The Witch Hunts (15th–18th century)

Before answering, it is necessary to state the objections in their strongest form, not their caricatured one. This is the only way to build a reply that will hold up against an intelligent interlocutor.

Objection 1 — "The Catholic Church burned millions of innocent women"

The most radical version of this thesis, spread by radical feminist movements since the late 19th century, asserts that nine million people — essentially women practising an ancient goddess religion — were massacred by a misogynistic and fanatical Church.^[1] In a more moderate version, taken up by many mainstream media outlets, the figure put forward is "several hundred thousand" or "millions." The Catholic Church is presented as the sole instigator of these persecutions, through its inquisitions and its clergy.

Objection 2 — "It is a medieval and specifically Catholic phenomenon"

The popular image associates witch trials with an obscurantist Middle Ages dominated by inquisitor monks. In this depiction, the stakes are the natural consequence of a Catholic cultural hegemony that smothered all freedom of thought and persecuted all deviance. The end of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment are said to have put an end to these abuses.

Objection 3 — "The Inquisition was the main driver of the executions"

The anti-clerical Black Legend makes the Inquisition — and the Spanish Inquisition in particular — the court responsible for the worst massacres. The image of the inquisitor monk torturing witches to death has become a widely disseminated cultural archetype.

Objection 4 — "It was a deliberate programme to exterminate female healers"

According to one academic variant, the witch hunts were a conscious and coordinated instrument for eliminating female medical culture — midwives, healers, herbalists — driven by a Church seeking to monopolise medicine.^[2] This is the thesis of Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in Witches, Midwives and Nurses (1972), which remains popular in certain feminist academic circles.

Objection 5 — "The Malleus Maleficarum represented the official doctrine of the Church"

The Malleus Maleficarum (1487) is said to have been approved by Pope Innocent VIII and constituted as an official guiding document for Catholic inquisitors. Its virulent misogyny and brutal judicial procedures would therefore reflect official Catholic doctrine on women and witchcraft.

Objection 6 — "These events prove the incompatibility between faith and reason"

In its most philosophical version, the witch hunts would constitute proof that belief in supernatural beings — demons, the diabolical pact, the sabbath — mechanically leads to persecutions. A faith that affirms the reality of the demon would have, as its practical horizon, nothing but judicial terror.

The invention of the figure

The figure of nine million victims does not stem from historical scholarship: it is a polemical invention extrapolated from a single region, amplified by systematic anti-Catholic activism. The German jurist Gottfried Christian Voigt had sketched it out at the end of the eighteenth century by projecting the data of a single city onto the whole of Europe.^[3] It was, however, the American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) who popularised it in Woman, Church and State (1893), a work of activism in which she claims that nine million women were burned by the Church for witchcraft.^[4] Her book is not a work of archival research: it is an ideological plea that uses this figure as a rhetorical weapon against Catholicism.

Murray and Gardner's witch-cult hypothesis

To Gage's thesis was added, in the twentieth century, the witch-cult hypothesis of the British Egyptologist Margaret Murray (1863–1963). In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), Murray argues that the trials actually targeted practitioners of an ancient pre-Christian fertility religion, organised into covens worshipping a "horned god".^[5] This thesis was taken up by Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), founder of Wicca in the 1940s, who coined the term "Burning Times" to designate the period of the trials and presented Wicca as an ancestral religion that had survived the stake.

The academic destruction of this thesis is complete and well documented. The historian Norman Cohn (1915–2007), in Europe's Inner Demons (1975), is one of the first to perform its systematic autopsy:

« Almost all of the evidence adduced by Murray is either fabricated, or misinterpreted, or selectively chosen to confirm a preconceived thesis. Her knowledge of medieval history is superficial, her method nonexistent. » — Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt, Basic Books, New York, 1975, p. 111^[6]

Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), acknowledges Murray's value as an intellectual stimulus but describes her thesis as "essentially groundless".^[7] Alan Macfarlane demonstrates in Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970) that English parish records systematically contradict the Murrayite postulates.^[8] No serious historian defends the witch-cult hypothesis today. It is cited in textbooks as the canonical example of historiography constructed backwards from a thesis.

