Heretics and the Black Legend of the Inquisition

Before entering into institutions and figures, it is useful to keep in mind the long chronology, from the first decretals of the 12th century to the renaming of the Holy Office in 1965 and then 2022. None of the four inquisitorial institutions was born at a stroke; none disappeared at a stroke; and the last word — Dignitatis Humanae and the Day of Pardon — is neither a rupture nor a concession, but the doctrinal culmination of a slow internal clarification.

Three institutions, three histories, three geographies

The fundamental error of popular discourse is to bring together under a single name — the Inquisition — institutions distinct in date, tutelary authority, procedure, territory and repressive intensity. Henry Charles Lea, in his monumental A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1888), remains one of the first to have methodically distinguished the different inquisitorial systems^[9]. Edward Peters, a century later, formalised definitively the distinction between historical Inquisitions (in the plural, jurisdictional, dated, archived) and "The Inquisition" (in the singular, mythological, polemical, ideological)^[10].

The following table summarises the three major institutions and their main differences. It must be kept in mind throughout the reading: no sentence of the type "the Inquisition did X" has meaning unless one specifies which Inquisition, at what date, in what place.

In addition to these three major institutions, there are the Portuguese Inquisition (1536–1821), modelled on the Spanish one, and the colonial tribunals (Goa 1560, Lima 1570, Mexico 1571, Cartagena de Indias 1610) — each with its own dynamics.

Why the singular became a political trap

When Dutch, English and then French propaganda speaks of "the Inquisition" as a single character, it performs a precise rhetorical move: making the medieval institution bear the figures of the Spanish one, the Roman one the abuses of the medieval one, and all of them together the witch-hunting of the Germanic territories — Catholic as well as Protestant lands, and precisely outside Catholic inquisitorial jurisdiction^[11]. This is an effect of polemical fusion: one word becomes a myth, and the myth absorbs every bloodshed.

Three mechanisms that sustain the myth

The rhetorical tour de force of the Black Legend rests, in the secondary literature, on three very precise mechanisms. Naming them allows the reader to spot immediately when the narrative shifts from history to polemical fiction.

First, fusion: people say "the Inquisition" knowing that no reader will ask which one. Every grievance against every ecclesiastical jurisdiction in all of Europe over six centuries is lumped under the same name. Edgar Allan Poe, in The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), sets his inquisitorial dungeon in Toledo — in a fanciful iconography with no archival support.

Second, inflation: Llorente extrapolated blindly from local figures; pamphlets of the time inflated figures without citing a single archive. The pamphleteering method never varies — from a verified figure of a few dozen, a fantastic figure for the whole institution is deduced by a rule of three.

Finally, moral transfer: the real, documented, massive violence committed by other jurisdictions (the secular courts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Provençal parlements, the Roman quaestiones, French revolutionary justice) is turned against the Catholic Inquisition alone, as if it condensed every conceivable guilt — while the English Star Chamber, often cited in the same breath, itself pronounced no capital sentence^[12]. Judicial torture existed in every European jurisdiction of the 16th century, often with less regulation than Italian inquisitorial procedure; yet it is the latter alone that occupies common memory.

A persistent media asymmetry

The result can be seen in common culture: the word Inquisition often circulates there without geographical precision or dates, associated with victim figures lacking archival support, while the executions of Genevan tribunals under Calvin, of Swedish and Scottish witch-hunts or of French royal justice — more murderous in proportion to their jurisdiction — are rarely recalled there, and the infamous and corporal penalties of the English Star Chamber (which pronounced no capital sentence^[13]) are rarely distinguished there from burnings at the stake. This asymmetry of memory is precisely what serious historical work has sought to correct for forty years.

The archival revolution of 1998

An editorial event changes everything in 1998. John Paul II opens to research the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — those of the Holy Office and of the Index — with explicit authorisation to examine trials, sentences, instructions and correspondence of the Roman Inquisition^[14]. The international symposium L'Inquisizione, organised at the Vatican from 29 to 31 October 1998, brings together Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and secular historians around the same documents. The proceedings, published in 2003 in the volume coordinated by Agostino Borromeo, gather their contributions^[15].

Since 1998, historians have worked on these Roman holdings as on the Spanish State archives. The conclusions converge: the historical Inquisitions were infinitely less murderous than the Black Legend claimed, but far more juridically structured than was imagined. It is this double inversion that makes the modern dossier fascinating — and popular rumour obsolete.

Before the Inquisition: ordinary episcopal repression

Before 1231, heresy was judged locally, by the diocesan bishop or by the civil power. The Council of Verona in 1184, under Lucius III, published the decretal Ad abolendam diversarum haeresium pravitatem, which organised collaboration between bishop and secular arm against Cathars, Patarines, Humiliati and other heretical groups named explicitly^[16]. The Third Lateran Council (1179) had already called for a crusade against the Cathars; the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), under Innocent III, fixed the matrix of repression in its canon 3 Excommunicamus^[17]. At this stage, there was as yet no pontifical inquisitor: repression was diffuse, sometimes improvised, often dependent on the intensity of popular feeling — which, left to itself, could lynch.

