How to Answer the Objection from the Inquisition?

What the person really has in mind

When someone says "the Inquisition," he almost never has a precise fact in mind. He has an image in mind: a dark room, hoods, instruments of torture, mass burnings, an all-powerful Church terrorizing Europe for centuries. That image does not come from the archives; it comes from the Gothic novel, Romantic opera, Hollywood cinema, and four centuries of polemic. The American historian Edward Peters showed that "the Inquisition" in the singular, as a single omnipresent machine, is a constructed myth, distinct from the real historical inquisitions^[4].

The first mistake, then, would be to answer only the letter of the objection (the numbers) without touching its emotional engine (the image). Before citing a statistic, one must make clear that the interlocutor is defending a cinematic representation, not an archival dossier.

The trap of the singular

The weakness of the objection is in its first word: "the Inquisition". There was never only one. There were at least four distinct institutions, separated by centuries, countries, procedures, and repressive intensity:

• the medieval Inquisition (from 1231), loosely coordinated pontifical tribunals against Cathar and Waldensian heresy;
• the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834), created by the kings of Spain and largely controlled by the crown, not by Rome, with its American tribunals (Mexico, Lima, Cartagena);
• the Roman Inquisition, erected in 1542 and reorganized under the name of the Holy Office by the constitution Sapienti consilio of Saint Pius X (29 June 1908)^[5], which judged Galileo in 1633^[6];
• the Portuguese Inquisition (1536-1821), its tribunal in Goa and its jurisdiction over Brazil and Cape Verde.

Mixing these institutions together is like blaming "justice" for both inventing habeas corpus and organizing the Terror of 1793. Asking the interlocutor to make that distinction — "which one are you talking about?" — most often suffices, experience shows, to defuse the objection, because almost no one can answer. The detail of these four histories is laid out in the full dossier.

Rather than a catalogue of comebacks, one needs a method that works whatever exact form the objection takes. It has three movements, and they must come in order.

First step: acknowledge the real fault

Never begin with the numbers or the comparisons. The first word must be one of painful truth: yes, men were tortured and sent to the stake in the name of the faith; yes, this was a spiritual failure by Christians; yes, the Church today rejects it without reserve. This acknowledgement is not a tactical concession: it is the official position of the Church herself, which asked forgiveness for "the violence to which some of them had recourse in the service of truth" — words of John Paul II in the homily of the Day of Pardon^[7].

Refusing this first step condemns one to sounding like a denialist, and everything said afterward will be disqualified. Acknowledging it at once disarms aggression and gives the right, afterward, to correct exaggerations.

Second step: distinguish what is being conflated

Once the fault has been acknowledged, one has earned the right to distinguish. The objection works by fusing separate realities; the answer consists in unfolding them one by one:

• distinguish the four inquisitions, which had neither the same period, nor the same authority, nor the same intensity;
• distinguish the ecclesiastical tribunal (which judged) from the secular arm, that is, civil power (which executed);
• distinguish royal policy (the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 was a royal decree, not an inquisitorial sentence) from the action of the tribunals;
• distinguish the sins of members from the holiness of the Church as the Body of Christ.

These distinctions are not meant to evade responsibility; they are meant to locate it exactly. A system that hands a heretic over to the secular arm while knowing what awaits him bears full moral responsibility — but it did not "burn millions of people itself," and saying this precisely is not an excuse; it is honesty.

Third step: restore the scale

Only now, after acknowledging and distinguishing, does one have the right to put forward the figures — and they are devastating to the legend. All inquisitions combined, over six centuries, historians propose an order of magnitude of 6,500 to 10,000 executions — an estimate proposed on the basis of work on Spain and studies on the other tribunals, not an archival figure^[8]. This is tragic for every victim; it has nothing to do with the "millions" of propaganda. By comparison, the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), first a conflict between Catholics and Protestants that became a European war (interventions of Denmark, Sweden and then France), cost, according to historians' estimates, between 4.5 and 8 million lives in thirty years^[9].

Three figures, memorized once and for all, make it possible to hold almost any conversation. The table below contrasts the myth with the archives.

The figure of "millions" has no archival source. The famous intermediate figure — 31,912 burned for Spain — comes from a single author, Juan Antonio Llorente, a former secretary of the Inquisition turned anticlerical polemicist under Napoleon, whose extrapolations from very incomplete series have been dismantled one by one since the nineteenth century^[10]. Today, current archival estimates — Contreras-Henningsen, Bennassar, Kamen — retain a few thousand executions for Spain, far below Llorente's figures.