What the archives actually say

The historiographical revolution of the 1970s–2000s changed everything. The American historian Brian P. Levack estimates the total number of executions for witchcraft in Europe, across the three centuries of the phenomenon, at around 45,000, out of roughly 110,000 trials.^[9] His revised third edition (2006) lowers previous estimates (~60,000) following a better analysis of German and French regional archives. The German historian Wolfgang Behringer, whose Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History (2004) offers the broadest perspective, places the figure at between 50,000 and 60,000 executions.^[10] Ronald Hutton offers a range of 40,000 to 50,000.^[11]

The gap between 9,000,000 (Gage, 1893) and 45,000 (Levack, 2006) is a factor of 200. This is not a marginal adjustment but the difference between reality and militant fiction. Those forty-five thousand victims remain a real and immense human tragedy — but correcting the figure is an imperative of truth that forbids history from serving ideological projects.

The Canon Episcopi: the official scepticism of the medieval Church

One of the great ironies of the subject is that the official medieval Catholic Church did not believe in the physical reality of witchcraft. The Canon Episcopi, a canonical text from the early tenth century (~906), is explicit and unambiguous:

« Certain wicked women, converted to Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantoms of demons, believe and affirm that they ride in the night, with Diana, goddess of the Gentiles, and an innumerable crowd of women, crossing great expanses of earth [...]. Wherefore priests must preach insistently to the people that these things are absolutely false, and that these illusions are sown in the minds of the faithful not by the divine Spirit, but by the evil spirit. » — Canon Episcopi, c. 906, transmitted by Regino of Prüm, De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis (c. 906), incorporated into the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (c. 1010, II, 179) and then into the Decretum Gratiani (~1140, C. 26, q. 5, c. 12)^[12]

This text — which holds canonical authority for five centuries — states that women who claim to fly at night suffer from demonic illusions, and that believing in the physical reality of these flights is an error. The majority of medieval theologians share this scepticism: the Archbishop of Lyon Agobard (ninth century), the canonist Burchard of Worms (tenth century), the great scholastic Thomas Aquinas himself, all carefully distinguish between diabolical seductions of the mind and real physical acts.^[13] It is precisely the questioning of this canonical scepticism — from the end of the fourteenth century onwards — that opens the way to the great hunts.

The fifteenth-century demonological rupture

The turning point comes between 1420 and 1490, under the effect of several converging factors. The gradual construction of the concept of the diabolical sabbath in the French and Swiss Alps — an organised nocturnal assembly, with an explicit pact with the devil, ritual infanticide, night flights, demonic sexual promiscuity — is at first not of Roman doctrinal origin: it is local and judicial, produced by trials conducted in peripheral alpine regions.^[14] The Swiss Dominican Johannes Nider (~1380–1438), in his Formicarius (~1437), describes sabbaths and witches in the Valais while constructing a new narrative demonology that breaks with the scepticism of the Canon Episcopi.^[15] The printing press then enables the rapid dissemination of demonological manuals and narratives on an unprecedented scale.

The real chronology: the peak from 1560 to 1630

The actual periodisation of the great hunts directly contradicts the medieval stereotype. The bulk of executions is concentrated in seventy years of the early modern period, at the time of the Reformation and the wars of religion, not in the High Middle Ages.

The heart of the great witch hunts belongs to the early modern period — the age of the Renaissance, the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, the wars of religion, and the absolutist state — not to the High Middle Ages. The image of the medieval monk burning witches is an anachronistic projection.

Heinrich Kramer: the expelled inquisitor

Heinrich Kramer (c. 1430–1505), a Dominican inquisitor for southern Germany, wrote the Malleus Maleficarum following a series of judicial setbacks. In 1485 he had conducted controversial trials in Innsbruck, whose methods were judged illegal and excessive by the local bishop Georg Golser, who expelled him from the diocese and described him as a "senile" person.^[16] In his manual, Kramer seeks to circumvent the opposition of the local ecclesiastical authorities who were hindering his investigations.