Vergentis in senium (1199): heresy as lèse-majesté

Innocent III took a major theoretical step with the decretal Vergentis in senium (25 March 1199) addressed to the inhabitants of Viterbo: he assimilated heresy to the crime of divine lèse-majesté and therefore authorised confiscation of goods and civil penalisation, by analogy with the crimen laesae majestatis of Roman law^[18]. This juridical construction — heresy = treason against the Christian commonwealth — would provide the theoretical basis for all subsequent Inquisitions.

The creation of pontifical inquisitors (1231–1233)

It was Gregory IX who formally created the institution. The constitution Excommunicamus (February 1231) confirmed the arsenal of Lateran IV^[19]. Above all, the bull Ille humani generis (April 1233 — 20 April according to Haskins, who addresses it to the bishops of France; 22 April according to Lea, vol. I, p. 301 n.) delegated to the Dominican Order pontifical powers of investigation; a few years later, the Franciscans would be associated^[20].

Conrad of Marburg and Robert le Bougre: the first abuses

The first inquisitors appointed immediately illustrate the two structural dangers of the institution: excessive zeal and the violence of heretics against those who judged them.

Conrad of Marburg (c. 1180–1233), a German priest, was appointed by Gregory IX in 1231 as inquisitor for the Holy Roman Empire. His procedure was expeditious — without real hearing or possible recourse. Count Henry III of Sayn, an accused nobleman, was acquitted at Mainz in 1233. The resistance of the Rhenish bishops, notably that of the Archbishop of Mainz, led to a collective protest to Rome; Conrad was assassinated on 30 July 1233 on the road to Marburg, shortly before Gregory IX decided to moderate his powers^[21].

Robert le Bougre, Dominican inquisitor for the kingdom of France from 1233, followed the same logic. He had more than 180 people burned in a single day at Mont-Aimé (Champagne) on 13 May 1239^[22]. The papacy finally deposed him for abuse — on a disputed date (1239 according to Lea and Tanon, c. 1241 according to Frederichs, at least 1244–1245 according to Haskins) — and he himself would be condemned to perpetual imprisonment^[23]. These two cases show that the pontifical Inquisition, from its beginnings, monitored its own excesses and could sanction its own inquisitors: this is an important procedural trait, largely ignored by the Black Legend.

The Council of Toulouse (1229) and the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade

The medieval Inquisition was born in the immediate wake of the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), which concluded with the Treaty of Meaux-Paris (1229). The provincial Council of Toulouse (November 1229) prescribed, in its canon 1, systematic episcopal inquiry in parishes^[24]. At this stage, the Inquisition was therefore not an instrument of conquest: it was the post-conflict instrument of religious pacification, where the crusade — bloody — had left a traumatised Languedoc.

Bernard Gui, Inquisitor of Toulouse (1307–1323)

Bernard Gui (1261/62–1331), Dominican inquisitor at Toulouse between 1307 and 1323, has become the black archetype of the medieval inquisitor — notably in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. Yet his archives, preserved almost entirely, give a radically different image: a meticulous jurist, whose Liber sententiarum preserves 940 acts of justice concerning 938 individuals, i.e. 636 persons tried (Pales-Gobilliard, vol. I, pp. 30 and 33)^[25] — with 43 handings over to the secular court (plus 3 condemnations "if they were alive"), i.e. 4.6% of acts and 6.8% of persons.

Bernard Gui is also the author of the Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (c. 1323–1324), an investigative manual for inquisitors. Its objective is explicit:

"The end of the office of the Inquisition is that heresy be destroyed." — Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, Book V, c. 1323^[26]

In substance — a paraphrase, presented as such —: heresy, in his view, can only be destroyed if heretics are destroyed, on two conditions: either they are converted to the true Catholic faith, or, delivered to the secular arm, they are consumed by bodily flames.

This passage is troubling for the modern reader. It must be read for what it is: the medieval doctrine of religious coercion, shared by all Christian jurisdictions — Catholic, Orthodox, later Protestant — and which Vatican II would definitively reject with Dignitatis Humanae (1965)^[27]. Historical rigour consists in citing it plainly, without hiding it.

Nicolau Eymerich and the Directorium Inquisitorum (1376)

The second great medieval inquisitorial manual is the Directorium Inquisitorum of Nicolau Eymerich (c. 1316–1399), Catalan Dominican, Inquisitor General of Aragon. Completed around 1376, the text was re-edited in 1578 by Francisco Peña, Spanish theologian, with juridical commentaries that made it the European reference for two centuries^[28].

In it Eymerich formalises the medieval juridical principle — borrowed from late Roman law — according to which torture is only a probatory substitute, to be used only for want of other proofs^[29]. That is to say, from the 14th century onward, the severest medieval manual presents torture as a framed juridical recourse — while circumventing the prohibition on repeating it. Again, this does not make anything moral — torture remains objectively contrary to human dignity — but it contradicts the popular imagery of an inquisitor who tortures for pleasure and systematically.

The tempus gratiae: a delay for self-denunciation

When the inquisitor arrived in a parish, his first gesture was not to arrest but to preach. He summoned the whole population to church, expounded Catholic doctrine, indicated the outward signs of Cathar or Waldensian heresy — and opened a tempus gratiae (time of grace) of fifteen to thirty days during which anyone who spontaneously denounced themselves saw their penalty considerably reduced, often to a simple penance (fasting, pilgrimage, wearing a yellow cloth cross on the mantle)^[30].

