millions of nightmares, hundreds of different movie scenes, and some really good literature, but is it based on the truth? Is all that based on the truth, or is it based on black legend? Here’s Chris Check to help us understand it.
Cy Kellett:
Chris Check, president of Catholic Answers, thank you for being with us again to talk about Inquisition. I’m going to just summarize. We’ve talked about the-
Chris Check:
How many people have we executed so far?
Cy Kellett:
While we’ve been doing these episodes?
Chris Check:
On the Inquisition.
Cy Kellett:
It hasn’t been more than one or two a day, has it?
Chris Check:
Yeah, it’s enough.
Cy Kellett:
I miss the marketing department, but they had it coming. That’s what they get for their heresies.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so we talk about the Inquisition in general, the Medieval Inquisition. There’s this thing called the Spanish Inquisition, which is what most people usually mean most of the time when they talk about the Inquisition. It turns out it’s not that easy to talk about. There’s a lot of twists and turns in the story of the Spanish Inquisition.
Chris Check:
It’s an involved story. I think, by the way, to your first point, it is the most discussed and best known. For one thing, it lasted the longest. Then Spain, of course, is the greatest empire of the modern period, so she’s well-known. Then Spain is the object of what we call black legend, originating in England first, and then also even in authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, for example. The popular understanding of the Inquisition, or the Spanish Inquisition, exists through these forms.
Cy Kellett:
There’s a way in which the whole history of the conflict between Spain and England, especially as it comes to the New World, as England leaves the Catholic communion, in the English-speaking world there develops, as you said, this black legend, and this is mostly what we know about the Inquisition. We know the legend.
Chris Check:
Right. The actual tale takes a little work to get our imaginations around. No country’s history summarizes easily, Cy. Spain’s is especially tangled. In particular, going back to the Roman period, you’ve got Romans, Visigoths, Carthaginians. Eventually, Arabs come in. We have the largest Jewish community in time in Europe, the largest Jewish community outside of the Holy Land. Then we have a period of seven centuries of war that we call the Reconquista, of Christians taking back, inch by inch, yard by yard, of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim invaders.
Cy Kellett:
I’ve got to stop you there, because I get my history from Time magazine and the Washington Post, and what actually happened was the Muslims were completely peaceful and innocent, and it was the evil Catholics who ended the Convivencia.
Chris Check:
Yeah, and we can get derailed on that particular topic. I’m going to recommend a book called The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise that addresses this question that everyone lived peacefully under Islamic rule. It’s false. They did not.
Chris Check:
I want to respect time here. There are two kinds of conflicts, and they very much overlap in the Venn diagram. One is a religious conflict, and you have three principal groups, Jews, Christians, and Muslims. There are certainly periods of, and you used the exact word, convivencia, where these three groups basically get along. There are even accounts of common prayer services. All of you Catholics who get exercised about when the Methodists and the Catholics get together and pray for something, and we shouldn’t be doing that, that’s false ecumenism, my goodness, please. But there are examples of common prayer services in the cases of drought, for example, or famine. But that said, this is always a relationship of unequals. It’s either Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule, or Muslims and Jews living under Christian rule. That’s the first dynamic.
Chris Check:
The second one that begins to take the center of the stage as the Reconquista progresses are just the civil conflicts among the princes of the Iberian Peninsula and Portugal. You have Castile. You have Aragon. You have Al-Andalus , which is what we call Muslim-occupied Spain, or what Muslims call it. But those civil conflicts start to get resolved with the great marriage, around 1480, of Ferdinand and Isabella, which is one of the great marriages of history and unites in a marriage, in the main, the Iberian Peninsula. That’s some quick background.
Cy Kellett:
Ferdinand and Isabella, for people in our part of the world, are the people who sent Christopher Columbus.
Chris Check:
It’s important that the discovery of the Americas is a Spanish event. I know it’s an Italian who had the courage and the brains and the imagination and, frankly, the genius to do it, but it’s Spain that pays for it and believed in it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Great. Sure. But all of this, this historic event of Spain being the discoverer, does have enormous consequences in the coming centuries, consequences we still live with that are felicitous for us even to this day.