Jakob Sprenger, dean of the University of Cologne, appears on the title page from the 1519 edition — that is, after his death and thirty years after the first publication. Most modern historians consider his role in the writing to have been negligible or non-existent, and that his name was added to lend prestige to the work.^[17]

The bull Summis desiderantes affectibus: a document of jurisdiction misused

The papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (5 December 1484) is systematically presented, in anti-Catholic literature, as papal approval of the Malleus. This interpretation is inaccurate. The precise and limited subject of the bull is a jurisdictional conflict: local bishops (dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, Bremen) had refused to assist Kramer in his investigations into witchcraft in southern Germany. Pope Innocent VIII confirms his existing inquisitorial powers and orders the local authorities to cooperate. The bull contains no approval of doctrine on the nature of witchcraft, no reference to any manual, and no new judicial instruction.^[18]

Kramer incorporated this bull as a preface to the Malleus in order to create the impression of papal authorization for his entire work. Historians unanimously describe this move as deliberate manipulation. He carried out a similar fraud with a letter of approval from the Faculty of Theology of Cologne: at least two of the theologians whose signatures appear publicly disavowed having approved the work.^[19]

The condemnation of the Malleus in 1490

This point is crucial and systematically ignored in popular literature: the Malleus Maleficarum was condemned by the Roman Inquisition and by the Faculty of Theology of Cologne in 1490, only three to four years after its publication. The reasons given included judicial procedures contrary to canon law, doctrinal claims contradicting existing Catholic theology, and morally unacceptable methods.^[20]

« The Inquisitor Institor [Kramer] had so little approval from the Church that his local bishop caused him to be expelled from Innsbruck after judging his procedures illegal. » — Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004, p. 72^[21]

A manual never officially adopted

Despite its 28 editions before 1600 — a sign of its commercial success among judges and demonologists — the Malleus was never officially adopted or recommended by any authority of the Catholic Church. No council, bull, decree, or letter from a pope ratifies it as an official manual. Its influence is that of a private work, widely disseminated by the movable-type printing press, not of an ecclesiastical directive. Its very existence proves the opposite of the anti-Catholic thesis: had the Church wished to organize a witch hunt, it would not have condemned the principal manual in 1490.

Calvinist Geneva

One of the most decisive facts in refuting the objection of a purely Catholic witch-hunt is the denominational distribution of the victims. Calvin's Reformed Geneva burned more than twenty people for witchcraft between 1542 and 1546, followed by thirty-five additional executions between 1543 and 1563.^[22] Calvin himself did not oppose these trials: for him, witchcraft and heresy were two equivalent capital offences. The case of Geneva is not an isolated one: the Reformed Swiss cantons are among the regions proportionally hardest hit in Europe.

Protestant Scotland: A Dramatic Toll

Presbyterian Scotland is one of the most illuminating cases. Under the influence of John Knox's Presbyterianism and his theology of fear of the devil, about 4,000 to 6,000 people were accused of witchcraft between 1560 and 1720, with an execution rate estimated at between 50 and 67 per cent — among the highest in Europe.^[23] King James VI (the future James I of England), sovereign of the most rigidly Calvinist country in Europe, personally took part in the interrogations during the North Berwick trials (1590–1591) and published his own treatise on demonology in 1597, the Daemonologie.

"The witch-hunt in Scotland, relative to its population, was among the most murderous in Europe — and it had been an entirely Protestant country since the 1560s." — Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed., Pearson Education, Harlow, 2006, p. 216^[24]

Confessional Faith Is Not the Decisive Variable

The conclusion is inevitable: neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, as such, constitutes the explanatory variable of the witch-hunts. Entirely Catholic regions — Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland — saw very few executions. Entirely Protestant regions — Scotland, certain Lutheran territories — saw many. What matters is the judicial structure, the degree of centralisation and control of proceedings, the presence or absence of appeal mechanisms, and local social dynamics.