This procedure, documented by the preserved Languedoc registers^[31], contradicts the popular image of a nocturnal and arbitrary manhunt. The period of grace even became, in some regions of Languedoc, an instrument of social de-escalation: it made it possible to purge rumours and denunciations without formal trial.

The procedure proper

Once the tempus gratiae expired, formal investigation opened. Inquisitorial procedure, inherited from 12th-century Romano-canonical law, comprised six stages:

1. Denunciation or public rumour (fama);
2. Preliminary investigation by the inquisitor, who gathers testimonies;
3. Citation and interrogation of the accused, with written record;
4. Defence — the accused drew up the list of his personal enemies, and any testimony coming from a declared enemy was discarded; on the other hand, he had no guaranteed advocate: the decretal of Innocent III forbids advocates to assist heretics, the councils of Valence (1248) and Albi (1254) confirm it, Bernard Gui treats the advocate of a heretic as a fautor, and Eymerich — who admits the right in theory — authorises prosecuting the advocate^[32];
5. Sentence pronounced publicly (sermo generalis);
6. Penalty: absolution, penance, prison, wearing yellow crosses sewn on the garment (the local equivalent of the later Spanish sanbenito), confiscation, or handing over to the secular arm in cases of obstinate heresy^[33].

The anonymisation of witnesses — one of the severest reproaches levelled at the Inquisition — is attested. But it is explained by the real fear of reprisals: the inquisitor Saint Peter of Verona was killed on 6 April 1252 by a paid assassin — not by the perfects themselves, who professed non-violence^[34]. As compensation, the defence could ask the accused to draw up the list of his personal enemies, and any testimony coming from a declared enemy was discarded.

Ad extirpanda (1252): torture, its limits, its reality

Torture officially entered the repression of heresy with the bull Ad extirpanda of Innocent IV (15 May 1252). The text is addressed to the podestà and the civil authorities — not to the inquisitors — and it is explicit:

"Let the podestà or rector be bound to constrain all heretics he has captured — without mutilation of limb or danger of death, as true brigands and murderers of souls, thieves of the sacraments of God and of the Christian faith — to expressly confess their errors and to denounce the other heretics they know." — Innocent IV, bull Ad extirpanda, 15 May 1252, law 25^[35]

Three things must be noted. First, torture was not invented by the Inquisition: it has existed since Roman antiquity and the quaestio is an ordinary judicial procedure in 13th-century civil tribunals, notably since the rediscovery of Justinian's Digest at the universities of Bologna and Padua. The Inquisition borrowed it from the civil law of its time. Second, the text fixes only two limits, addressed to the civil power: no mutilation, no danger of death — citra membri diminutionem et mortis periculum. Finally — a point often distorted — the bull knows neither ratification within twenty-four hours, nor a maximum duration of one hour, nor the mandatory presence of a physician: the later rule of an interval of at least twenty-four hours between torture and confirmation of the confession goes in the other direction, and it was most often ignored (commonly disregarded)^[36].

Recognising these limits does not rehabilitate torture. The Catechism of the Catholic Church today condemns it without appeal:

"In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law on torture. Alongside these regrettable facts, the Church has always taught the duty of clemency and mercy; she forbade clerics to shed blood." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2298^[37]

The express condemnation of torture — "contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity" — is found in the preceding no. 2297; the formula "contrary to the moral law" there targets amputations, mutilations and sterilizations. We therefore have, in the same magisterial document, both the honest recognition of a past practice and its unambiguous doctrinal rejection — exactly what historical rigour requires.

The real penalties: pyramid of sentences

Popular imagery retains only the stake. The archives tell a very different story. Of the 636 persons tried by Bernard Gui between 1308 and 1323, table no. 1 of the Pales-Gobilliard edition (vol. II, p. 1646) breaks down the sentences as follows^[38]:

• 43 handings over to the secular court (+ 3 "if they were alive"), i.e. 6.8% of persons;
• 66 exhumations followed by burning (posthumous sentences);
• 277 condemnations to the Wall (imprisonment) + 30 to the strict Wall;
• 80 bearers of single crosses + 55 of double crosses (yellow crosses sewn on the garment — the local equivalent of what Spain would later call the sanbenito);
• 135 remissions of the crosses;
• 139 releases from the Wall (liberations from prison);
• 17 condemnations to the Wall "if they were alive" (posthumous);
• 40 fugitives tried in absentia;
• 22 houses destroyed;
• 1 Talmud burned;
• 1 reconciliation (Cordes).

The central figure — 6.8% handings over to the secular arm — should open eyes. The stake was the extreme and minority sanction, reserved for obstinate or relapsed heretics. The overwhelming majority of inquisitorial sentences were penitential penalties: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, wearing a distinctive sign, supervised prison.

Creation by the Catholic Monarchs (1478)

The Spanish Inquisition is undoubtedly the best known, the longest and the most controversial. It was created by the bull Exigit sincerae devotionis affectus of Sixtus IV, dated 1 November 1478, at the request of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon^[39]. But — a capital point — this bull entrusted to the Catholic Monarchs the power to appoint the inquisitors themselves. From the outset, the Spanish Inquisition was therefore a royal tribunal, with pontifical authorisation but under civil direction.