Chris Check:
Well, I know. We’ve talked about Christopher Columbus. Spain doubles the size of the world. And boy, we’re getting to the end of the story here, but I’m going to give something away. Were it not for the Inquisition in Spain and the religious unity and cultural unity that was the consequence of this Inquisition, you could make the case that Spain would not have had it sufficiently together to lead the Age of Exploration in the way that she did.
Cy Kellett:
But my point was-
Chris Check:
We’re getting way ahead.
Cy Kellett:
It’s reasonable in this case because this is what we tend to know about Ferdinand and Isabella, but this is a small part of their story, actually, their discovery of America, at least from their perspective. Tell us about the beginnings, in 1492, I think, actually, of the inquisitions.
Chris Check:
Well, with the conquest of Grenada, right, in 1492, the Iberian Peninsula and Catholic Europe are made whole again. Now, in the middle episode of this trilogy, Cy, we talked about the Medieval Inquisition. The Medieval Inquisition was quite successful in Spain. It actually didn’t really have to operate that much in Spain. Spain wasn’t afflicted with heresy the way that southern France was.
Chris Check:
However, there was a thing, a kind of person in Spain, that if we don’t try to understand, none of this will make sense to us. This person is called a converso. The conversos were Jewish converts to Christianity, some sincere and some not sincere.
Chris Check:
Now, how did we get these? Well, in that civil strife that I described, and now we’re actually going to go back about a century before 1492, so into the 14th century, the 1300s, in that civil strife, as Christianity is becoming the dominant faith and political power in Spain during the Reconquista, and then there is this civil strife among the Christian princes of Spain, in the middle of all this civil strife, there is a reaction against the growing Jewish population. Why? Well, they do practice usury. They have a role in the slave trade. There are two objections there that both rich and poor Christians objected to. And then just, well, in fact, the jealousies and bigotries, let’s be very honest here, that happen when you’ve got this civil and religious conflict underway.
Chris Check:
I’m summarizing here, Cy. I apologize. It comes to a head in the form of a number of, how do you say this, pogroms, and there are Jews who are given a choice at the point of a sword. They can become Christians or they can die. Now, let’s be clear. The Church objects strongly to people being constrained to accept a baptism.
Cy Kellett:
The Lord objects strongly.
Chris Check:
Sure. He does.
Cy Kellett:
Clearly, yeah.
Chris Check:
Yes. But in fact, this did happen. This took place in the 14th century in Spain during all of this time of conflict. Okay, so that’s the first fact that people have to understand. Jews became Christians, some sincerely and some not sincerely. And there are so many of them, it’s hard to say which ones sincerely and which ones not.
Chris Check:
As time proceeds, conversos are offered the opportunity to return to the Jewish religion. Now, some take that offer, some do not. The ones who do not have a variety of motives. They now, given their Christian status, find themselves more successful in society, and that may in fact be part of it. They may feel unwelcome to return to the Jewish community because they or their ancestors abrogated.
Chris Check:
But again, summarizing very quickly, as time proceeds, towards the end of the 15th century, we have this body of people called conversos, and now by the end of the 15th century, the descendants of these conversos are also called conversos. It’s not clear who among them is a faithful Christian and who isn’t. Then going back to the point that we were underscoring in the very first episode of this trilogy, your faithfulness to the Christian religion-
Cy Kellett:
Has civil consequences.
Chris Check:
Thank you, Cy. Is bound up in the common good.
Cy Kellett:
Right. The civil ruler is concerned, are you really Christian or not?
Chris Check:
As Ferdinand and Isabella come into power, Muslims are resurgent. There’s an event, in fact, not in Spain, in Italy, in Otranto, around 1480, where a Turkish galley comes to the town of Otranto. Benedict went to visit this shrine when he was pope. They land at the town, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Christians are executed. You can see today the skulls there in the church honoring the martyrs.
Chris Check:
Ferdinand and Isabella are feeling a threat from insurgent Islam within and without Spain, and what they need is political unity. Mitigating against or fighting against political unity is a certain number of conversos, who now, in fact, are even in the church. There are priests, there are bishops who are conversos. Some of them are loyal subjects for the Crown and loyal Catholics, and others are, in fact, engaged in conspiracy against both.
Chris Check:
Are you with me so far?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. It’s a very complex situation, though.
Chris Check:
It is. Now you have this situation where the Crown needs to know who’s loyal and who is not. Baptism is not something that can be offered to demonstrate loyalty because these people are already baptized, so now you need some kind of a test. It is these set of circumstances that I’ve done such a ham-fisted job of describing that lead to the Inquisition in Spain.