The disproportion is striking: the Holy Roman Empire, with some 15 million inhabitants, probably concentrated half of all European executions for witchcraft — some 20,000 to 25,000 deaths.^[25] This over-representation is explained by structural, not confessional, factors.

Judicial Fragmentation: Hundreds of Courts Without Oversight

The German Empire was not a state: it was a constellation of several hundred autonomous entities — principalities, bishoprics, free imperial cities, counties — each with its own justice system, without any central authority able to intervene in local proceedings. While the Spanish Inquisition allowed appeals to Madrid and the English Privy Council could step in to halt trials, every petty German lord could conduct his own trials with no outside scrutiny.

Wolfgang Behringer has shown how this system mechanically produces uncontrollable spirals: once a trial begins in a small jurisdiction, the absence of any structural brake allows an escalation that is only halted when the accused come to include members of influential families or persons close to the judge.^[26]

Bamberg and Würzburg: The Laboratories of the Worst

The prince-bishoprics of Bamberg and Würzburg offer the most extreme cases and, from an apologetic standpoint, the most instructive ones. In both cases, a prince-bishop combines religious and temporal power, with neither Roman oversight nor effective imperial control — which makes them de facto temporal states, governed by an ecclesiastical elite acting as feudal lords.

In Bamberg, between 1626 and 1631, Prince-Bishop Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim oversaw trials that led to the execution of 300 to 400 people — some sources give figures of up to 600.^[27] Among the victims: the burgomaster Johannes Junius, several members of the city council, and a nine-year-old boy. The machinery of denunciation under torture had devoured the local elite.

The farewell letter written by Junius to his daughter Veronica from his cell, on the eve of his execution (24 July 1628), remains one of the most moving primary documents of the early modern period. Innocent and clear-sighted, the burgomaster describes the machinery of forced confession:

"A hundred thousand good nights, my beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent I entered this prison, innocent I was tortured, innocent I must die. For whoever enters the witches' prison must become a witch, or else be tortured until he invents something in his head — and may God forgive him — and confesses it. [...] I tell you finally, my daughter, that you must, you absolutely must keep this secret, otherwise I would be tortured to the heart, and the jailers would be beheaded." — Johannes Junius, letter to his daughter Veronica, Bamberg, 24 July 1628^[28]

Junius died at the stake on 6 August 1628, with a rope around his neck — a privilege granted to shorten his suffering, on account of his rank. His letter, miraculously preserved, proves that the victims themselves saw with terrible clarity what the judges refused to see.

In Würzburg, during the same period, Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg oversaw the execution of about 300 people, including many children and members of the clergy.^[29] These two examples illustrate a decisive apologetic point: the worst massacres did not take place under the direct authority of Rome, but in temporal principalities where a bishop wielded absolute political power beyond any central Catholic control.

The Carolina and Systematic Torture

The imperial penal code Carolina (promulgated by Charles V in 1532) authorised torture in cases of "strong indications" of guilt.^[30] With no centralised mechanism of oversight, local judges applied this provision without restriction. Systematic torture produced confessions that implicated new defendants, creating chains of accusation that jurists of the time called crimen exceptum — an exceptional crime justifying exceptional procedures that suspend the ordinary guarantees of justice.

The Contreras-Henningsen Archives

The decisive turning point in understanding the role of the Spanish Inquisition comes from the quantitative work of Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen. Their systematic study of 44,674 cases tried by the Spanish Inquisition between 1540 and 1700 yields a decisive result: 826 executions in person and 778 convictions in effigy (of the absent or already dead).^[31] Over this period and this number of trials, the execution rate is under 2 % of the cases handled — a proportion that contrasts radically with the German and Scottish civil courts, where this rate sometimes reached 40 to 60 %.