This peculiarity explains three things:

• Madrid's autonomy from Rome, a source of constant conflicts for three centuries (notably under Paul III in 1538 — and under Pius V, who obtained in 1567 the transfer to Rome of the Carranza trial).
• The strongly political dimension of trials, especially in the 16th century when the Inquisition became an instrument of the Catholic monarchy against any ideological deviance.
• The initial specialisation against the conversos, i.e. Jews converted to Christianity accused of secretly continuing to practise Judaism.

Tomás de Torquemada and the Instructions (1484)

Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498), Dominican confessor of Isabella, became Grand Inquisitor in 1483. He published in 1484 and then 1485, 1488 and 1498 the Instrucciones that structured the institution^[40]. This name has become synonymous with absolute cruelty in the Black Legend. What do the archives say?

Henry Kamen, in The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (4th ed., Yale, 2014), estimates at about 2,000 the executions of the first decades, up to around 1530 — for the most part in the initial phase, including Torquemada's mandate as Grand Inquisitor (1483–1498)^[41]. This is very far from Llorente's legendary figures (8,800 burned alive in 18 years), and it remains dramatically high.

The study that changed everything: Contreras-Henningsen (1986)

The scientific turning point on the Spanish Inquisition came from the article by Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen published in 1986. The two researchers exploited the relaciones de causas (case reports sent by local tribunals to the Council of the Inquisition in Madrid). For the period 1540–1700, they recensused 44,674 trials of which only 826 executions in person and 778 executions in effigy (absent, fugitive or already dead condemned of whom a statue was burned)^[42].

Contreras and Henningsen stress that these 826 personal executions represent barely 1.8% of the accused^[43] — a finding that contradicts the popular image of an omnipresent Inquisition burning on a large scale.

Extrapolating to the whole duration of the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834), Kamen writes that at most three thousand persons suffered death in the entire history of the tribunal ("a maximum of three thousand persons may have suffered death during the entire history of the tribunal", 4th ed., 2014, p. 253)^[44]. The 3,000–5,000 range is that of Contreras (1994) and, for 4,200–5,250, of García Cárcel; Bartolomé Bennassar retains a comparable order of magnitude in his Inquisition espagnole, XVe-XIXe siècle (1979)^[45].

The auto-da-fé: penitential liturgy, not spectacle of burning

The word auto-da-fé — literally act of faith in Portuguese and Spanish — denotes, in modern popular language, a collective burning. In precise historical language, it denotes the public ceremony of proclamation of sentences^[46]. Most autos-da-fé did not end with a burning: they were the occasion to proclaim publicly abjurations, penances, prison terms or confiscations. The actual burning, when it took place, occurred outside the city, on civil ground (the quemadero), and was carried out by the secular arm, not by the inquisitor.

The great auto-da-fé painted by Francisco Rizi on the Plaza Mayor of Madrid on 30 June 1680 is undoubtedly the most famous — 118 accused presented, of whom about twenty were condemned to the stake, the others receiving penances, prison terms or non-capital afflictive penalties^[47].

The moriscos and the end of the 16th century

The second great wave of trials targeted the moriscos — Muslims baptised after the forced conversions of 1502 (Castile) and 1525 (Aragon). The moriscos often practised their faith in secret, which earned them trials for apostasy. Their massive expulsion from Spain under Philip III (1609–1614) — about 300,000 people displaced to the Maghreb — however falls under royal policy, not the Inquisition stricto sensu: the decision was taken by the Council of State. Opposition came from the Aragonese and Valencian nobility — for whom the moriscos constituted an essential part of the agricultural workforce — while the Valencian Dominican Jaime Bleda and Archbishop Juan de Ribera pushed for expulsion^[48].

Paul III and Licet ab initio (21 July 1542)

Faced with the expansion of Protestantism in Italy — notably in Naples, Lucca, Modena and the Venetian Friuli — Paul III created by the bull Licet ab initio of 21 July 1542 the Roman and Universal Congregation of the Inquisition, or Holy Office^[49]. Six cardinals (including Gian Pietro Carafa, future Paul IV) were appointed inquisitors general with direct jurisdiction over the Italian states and territories subject to Rome.

The case of Giordano Bruno (17 February 1600) — the only famous burning

Before Galileo, the Roman Inquisition had another resounding trial: that of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), defrocked Dominican, itinerant philosopher between Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, London, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstedt and Frankfurt. Arrested in Venice in May 1592, transferred to Rome in February 1593, he was tried for seven years by the Holy Office. On 17 February 1600, he was burned on the Campo de' Fiori in Rome^[50].

The Romantic legend made him a martyr of science. The dossier edited by Luigi Firpo (1915–1989) for nearly forty years, published posthumously in 1993 — after the rediscovery of the Sommario del processo in the early 1940s — tells another story^[51]. Bruno was not condemned for heliocentrism as an astronomical thesis — none of the eight counts of the Sommario (Firpo-Quaglioni edition, 1993) targets the Copernican system as such — but for a body of doctrinal theses, some of them cosmological: denial of the Trinity, denial of the divinity of Christ and of the Incarnation, denial of the virginity of Mary, denial of transubstantiation and of the Mass, plurality and eternity of worlds, metempsychosis, magic and divination^[52]. Copernicanism was discussed at the trial and cosmology is therefore part of the dossier; but every censure concerns doctrinal implications, not a scientific discovery — which still does not make him a "martyr of science" in the modern sense.