Cy Kellett:
But my sense of the Inquisition, and correct me if I am wrong, this might be a naive sense, that at least part of the concern for having a test is that conversos were facing unjust persecution from people who would just torture them and kill them without a test.
Chris Check:
You are absolutely right. By the way, this goes back to what we were talking about in the second episode, where we wanted to distinguish between the people who in fact were Albigensians and those who were genuine Christians who were now victims of the same kind of vigilante or mob justice that now we’re finding in Spain, in Seville, for example.
Cy Kellett:
The civil authorities are concerned to prove, “This is a good Christian. Leave this person alone.” It’s part of what they want to do.
Chris Check:
In fact, Cy, and this is a fact of history, it’s in Henry Kamen, it’s in Stanley Payne, it’s in Edward Peters, who are the three really first-rate historians of the Inquisition in our time, the principal people calling for an inquisition in Spain were conversos, who wanted to demonstrate that they in fact were loyal Christians.
Cy Kellett:
Right. You go back, at the roots of all of this is, in fact, injustice against Jews, without question. We don’t want to elide that fact. But now you have a new thing called the converso-
Chris Check:
100 years later. What do you do?
Cy Kellett:
So the converso says, “Well, I don’t want to get just beaten up by the mob. How do I prove my faith?” and we end up with the Inquisition. Again, everything in Spain is an oversimplification because it’s the most complicated situation in the world.
Chris Check:
It is.
Cy Kellett:
But in general terms, I think there’s our outline.
Chris Check:
I got to say, Cy, if someone really wants to make an honest stab at getting his imagination around Spain, pick up the work of Stanley Payne. I don’t know if he’s retired or not. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But he has a book, and I’m not going to get it exactly right, but it’s something like An Unusual History of Spain or An Unorthodox History of Spain, something like that, and it’s quite good. He has a sound, balanced story, and I recommend, but also Henry Kamen and Edward Peters, not our Edward Peters, the canon lawyer, but Edward Peters the historian. They’re very good.
Cy Kellett:
All right, so help us, what happened in the Inquisition then? We see where the roots of it are. What happened?
Chris Check:
Right? Pope Sixtus IV, 1478, issues a bull, it’s called Exigit Sinceras Devotionis, calling for an inquisition in Spain. The monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, they say, “Well, you know what, we’re not going to use an inquisition first. Let’s try a period of apologetics first.” So they launch a Catholic Answers and try to spread catechesis and apologetics throughout Spain for a period of a year or two.
Cy Kellett:
By the strict letter of the law, they were disobeying the pope by going easy.
Chris Check:
They were saying, “We’re not going to do this yet.”
Cy Kellett:
Just yet. Okay, gotcha.
Chris Check:
Yeah, exactly. “Let’s see if we can just try some catechesis.” But no, things do heat up, Otranto is the good example, and civil unrest. Now they do have to enact the Inquisition. It’s in this atmosphere… Gosh, I’m looking at my notes here. I’ve got to cheat here and look on the camera.
Chris Check:
They take the manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich, and eventually it’s Tomas Torquemada, who gets a bad rap, but he takes it over and he applies the care of these medieval Dominicans. Most of the excesses that we see in the Spanish Inquisition take place in the initial period before Torquemada takes over. There are maybe about 2,000 executions in this period. The executions slow dramatically after Torquemada takes over. If we set aside the first year or so, and then take it into the 19th century, because it lasted a long time, it’s maybe something like two or three executions a year-
Cy Kellett:
But where’s the part where hundreds of thousands-
Chris Check:
Yeah, millions. Right, exactly. That the population wouldn’t even have supported.
Chris Check:
Then there are other myths here as well, Cy, that it was anti-Semitic. Well, Jews, as unbaptized persons, and Muslims, for example, don’t fall under the authority of an ecclesial court.
Cy Kellett:
There were anti-Jewish things, like being expelled from the country.
Chris Check:
Yeah, although that happened in France and it happened in England, not so much in Spain.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay, so it was actually milder in Spain. I didn’t know that.
Chris Check:
Yeah. As I said, largest Jewish community outside of Israel-
Cy Kellett:
I make that just by way of contrast, that the Inquisition, whatever violence it could do, it couldn’t do it against Jews because you can’t be a subject of the Inquisition if you’re Jewish.
