Topic:  Why did the Catholic Church participate in the Spanish Inquisition?

Source of this posting: Moderator response

Date originally posted: January 28, 2003

Moderator who originally posted this source: Father Phillip

Question:   I was talking to some people and they totally disaggreed with the Catholic religion and it made me SO mad. One of the reasons they said it was bad was beacuse we participated in the Spanish Inquisition. And I didn't have a defense on our ( the Catholics ) part. So my question was...Why did the Catholics participate in and approve of the Spanish Inquisition and commit murder if it is a mortal sin?

Answer: 

Thank you, Lauren, for your question to www.CatholicQandA.org!

While the specific issue of the Spanish Inquisition is troublesome indeed, you are, actually, raising a much broader and more profound problem, namely, why does God choose to work through limited, fallible human instruments and institutions? That's a really hard one! I think I will leave it for some other time. :-)

Let me try to make a couple of comments about the Spanish Inquisition. As with all historical issues, we really have to try hard to put ourselves into the mind-set of the people who were living at THAT time. Imposing our points-of-view on people who lived 400 years ago is not really fair!

It's like asking why Columbus took so long to get to the West Indies since we can fly in just a few hours. We have to respect the fact that people are very much the products of their own time. Columbus was very happy to have made it at all, and he probably didn't even conceive of the possibility of making the journey in hours rather than in weeks.

At the time of the Spanish Inquisition at least three big issues were coalescing to create a very difficult situation. First, Spain was in the throws of coming to terms with centuries of having been divided between Christians and Moslems. Though the Moslems had largely been driven out of Spain by the time the Inquisition got into full swing, the legacy of distrust and hate was very old. Second, at about the same time the Protestant Reformation was rocking much of northern Europe. Catholics in Spain did not want the Reformation to reach into Spain. Third, a theological assumption was deeply held by many leaders of the Catholic Church at that time: namely, that a person who did not believe as the Catholic Church believed would burn eternally in hell.

So, to understand the Catholic Church's participation in the Inquisition, we have to account -- more or less -- for these three issues. Some people supported the Inquisition as a way to bring some measure of political and cultural unity to Spain. By "getting rid" of any Moslems or Moslem sympathizers, these supporters of the Inquisition felt that they were doing a great service to their native land.

Other people supported the Inquisition because they were so afraid of the Protestant Reformation. These supporters of the Inquisition felt as though the Inquisition would spare Spain from being split apart on religious grounds. Such an outcome was particularly dangerous in the minds of this group of the Inquisition's supporters in light of the fact that Spain had already been split religiously for centuries between Catholics and Moslems; they did not want to see such a situation arise again between Catholics and Protestants.

The third group of people who supported the Inquisition were those who believed, for the most part most sincerely, that ANYTHING -- even burning a person alive -- was better than allowing that person to burn FOREVER in hell. The Inquistion was, in the opinion of many of these people, actually an act of harsh kindness -- tough love, we might call it today -- because it burned out the sin in the heretic's soul so that Catholic truth could fill that soul in the last moments before death.

Probably most of us today would be able to find other ways of accomplishing these goals -- if we even agree with them at all. Nevertheless, some 400 years ago in Spain,good people thought that the Inquistion was an appropriate solution to the problems confronting them. We don't have to like it or even support it. But we should try to understand it on it's own terms.

Hope this helps!

Blessings,
Father Phillip