This does not make the stake moral — capital punishment for heresy has been held inadmissible since the revision of the Catechism (no. 2267, 2018^[53]). It does however contradict the myth of a Bruno "martyr of free scientific thought", which has served Italian anticlericalism since the monument erected by Ettore Ferrari on the Campo de' Fiori in 1889.

The Galileo case (1633) — what really happened

No trial of the Roman Inquisition is better known — and more distorted — than that of Galileo Galilei. Here are the facts, as established by the pontifical study commission (1981–1992) instituted by John Paul II^[54].

First, Galileo was not tortured, contrary to a tenacious legendary account. The sentence's phrase of 22 June 1633 formally mentions "rigoroso essame", but the trial records show it was a juridical formula of threat — territio verbalis (verbal intimidation) — required by 17th-century procedure, and that no physical torture was applied^[55]. For a man of 69, his health was fragile; he was kept in broadly clement conditions (at the Tuscan ambassador's residence in Rome, then in ecclesiastical residences).

Second, the sentence declares him "vehementemente sospetto d'heresia, cioè d'haver tenuto e creduto dottrina falsa e contraria alle Sacre e divine Scritture" — vehemently suspect of heresy, i.e. of having held and believed a false doctrine contrary to the Holy and divine Scriptures — judging that it could be defended "per probabile" after its condemnation^[56]. The trial therefore does concern heliocentrism held as a true doctrine, and not a mere mathematical hypothesis: Galileo claimed to have proved what, in the state of evidence in 1633, he had only made probable (stellar parallax would not be observed until 1838 by Bessel, providing the mechanical proof of the Earth's movement).

Finally, the sentence pronounces: "Ti condaniamo al carcere formale" — we condemn you to formal prison — a penalty immediately commuted to house arrest: Galileo lived out his life under house arrest at Arcetri, near Florence, where he continued his research. But he could neither receive visitors freely nor publish: the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze (1638), which founded modern mechanics, appeared at Leiden with Elzevir because the Inquisition had forbidden any publication of his works^[57].

This does not rehabilitate the trial. John Paul II recognised it without evasion on 31 October 1992:

"Starting with the Enlightenment and continuing to our own day, the Galileo case has been a sort of myth, in which the image fabricated of the events was quite far from reality. [...] The error of the theologians of that time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our knowledge of the structure of the physical world was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Scripture." — Saint John Paul II, address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 31 October 1992, § 10^[58]

The Galileo affair is therefore, for the Catholic conscience, a real case of ecclesial error — but not a case of torture or execution: the formal prison pronounced by the sentence was commuted to house arrest.

The Roman Inquisition: a moderate executive record

Andrea Del Col, in L'Inquisizione in Italia (Mondadori, 2010, pp. 779–780), recensuses about 1,250 death sentences for 51,000 to 75,000 trials in post-1542 Italy^[59] — very far from the "100 executions" sometimes cited after Tedeschi (1991), whose article gives only local samples^[60]. Christopher Black, in The Italian Inquisition (Yale, 2009), confirms an order of magnitude far below that of the Spanish one^[61]. The reasons for this relative moderation: stricter central ecclesiastical control — the pope himself presiding over the congregation (1917 CIC, c. 247 § 1) — broader recourse to prison terms and abjurations, and the absence of the politico-royal dimension that hardened the Spanish one.

The Index of Forbidden Books

The Roman Inquisition was also responsible for the Index librorum prohibitorum, created by Paul IV in 1559 and regularly re-edited until its abolition in 1966 — notification of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith signed by Cardinal Ottaviani^[62]. The Index condemned books judged contrary to Catholic faith. It included many works today considered classics (Descartes, Pascal for the Provinciales, Galileo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Hugo, Sartre). Its existence poses a real philosophical question — that of ecclesiastical censorship in intellectual matters — on which contemporary Catholic conscience has decided in favour of freedom of research and expression, in the line of Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II, 1965).

The Portuguese Inquisition was instituted by the bull Cum ad nihil magis of Paul III, on 23 May 1536, at the request of John III of Portugal^[63]. It principally targeted the cristãos-novos (converted Jews), and would be extended to the colonial empire with the creation of the tribunal of Goa in 1560. Later, similar tribunals would see the light in Spanish America: Lima in 1570, Mexico in 1571, Cartagena de Indias in 1610. These colonial tribunals, studied notably by Solange Alberro for Mexico and René Millar Carvacho for Peru, were statistically even less murderous than the peninsula: Lima recensuses about 30 to 32 executions over 250 years (Millar Carvacho), Mexico about 50 to 51, and Goa 57 in person^[64].

The Contreras-Henningsen revolution and modern estimates

Here, in synthesis, are the most solid estimates today available, all Inquisitions combined, over the whole six centuries of existence:

That is, over six and a half centuries of cumulative activity of the Catholic Inquisitions worldwide, an order of magnitude — this article's own estimate by addition of the ranges above — situated between 7,500 and 10,500 executions, to be compared with estimates once widespread via Llorente (~32,000 burned for Spain alone) or certain anti-Catholic pamphlets ("several million").