Henry Kamen, in The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (4th ed., Yale University Press, 2014), confirms this picture and points out that the Spanish Inquisition, despite its real abuses, was structurally less murderous than most of its European civil counterparts.^[32]

Alonso de Salazar Frías and the End of the Basque Trials (1611–1614)

In 1609, a witchcraft panic broke out in Navarrese Basque Country around the villages of Zugarramurdi and Urdax. A first tribunal at Logroño resulted in an auto-da-fé on 7 November 1610. The Grand Inquisitor then charged Alonso de Salazar Frías with an apostolic visitation of the villages concerned (1611–1612).

Salazar's method is remarkable for its empirical rigour: he questions witnesses separately to detect inconsistencies, has the ointments supposedly used during the sabbaths chemically analysed (they turn out to be harmless), visits the sites of the alleged sabbaths, and carefully examines the testimony of children to test its credibility. At the end of an investigation covering 1,802 people presumed to be witches, his conclusion is unequivocal:

“I have not found any proof — nor even sufficient indications — that a single act of witchcraft has ever taken place in the villages I have visited, even among those who confessed to being witches.” — Alonso de Salazar Frías, report to Grand Inquisitor Bernardo de Sandoval, 1613, cited in Gustav Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, University of Nevada Press, Reno, 1980, p. 210^[33]

Salazar attributes the panic to the contagion of neighbouring French persecutions, to impassioned preaching, and to the collective imagination amplified by fear. His report constitutes one of the first documented examples of a methodical empirical investigation bringing a witch hunt to a halt.

The 1614 Instructions: A Prophylactic Reform

The Council of the Supreme Inquisition adopted Salazar's conclusions in its 1614 Instructions, which established: the requirement for independent corroborating evidence before any conviction, the prohibition on convicting on the sole testimony of other accused persons, severe restrictions on the use of torture, and a public silence imposed on discussions of witchcraft to prevent the contagion of panic.^[34]

These Instructions de facto suspended executions for witchcraft in Spanish territories, several decades before most European jurisdictions adopted similar positions. The lesson is clear: rigorous procedure saves lives. The gap between Spain and Germany does not lie in the religious confession of the two countries — both Catholic — but in the procedural structure of their judicial institutions.

Johann Weyer and the medical critique (1563)

The Flemish physician Johann Weyer (1515–1588), a disciple of Erasmus, published in 1563 De Praestigiis Daemonum et Incantationibus ac Veneficiis — the first systematic medical work to question the reality of the witch trials. Weyer does not deny the existence of demons; he argues that the women accused of witchcraft suffer from mental disorders (melancholy, senile madness) and that their confessions are the product of hallucinations or judicial coercion, not of real pacts with the devil.^[35] Although a Protestant, Weyer shows that the medical and legal critique of the witch-hunt is not an invention of the atheistic Enlightenment: it emerges in the very heart of the sixteenth century.

Friedrich von Spee and the Cautio Criminalis (1631)

The German Jesuit Friedrich von Spee (1591–1635) is the most remarkable figure of Catholic resistance to the witch-hunt. Confessor to the condemned in the principalities of Bamberg and Würzburg, he accompanied hundreds of women to their execution and became convinced of their innocence. This direct experience led him to write the Cautio Criminalis, seu de Processibus contra Sagas Liber (Rinteln, 1631), published anonymously.

His central argument is legal: the judicial procedures of the witch-hunt make any innocent outcome structurally impossible.

« If I myself were accused of witchcraft, I would be able to withstand the torture for only a short time, if our judges decided to subject me to it. I would confess to any crime [...]. I have accompanied more than fifty people to the stake, and I have not found a single one whose guilt I believed. » — Friedrich von Spee SJ, Cautio Criminalis, Rinteln, 1631, Question 17, translated from the English translation by Marcus Hellyer, University of Virginia Press, 2003, p. 93^[36]

The Cautio Criminalis had concrete results: it helped reduce accusations in several jurisdictions that read it, notably in Hanover, where Duke Johann Friedrich banned witch trials after reading it.^[37] It is today recognized as one of the first systematic pleas for the rights of the accused in the history of Western criminal law.