Chris Check:
They weren’t subject to ecclesial courts, or Muslims were not, for that matter.
Chris Check:
Yeah, so that’s how it came to pass. It was administered with care. There’s a Sorbonne historian, Jean Dumont, I think is his name, and he makes the argument that if the Inquisition should be remembered for executions, which by the way, were carried out by the state, not by the Church, when someone was found guilty, same as with the Medieval Inquisition, or if it should be remembered for torture, it should be remembered that it was the exception among the secular courts of Europe in its mild or infrequent use of these things. That, of course, is not the impression, as we were talking about at the beginning here, that people have.
Chris Check:
It was the most advanced, we would say most modern, court of its age. There’s so many examples of people deliberately blaspheming or accusing themselves of heresy so that they could have their secular case, if they were being tried by a secular court, transferred to the courts of the Inquisition. The prisons were better. In many cases, people weren’t even put in prisons. They were just consigned to house arrest. Or they would say, “Cy, you can’t leave. You have to stay in Oceanside.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, which is not so bad, Oceanside-
Chris Check:
No. I know you go to the beach every day. Right.
Cy Kellett:
… but Seville or León ?
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so when does the black legend then get going? Let’s just make a moral judgment then. We wouldn’t be advocating a return to the Inquisition, but a reasonable understanding of the Inquisition places it in its time and place, where virtually every court on earth would have used torture in one way or another, execution would have been much more common. It’s just a different world. Certainly, there are insights that the Church and the world will have in the coming centuries that have not been had yet. You wouldn’t say, “Well, let’s do that again. Let’s have another Inquisition.” But what would you say as a moral judgment passed on the Inquisition?
Chris Check:
As we talked about, I know, earlier, in a sense we do have still an Inquisition. We just call it the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But you’re right, we’re not torturing people-
Cy Kellett:
The worst that’s likely to happen is a strongly worded letter. Literally, nothing else can happen. I guess you could lose your faculties at a Catholic university in some places.
Chris Check:
Well, and also worth saying… Actually, that would be quite good. There are probably a lot of people teaching at Catholic universities who should lose their faculties.
Chris Check:
We should also point out, Cy, that the trying and torturing and executing of heretics is not a Catholic preserve. The Catholic Church-
Cy Kellett:
Of course not.
Chris Check:
Calvinists did this in Geneva. It was done in England as well.
Chris Check:
The black legend really kicks in in the 19th century. There’s an edition in the 19th century by the Reverend Ingram Cobbin, which is a new edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. In his introduction to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which actually has nothing to do with the Spanish Inquisition, he describes these fantastic instruments of torture, like an iron maiden. You step across the line and it springs a trap, and then the female doll embraces you and you’re pierced with a thousand knives. And then Edgar Allen Poe, of course, as well, with Pit and the Pendulum.
Chris Check:
So that black legend really starts to kick in in the 19th century as we need to retell the story of how evil Philip II was in 1588, sending his armada to England with the hulls of the ships laden with the torture devices of… Interestingly, with respect to torture-
Cy Kellett:
The English Reformation was probably worse. I don’t know if you want to make a judgment like that, but when you think about some of the tortures inflicted during the English Reformation-
Chris Check:
Drawing and quartering, this is a uniquely English practice, of ripping somebody’s insides out while he’s still alive and watching it take place. This is something for which the English really take pride of place.
Chris Check:
But as far as torture goes, Torquemada says he largely… We talked about that strappado, dislocating the-
Cy Kellett:
Shoulders.
Chris Check:
… shoulders. He does away with that. The method of torture that was used in Spain infrequently, probably in about 2% of cases, if not less, was something akin to waterboarding. Now, by the way, I feel very strongly that waterboarding is torture. I’m just going on the record saying that, and I oppose it. I opposed its use by our government, and I think the Catholic Church does too. Nonetheless, we do see, as you say, a progression away from these kinds of tortures that were used throughout medieval Europe.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so I asked you how we make a moral assessment of this. The-
Chris Check:
Oh, I know, and I avoided the question.
Cy Kellett:
Was that intentional or-
Chris Check:
No.
Cy Kellett:
I thought you just didn’t want to-
Chris Check:
No, I got distracted because I think there was something else I wanted to underscore. Okay, ask the question again.