The Spanish Inquisition as seen by Jewish historians and by Kamen

A significant part of the historiographical revolution on the Spanish Inquisition comes from two Jewish historians — Cecil Roth and Yitzhak Baer — and from the great British revisionist Henry Kamen. Three names stand out.

Cecil Roth (1899–1970), English Jewish historian, author of A History of the Marranos (1932) and The Spanish Inquisition (1937): already in the 1930s he showed that the institution had jurisdiction only over the baptised, and documented the fate of prosecuted conversos — most often reconciled after abjuration rather than handed over to the secular arm. He nonetheless recognised the real suffering of the Marrano community and the socially crushing character of trials^[65].

Yitzhak Baer (1888–1980), German then Israeli Jewish historian, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of the monumental A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (1961–1966) in two volumes: his work, damning for the expulsions of 1492 and for social pressure on conversos, nonetheless took care to distinguish between royal policy (expulsion) and inquisitorial action (individual trial after baptism)^[66].

Henry Kamen (born in Rangoon, Burma, in 1936), British historian, emeritus professor at the CSIC in Barcelona, has become the contemporary worldwide reference with The Spanish Inquisition (1st ed., 1965, without subtitle), recast as A Historical Revision (1997–1998, then 4th ed., Yale, 2014): it is he who established that at most three thousand persons suffered death in the entire history of the tribunal (2014, p. 253)^[67], and who demonstrated the relative moderation of the Spanish Inquisition compared with contemporary European civil justices. His position, summed up in paraphrase: the Spanish Inquisition was a dark institution, but neither omnipotent, nor omnipresent, nor genocidal — a sophisticated, slow bureaucratic instrument, and much less effective than its legend would have it.

In substance, Kamen's revision holds that the Spanish Inquisition was neither the worst system of repression in modern Europe, nor a particularly racist instrument, nor the precursor of the concentration camps of the 20th century: it was a religious tribunal whose declared objective — the confessional unification of the peninsula — entailed real sufferings, but in proportions very distant from the image forged by Romantic historiography^[68].

This convergent testimony — two Jewish historians and the British revisionist of reference, with no Catholic apologetic interest — constitutes probably the most diriment element against the Black Legend in contemporary conversation. It forbids the easy reflex according to which any relativisation of figures would be a "Catholic apologetic".

Comparison with contemporary civil justices

To measure the real place of the Catholic Inquisitions in the judicial violence of their time, they must absolutely be compared with other contemporary European jurisdictions — civil, royal and Protestant. The table below synthesises orders of magnitude established by historians of criminal law and historical crime. Each row is sourced: Star Chamber^[69], Parlement of Paris^[70], tribunals of the Holy Roman Empire^[71]; Geneva: Galiffe, taken up by Schaff.

These orders of magnitude put into proportion the share of the Catholic Inquisitions in the judicial violence of modern Europe — while comparing heresy tribunals with the whole of the criminal justice of their time, which does not allow concluding that one confession was globally "more murderous" than another. This exonerates nothing — torture and capital punishment are rejected by the contemporary Church whatever their historical uses — but it frontally contradicts the narrative according to which Catholicism would have been in modern Europe a monstrous singularity. The singularity is not in the violence; it is in the authority that finally recognised it, doctrinally and publicly.

Llorente and the inflation of figures

The famous figure of 31,912 burned alive for Spain comes from a single author: Juan Antonio Llorente, former secretary of the Spanish Inquisition from 1789 to 1801, become afrancesado under Joseph Bonaparte. His Histoire critique de l'Inquisition d'Espagne (Paris, 1817–1818) extrapolated from local averages on very incomplete archival series^[72]. Llorente had an avowed anticlerical political programme, and his extrapolations were dismantled one by one by Henry Charles Lea (A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 1906–1907) then Bennassar (1979) and Kamen (1997). In today's scholarly literature, no one any longer defends Llorente's figures.

Comparison with witch-hunting

To measure the gap between Inquisition and witch-hunting, two figures suffice:

• Witch-hunting in Europe (1450–1750) caused about 40,000 to 60,000 deaths according to syntheses by Brian Levack^[73] and Wolfgang Behringer^[74].
• The bulk of these executions took place outside Catholic inquisitorial jurisdiction: in the Holy Roman Empire — Catholic as well as Protestant lands, the mass trials of south-western Germany being those of the Catholic prince-bishoprics (about one third of German executions and one quarter of European ones) — as well as in Switzerland, Scotland and Sweden. Lorraine, a Catholic duchy, had its own hunts: Nicolas Rémy claims 800 to 900 condemnations^[75].
• In Spain, witch-hunting was systematically curbed by the Inquisition itself, particularly after the report of inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías on the Zugarramurdi witches affair (1609–1614).

The historical paradox is edifying: within the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition, witch-hunting was among the least murderous in Europe — precisely because the Inquisition, attentive to material evidence, refused confessions extorted by village panic. Catalonia nonetheless saw, in 1615–1627, a hunt conducted by the secular tribunals — more than 1,000 executed, rehabilitated by the Catalan Parliament in 2022 — until the Audiencia and the Inquisition took matters back in hand in 1622^[76].