Cornelius Loos: suppressed internal resistance

Cornelius Loos (~1546–1595), a Flemish Catholic theologian, criticized the witch-hunt as early as 1592 in his work De Vera et Falsa Magia, denouncing the trials as unjust persecutions founded on illusions. He was forced to make a public retraction in Trier in 1593, but his testimony proves that critical Catholic voices existed in the very heart of the worst-affected regions — and that they were sometimes silenced by local authorities, not by Rome.^[38]

These three examples — Salazar, von Spee, Loos — show that resistance to the witch-hunt was not born of the atheistic Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It emerges in the very heart of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, carried by convinced Catholics who combat an aberrant practice in the name of authentic Catholic values: judicial prudence, respect for the person, rejection of torture, love of truth.

The real statistics by region

The majority of the victims of the witch trials were women: the overall proportion is estimated at 75–80 % women in most regional studies.^[39] This reality deserves serious analysis. But the explanatory framework is more complex than the thesis of a unified ideological program.

Several regions display radically different patterns:

• In Iceland, men account for 90 % of the accused — a peculiarity linked to a local demonology centred on nautical spells.
• In certain areas of the Holy Roman Empire (Normandy, Flanders, the northern German counties), men can make up 30 to 40 % of the accused.
• In tsarist Russia, men dominate the witch trials until the eighteenth century.
• In Finland and in certain Scandinavian counties, the trials first targeted men accused of harming agricultural and pastoral activities.^[40]

The female proportion varies fivefold from one region to another — which argues against a theory of unified, centralized institutional targeting.

The real misogyny of the Malleus

The misogynistic dimension is nevertheless real in the demonological literature of the period, and it is a direct Catholic failing that must not be minimized. The most famous passage of the Malleus Maleficarum is its troubling illustration:

« Why are women chiefly afflicted by diabolical superstition? [...] Because woman is more carnal than man [...]. The name of woman means failing faith: it comes from fe and minus, for she always has less faith. » — Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, Part I, Question 6, Speyer, 1487^[41]

This rhetoric is real and dangerous. It is not the ordinary Catholic doctrine on women — it belongs to an ancient misogynistic tradition that one individual amplifies to the utmost. But it helped make the accusation against vulnerable women plausible, and the Church bears real responsibility for not having stifled this culture more vigorously.

Socio-economic factors vs ideological program

Modern historians emphasize socio-economic factors to understand the feminization of the accusations. The most frequent victims are elderly women, often widows, poor and marginal — the most vulnerable members of communities under pressure.^[42] Neighbourhood tensions, property disputes, economic jealousies and inheritance conflicts play a greater role than any centralized ideological program.

The thesis of Ehrenreich and English that the trials specifically targeted midwives and healers has been systematically refuted by the archives: the overrepresentation of this occupational category among the victims is not confirmed by the court records. Most of the accused are elderly women with documented neighbourhood conflicts, not medical professionals.^[43]

Torture and the production of confessions

The heart of the drama is judicial, not primarily doctrinal. Torture, legal in nearly all Ancien Régime penal systems (Catholic and Protestant alike), drives the accused to confirm the expected narrative: a diabolical pact, a sabbath, harmful magic, the names of accomplices. It is not faith in itself that produces the stakes: it is a judicial procedure whose internal logic turns any accusation into an automatic conviction.

The spiral of denunciations

The exponential dynamic of the hunt can be explained mechanically. Under torture, the accused must name accomplices. Each name produces a new accused person who, in turn under torture, produces new names. In the trials of Bamberg and Würzburg, these chains can be documented across several generations of accusations, each one feeding the next.^[44] It is precisely the prohibition of this mechanism in the Spanish Instructions of 1614 — which forbid conviction on the sole testimony of other accused persons — that broke the spiral in Spanish territories.