Cy Kellett:
In the light of what we can say, rejecting the black legend and all of that, but not trying to elide the truth in any way, what kind of moral judgment might we pass on the Inquisition, given the limits of our own abilities in that regard too?
Chris Check:
I think a couple of things for Catholics. One, first of all, if they’re going to talk about this, a little bit of a command of the history is going to make it easier for them to do. I know that’s not answering your question.
Chris Check:
The second thing, getting your imagination around the figures, so that when someone says to you hundreds of thousands were burned in an auto-da-fé. An auto-da-fé, by the way, was a Mass. Nobody was ever burned at one. An auto-da-fé was a Mass that brought repentant heretics back into the Church. It was an occasion of celebration, an act of faith.
Chris Check:
So getting some of those facts right, but also being able to say, look, as we talked about in the first episode, Cy, there was a time in human history when heresy was understood to be a threat to someone’s eternal salvation. If we’re going to make a moral judgment about this, you and I have to agree, whoever I am talking about this, that eternal damnation is the worst thing that’s going to happen to you, or could happen to you. There’s nothing worse that’s going to happen to you. Losing your arm is not as bad a thing as eternal damnation. Getting the chicken pox, not as bad.
Chris Check:
So if you can get someone to say, “I agree with you that eternal damnation is the worst thing that can happen to you, and it’s a very bad thing,” then you can say, “All right, I understand a civic institution, if you will, in this case an ecclesial institution, that wants to save people, those in heresy and those who might be influenced by them, from that fate. If there’s an excess of zeal that tips over into wickedness, I get where they’re starting from.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, I get the starting point. Right. It tips into wickedness. Almost every human endeavor taken with great passion tips into some kind of wickedness.
Chris Check:
Sure, excess.
Cy Kellett:
That’s just how we are. Again, I just don’t want to feel like we’re completely excusing, but you do want to make a judicious moral assessment. What if somebody wanted to take your class and be like, “I want to learn more about what this Chris Check guy says about the…”
Chris Check:
Schoolofapologetics.com.
Cy Kellett:
Schoolofapologetics.com.
Chris Check:
I had a lot of fun doing it. I want to give credit to John Vercillo and his crowd in the video department. They do superb work, and they built that beautiful set. My class or Tim’s or Trent’s or Jimmy’s, they’re really well-done. I’m so proud of our School of Apologetics-
Cy Kellett:
Right. It is good, really.
Chris Check:
… and the work that those guys are doing. Honestly, Donna Barrack in marketing is always offering some kind of a deal. There’s probably a deal right now. I don’t happen to know what it is. We’re always giving away the farm here.
Cy Kellett:
Well, right now could mean anything because people could watch this two years from now.
Chris Check:
That’s true.
Cy Kellett:
Whatever the deal is, I don’t… But there’s probably a deal two years from now too.
Chris Check:
If there isn’t a deal on this, wait seven days, because Donna and Kerry Beck, there’ll be offering one. But yeah, my class, you’ll get through it in… You could do it in a day if you wanted to. I think it’s 14 lessons, totaling maybe two hours, something like that. There’s a study guide and a quiz at the end of it. Our own operations officer, John Sorensen, took it, and he said it was brilliant.
Cy Kellett:
Really? Good for him. Where is he in the org chart in relation to you?
Chris Check:
Directly under.
Cy Kellett:
He’s directly under you. Okay.
Cy Kellett:
Chris Check, president of Catholic Answers, thank you very much for all of this conversation about the Inquisition. It’s really been a great conversation.
Chris Check:
God bless you, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
You too. Thank you.
Cy Kellett:
Certainly, with a topic as complicated as the Spanish Inquisition, in a short time, you’re just not going to be able to cover everything. So that’s somewhat impressionistic, what you’ll get from this video. But if you’d like more, you can take Chris’s course at schoolofapologetics.com, or take any other courses. Just check out the courses. Visit schoolofapologetics.com.
Cy Kellett:
If you have an idea for a future episode, maybe there’s something in Catholic history that you’d like some more clarification on… I’m sure we’ll get to Galileo one of these days. There’s a lot more always to do on the Crusades. If you have an idea, send it to radio@catholic.com.
Cy Kellett:
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Cy Kellett:
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Cy Kellett:
Thanks so much for joining us. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.