Salazar Frías, the inquisitor who saved hundreds of lives

The episode deserves to be told in detail, for it reverses the image imposed by the Black Legend. Between 1609 and 1614, the valley of Zugarramurdi, in Basque Navarre, was shaken by a witchcraft panic threatening to produce an Iberian Salem. The first denunciations led to an auto-da-fé at Logroño on 7 November 1610, during which eleven accused were condemned, six of whom to the stake — six people who paid with their lives for communal panic. This is one of the deadliest witch-hunting episodes in the history of the Spanish Inquisition — the deadliest remaining that of Calahorra in 1507–1508, with about 11 burned and 7 effigies^[77].

But the institution pulled itself together. Alonso de Salazar Frías (1564–1635), one of the three inquisitors of the tribunal, was sent on site to verify the accusations that continued to proliferate. For eight months, from May 1611 to January 1612, he travelled the region on horseback, personally interrogating 1,802 accused, including 1,384 children^[78]. He visited the alleged "sabbath places", asked several accused to manufacture before him the magic ointments they claimed to know, had these ointments analysed by apothecaries: none contained anything other than ordinary plants. He methodically documented contradictions, spontaneous retractions, family pressures, cascading rumours.

His report — the Cuarta relación sent to Inquisitor General Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas in March 1612 — is one of the great texts in the history of European critical thought.

"I have found no certainty, nor even reasonable conjecture, that a single act of witchcraft, real and external, has been committed." — Alonso de Salazar Frías, report sent to Inquisitor General Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas in March 1612 (called Cuarta relación in the Henningsen edition)^[79]

In substance — a paraphrase, presented as such —: in his eyes the confessions of the accused and their mutual accusations are but fantasies, dreams and inventions, and he concludes that there were neither witches nor bewitched in these regions before people talked and wrote about them.

The Council of the Inquisition adopted Salazar's conclusions and published in 1614 new instructions henceforth requiring material evidence in all witchcraft trials: no confession obtained under torture without corroboration, no condemnation on denunciation alone, technical examination of accusatory objects. The result was immediate and lasting: over the following two hundred years, the Spanish Inquisition would execute almost no more accused witches. During the same period, the prince-bishopric of Würzburg in Germany executed about 300 people for witchcraft between 1626 and 1631; Calvinist Scotland, about 1,500 in total over the whole period of the hunts^[80].

Salazar Frías has not been canonised. But his figure deserves to be placed in the Catholic narrative of the Inquisition exactly where common memory reserves Torquemada: not as an isolated case, but as proof that at the very heart of the institution lay the rational, juridical and theological resources for its own limitation. A century before the Enlightenment, a Catholic inquisitor applied to witchcraft what modern sciences would call "experimental method": physical examination of ointments, material verification of places, cross-checking of depositions, identification of rumour chains. The gesture is exactly contrary to the popular image of the fanatical inquisitor.

Birth in the Netherlands and England of the 16th century

The Leyenda Negra — expression used as early as 1899 by Emilia Pardo Bazán, then forged in its modern historiographical sense by Spanish historian Julián Juderías in 1914^[81] — was born in the context of the revolts of the Spanish Netherlands (1568–1648) and Anglo-Spanish rivalry (Armada 1588). The founding work was published in Heidelberg in 1567 under the pseudonym Reginaldus Gonsalvius Montanus (probably the exiled Protestant Antonio del Corro or Casiodoro de Reina): Sanctae Inquisitionis Hispanicae Artes aliquot detectae, quickly translated into German, English (1568) and Dutch^[82].

The work mixes real facts (procedure of the Holy Office) and pamphleteering inventions (imaginary tortures, fanciful instruments, fantasised statistics). It became a major matrix of all subsequent anti-inquisitorial literature — alongside Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563, earlier and of its own English tradition) — up to Schiller's Don Carlos (1787) and The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe (1842).

The Enlightenment and the manufacture of a learned anticlericalism

The French and German Enlightenments prolonged and systematised the Black Legend. Voltaire in Candide (1759), Diderot in the Encyclopédie (1751–1772), Lessing, then Quinet and Michelet in the 19th century, made it the historical paradigm of religious fanaticism par excellence. This construction served history less than the political philosophy of the Enlightenment: to make the Inquisition the archetype of all religious State violence to be proscribed. The later secular State violences — Terror (1793–1794), Kulturkampf (1871–1878), Bolshevik de-Christianisations (1917–1939) — never occupied the same place in that memory.

The Iron Maiden and false instruments

A significant part of the "instruments of torture of the Inquisition" exhibited in modern museums are historical fakes manufactured between 1860 and 1920^[83]:

• The famous Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, supposed to crush the condemned inside a spiked statue, appears in no archive before 1793 (a text by Johann Philipp Siebenkees, probably fictional). The original object — destroyed in the bombing of Nuremberg in 1944 — was a 19th-century fabrication.
• The inquisitorial saw between the legs, the Judas cradle, the spiked rack are late iconographic inventions, popularised by international exhibitions of the Belle Époque.
• In contrast, the strappado — or garrucha, the same torment of suspension by arms tied behind the back —, the toca (forced ingestion of water) and the potro (rack), the most used, are attested and documented in inquisitorial archives — their regulated use and their low frequency.