The decisive work is that of Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen (1986): by examining the reports sent by the Spanish tribunals to Madrid between 1540 and 1700, they counted 44,674 trials and only 826 executions in person^[11]. The French historian Bartolomé Bennassar independently reaches the same order of magnitude of 3,000 to 5,000 executions for the whole Spanish period^[12]. The contemporary reference, the British historian Henry Kamen, concludes his historical revision by judging that the Spanish Inquisition was neither the worst repressive system of early modern Europe, nor a particularly racist instrument, nor the ancestor of the twentieth-century camps: a religious tribunal whose stated aim caused real suffering, on a scale far below the image forged by Romantic historiography (summary of the thesis defended in The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale University Press, 4th ed., 2014^[13]).

The argument is all the stronger because this revision of the figures comes not from Catholic apologists: it comes from the archives themselves, examined by Contreras and Henningsen, Bennassar, then Kamen^{[14] [15] [16]}. When one relativizes the figures, one is not doing apologetics: one is following the state of scholarship.

After the method, here are short replies to the ready-made formulas heard most often. Each points back to the full dossier for the details.

"The Church killed millions of people"

No comparable figure exists in the archives: the worldwide order of magnitude, across all inquisitions and all centuries — 6,500 to 10,000 executions — is an estimate proposed on the basis of work on Spain (Contreras-Henningsen, Bennassar, Kamen) and studies on the other tribunals^[17]. Any other claim belongs to propaganda, not history.

"The Church burned people itself"

The ecclesiastical tribunal pronounced the sentence of heresy; it was the civil power — king, city, secular judge — that executed, according to the canonical principle ecclesia abhorret a sanguine ("the Church abhors blood"). This distinction is real, but it does not erase moral responsibility: a system that hands someone over to the stake while knowing what will follow participates in it. The right answer is not "that was not us"; it is to acknowledge that children of the Church participated in it through methods that the Catholic conscience today can no longer accept (the author's paraphrase, after Memory and Reconciliation, chap. 5, § c)^[18].

"Torture was systematic"

False. Inquisitorial torture was regulated (limited duration, physician required, mutilation forbidden) and statistically rare: about 2% of trials in the Spanish Inquisition^[19] — much less than in the civil justice systems of the same period. A confession under torture also had to be ratified freely in order to be valid. This does not make torture acceptable — the Catechism condemns it unambiguously^[20] — but it contradicts the image of a permanent torture chamber.

"What about Galileo?"

Galileo was not tortured, was not thrown into a dungeon, was not condemned to death: he was placed under house arrest and forced to abjure a thesis that he was presenting — wrongly, given the state of the evidence in 1633 — as physically demonstrated^[21]. The trial remains an ecclesial error, and the Church officially acknowledged it: John Paul II said so directly on 31 October 1992, after an eleven-year study commission^{[22] [23]}. Few institutions acknowledge their wrongs in this way, four centuries later.

"The Inquisition burned witches"

The truth is almost the reverse. About three quarters of those executed for witchcraft in Europe were executed in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire — Catholic as well as Protestant lands — outside any inquisitorial jurisdiction^{[24] [25]}. In Spain, the Inquisition actually slowed the witch hunts: as early as 1614, after the investigation of the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías, it required material evidence and almost stopped executing.

"I have come to the conclusion that there were neither witches nor bewitched persons in all these regions until people began to speak and write about them." (paraphrase; see the note for the wording of the text) — Alonso de Salazar Frías, Cuarta relación, March 1612^[26]

"What about the Jews?"

The Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction over Jews: it judged only baptized persons, the conversos suspected of secretly judaizing. The expulsion of 1492 was a royal decree, not an inquisitorial sentence. And the papacy, since the bull Sicut Judaeis (renewed by about twenty popes), formally forbade, under pain of excommunication, forced baptism, murder, spoliation, and the profanation of Jewish cemeteries^[27]; Innocent IV even expressly condemned accusations of ritual murder^[28]. None of this erases medieval anti-Judaism, but it forbids the story of a unilaterally persecuting Church — and rejects the anachronistic amalgam with the Shoah^[29].

"That proves we cannot trust the Church"

This is the most serious objection, and it must be handled in two steps. One: the faults are real and do not disappear with the figures. Two: they engage the responsibility of the Christians of that time and of the structures that produced them, but not the holiness of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. This is the classical distinction between the sins of the members and the holiness of the Church herself^[30]. The Church's holiness does not depend on the holiness of her members, but on the fidelity of Christ who sanctifies her. The same logic applies to abuse and the Crusades.