An epistemologically closed system

The intellectual problem of the trials is as serious as the moral one. The judges believe they possess knowledge about the devil, the sabbath and harmful magic that renders the system impervious to any refutation: if the accused woman denies it, she is lying because she is a witch; if she confesses, she confirms the accusation; if she names accomplices, she proves the existence of a network; if material evidence is lacking, the devil has concealed it. Von Spee notes this vicious circle with a precision that remains legally relevant:

« If I accused these judges themselves of witchcraft, they would no doubt force me to confess before the end of the day. [...] No one is innocent who falls into their hands, for they proceed as if every person summoned were already guilty. » — Friedrich von Spee SJ, Cautio Criminalis, 1631, Question 51, translated from Marcus Hellyer, University of Virginia Press, 2003, p. 167^[45]

This sealed logic is not Christian discernment: it is a closed system in which the conclusion precedes the investigation. Authentic Catholic faith — grounded in the search for truth, respect for justice and charity toward the person — cannot but stand as its adversary.

John Paul II and the Day of Pardon (12 March 2000)

On 12 March 2000, in St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II presided over a Day of Pardon unprecedented in the history of the Church. Seven cardinals and bishops of the Curia presented in turn seven categories of historical wrongs committed by members of the Church, for which the Pope asked forgiveness from God and from humanity.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI), Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, presented the request for pardon for wrongs "in the service of the truth" — explicitly including the methods of intolerance and violence in the history of inquisitorial trials and religious repression:

« We ask forgiveness for the divisions, the violence, the coercion, the persecutions committed by some sons and daughters of the Church, sometimes in the name of the truth, and we implore the Lord to give all Christians a taste for unity, for forgiveness and for joyful witness. » — Day of Pardon, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, 12 March 2000^[46]

This act had been prepared by the document Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past (International Theological Commission, March 2000), which set out the theological nature of the démarche: it is a request for pardon for the faults of members of the Church, not an indictment of the Church herself or of her dogmas.^[47] The theological distinction is essential: members of the Church can betray the Gospel without the Gospel being invalidated. That is precisely the reason why Catholics such as Von Spee were able to resist the witch-hunt in the name of their faith.

What the Church acknowledges and what she refuses

The mature Catholic response holds two demands simultaneously.

What must be honestly acknowledged: judicial procedures that used torture to produce confessions, theologians who produced a dangerous misogynistic literature, ecclesiastical authorities who at times condoned or initiated collective panics, Christians who abandoned the demands of justice, truth and charity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is unambiguous on the principles:

« Moral or physical torture, used to extort confutions [...] is contrary to respect for the human person. » — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 2297-2298^[48]

What must not be accepted: the activist figures of millions of victims; the thesis of a deliberate institutional programme of the Catholic Church; the conflation of the Malleus Maleficarum with official Catholic doctrine; the presentation of the witch-hunt as an exclusively medieval and Catholic phenomenon; the forgetting that committed Catholics fought these abuses in the name of their faith.

The authentic Catholic doctrine on the demon

The final objection — the one claiming that any affirmation of the supernatural leads mechanically to persecution — deserves a direct answer. The Catholic Church affirms the reality of demons and possesses a rite of exorcism rigorously regulated. In the Catholic tradition, this affirmation is carefully distinguished from any judicial procedure.

The Catechism warns against divination, magic and esoteric practices as desires for power contrary to trust in God.^[49] But this warning is of a spiritual and pastoral order — it authorizes and justifies no judicial procedure, no torture, no execution. Affirming the reality of the demon and organising panic trials are not only two distinct things, but two opposite things: it is precisely authentic supernatural discernment that enables one to resist judicial panics, as Salazar Frías proved in 1611.

The authentic Catholic tradition of spiritual discernment — from Saint Ignatius of Loyola to the Rules for Discernment in the Spiritual Exercises — seeks truth with rigour and prudence, unmasks illusions, tests the spirits, and refuses to let collective fear become legal evidence.^[50] These are precisely the values that Kramer betrayed and that Von Spee defended.

• The bloody legend of the Spanish Inquisition — to delve deeper into the archival record of the Holy Office.
• Is the Church misogynistic? — the question of gender in the Catholic tradition.
• Catholic exorcism — authentic Catholic discernment of the devil, distinct from judicial panics.
• The wars of religion — the confessional context of early modern Europe.