The best answer does more than defend itself: it turns the objection into an argument. For the most remarkable fact in this whole history is not that there were inquisitions — all civilizations have repressed dissent — but the gesture made by the Church in publicly asking forgiveness for this violence, for the faults of her children^[31].

This repentance had been prepared for a long time: as early as 1994, in Tertio Millennio Adveniente, John Paul II announced that the Church, as the Jubilee approached, had to acknowledge the faults of her children^[32]. On 12 March 2000, the first Sunday of Lent in the Jubilee, he presided in Saint Peter's Basilica over the Day of Pardon, the solemn penitential celebration of the Jubilee^[33].

Paraphrase of the 2nd intention, introduced by a representative of the Roman Curia: may each one, looking to Christ meek and humble of heart, recognize that even men of the Church have sometimes used, in the name of faith and in the duty of defending the truth, methods not in keeping with the Gospel (original English verified in the note). — Universal Prayer of the Day of Pardon, Saint Peter's Basilica, 12 March 2000^[34]

This gesture rests on serious doctrinal work, Memory and Reconciliation by the International Theological Commission (2000)^[35], prepared notably by the international symposium of historians gathered in Rome in October 1998 (proceedings: Borromeo ed., 2003^[36]), which distinguishes the faults of the Church's children from the holiness of the Church herself, and it denies no dogma. One can say this to the interlocutor without triumphalism: "The institution you accuse accused itself, publicly, in the year 2000."

The doctrinal end of religious coercion

This repentance is not a communication strategy: it extends a doctrinal decision of the Second Vatican Council. The declaration Dignitatis Humanae (1965) settles the question definitively.

"The human person has a right to religious freedom. [...] In religious matters no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own conscience, nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own conscience." — Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 2, 7 December 1965^[37]

And this doctrine is not a concession to the spirit of the age: it rediscovers the proper seed of the Gospel. "You do not know what spirit you are of," Jesus says to the disciples who wanted to call down fire from heaven on a hostile village (Luke 9:55, trans. from the Vulgate). "My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight" (John 18:36, Jerusalem Bible). Religious coercion was, in reality, foreign to the Gospel; rejecting it is a return to the source, not a rupture.

The last key is not an argument but an attitude. Faced with the objection from the Inquisition, two postures lose the conversation. The prosecutor, who collapses and concedes everything, validates the legend and betrays the victims by accepting that they be counted by the millions. The defense lawyer, who minimizes and excuses everything, looks like a fanatic and loses all credibility at the first statistic.

The right posture is that of the believing historian: he denies nothing, disguises nothing, but he also refuses to let archives be replaced by a cinematic story. He states the fault, he states the number, he states the forgiveness. This discipline — opening the archives, reading, distinguishing, rejecting both militant falsehood and pious blindness — is exactly the discipline the Church applied to herself when she opened the archives of the Holy Office to researchers in January 1998^[38]. It is also what makes history, far from ruining faith, surprisingly favorable to Catholicism once it is read seriously: see What if history is not what we have always been told? and Why Catholicism is the true religion.

If only one ready-to-use structure had to be retained, it would be this:

1. Acknowledge: "Yes, men were tortured and burned in the name of the faith, and this is a failure that the Church herself rejects."
2. Distinguish: "But there was not one Inquisition: there were several, over six centuries, and civil power carried out the executions."
3. Restore scale: "Historians propose 6,500 to 10,000 executions in total — an estimated order of magnitude, not an archival figure — rather than millions^[39]."
4. Turn the objection: "And the Church publicly asked forgiveness^[40], in the year 2000, for this history."

Acknowledge, distinguish, restore, turn: with this structure, the most feared objection in the anticlerical repertoire becomes an opportunity to show that faith can look its past in the face without denying or disguising it.

• The Black Legend of the Inquisition — the full historical dossier: four institutions, archives, figures, and the eight major objections treated one by one.
• The Bloody Legend of the Spanish Inquisition — the specialized study on Spain, Contreras-Henningsen, and Salazar Frias.
• The Crusades — the other major historical objection, to be handled with the same method.
• How to answer the objection from abuse? — the same distinction between the sins of members and the holiness of the Church.
• What if history is not what we have always been told? — reading Church history with method.