Edward Peters: myth versus history

Edward Peters thus sums up, in substance, the distinction at the heart of his Inquisition (Free Press, New York, 1988): on one side the historical inquisitions — medieval, Spanish, Roman, Portuguese — distinct, researchable and archived institutions; on the other, "The Inquisition" of public discourse, the product of a long polemical construction from the pamphlets of the revolted Netherlands to English Gothic novels, whose documentary reality is very distant from the mythical image^[84].

Objection 1 — "The Church killed millions of people"

This is the most widespread and simplest accusation to refute. No comparable figure appears in the archives, and no serious historian has defended this thesis since the 1980s. Adding up the estimates by institution recalled above gives an order of magnitude of 7,500 to 10,500 executions over six and a half centuries^[85] (this article's own estimate) for all Catholic Inquisitions worldwide — including the entirety of the medieval, Spanish, Portuguese, Roman and their colonial extensions. This is dramatically high for individual victims; it bears no relation to the "millions" of propaganda. By way of comparison, the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) — first a confessional conflict between Catholics and Protestants, become a European war with Swedish then French interventions — cost between 4.5 and 8 million dead in thirty years (combat, famine and epidemics combined)^[86].

Objection 2 — "The Church itself burned heretics"

The objection targets the juridical distinction between the ecclesiastical tribunal (which pronounced the sentence of obstinate heresy) and the secular arm (which carried out capital punishment). This distinction is historically real: no cleric could juridically pronounce a sentence of blood according to canon law — that is the meaning of the later formula ecclesia abhorret a sanguine^[87]. But it cannot serve as a moral loophole.

The International Theological Commission, in Memory and Reconciliation (§ 5.c), takes up the words of Tertio Millennio Adveniente 35 on "consent given, especially in certain centuries, to methods of intolerance and even violence in the service of truth"^[88]: recognising that the Inquisition handed the heretic over to the secular arm changes nothing regarding ecclesiastical responsibility — a system that knows where the handing over leads bears a real moral responsibility, which today's Catholic conscience can no longer assume.

Objection 3 — "Torture was systematic and unlimited"

Inquisitorial torture was:

• Juridically framed: Ad extirpanda (1252, law 25) imposes on the civil power only two limits — neither mutilation nor danger of death; in later Spanish practice, the session was additionally limited to about fifteen minutes (Kamen 2014, p. 191)^[89];
• Statistically minority: at Valencia, out of some 7,000 trials, torture is attested in only about 2% of cases (Kamen)^[90] — i.e. far less frequently than in the civil justices of the Ancien Régime;
• Procedurally contestable: the confession obtained under torture had to be confirmed outside torture after an interval of at least 24 hours to be juridically valid — a rule later than the bull, most often ignored^[91].

This does not make torture moral. The CCC (nos. 2297–2298) condemns it without appeal. But it contradicts the popular image of the torture chamber as an ordinary inquisitorial practice.

Objection 4 — "Trials were shams"

The archives tell the opposite. Inquisitorial procedure, inherited from Roman law and formalised in the 13th century, was technically more written than ordinary civil justice: mandatory written dossier, interrogation with written record, possibility of recusing witnesses for proven enmity. There was on the other hand neither a guaranteed advocate — the decretal of Innocent III forbids advocates to assist heretics (Valence 1248, Albi 1254; Bernard Gui, Eymerich)^[92] — nor appeal to a "central Holy Office", which would only exist from 1542.

Objection 5 — "The Inquisition persecuted the Jews"

This objection mixes three quite distinct things: inquisitorial jurisdiction, royal policy, and the traditional pontifical doctrine on Jews.

The Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction over Jews as such: its targets were the conversos — Jews converted to Catholicism — accused of secretly continuing to practise Judaism (and therefore of apostasy after baptism). Non-baptised Jews fell under other mechanisms: the edict of expulsion of 1492 (royal decree of Isabella and Ferdinand, not an inquisitorial sentence), forced conversions under social pressure, or popular pogroms like that of 1391 which ravaged Seville, Cordoba, Toledo and Valencia causing several thousand deaths. Yet these pogroms frontally contradicted the canonical tradition of pontifical protection recalled below — without that having sufficed to prevent them.

Sicut Judaeis: a little-known pontifical tradition

Since Callixtus II around 1120, and almost uninterruptedly — notably under Nicholas III in 1278, then up to Nicholas V in 1447 — the constitution Sicut Judaeis was regularly renewed by popes to formally forbid forcibly baptising, killing, wounding or despoiling Jews living under their jurisdiction^[93]. The text is explicit: no Christian may compel a Jew to baptism or profane his cemeteries — prohibitions without condition — nor, "without legitimate judgment of public authority", harm their persons, goods or customs. Innocent IV, in his letter of 5 July 1247, expressly condemned the accusation of ritual murder, that murderous fantasy which periodically justified popular massacres of Jews^[94].

This tradition in no way effaces the share of medieval theological anti-Judaism — segregation, distinctive sign imposed by Lateran IV in 1215, professional restrictions, and the argumentation of John Chrysostom or Saint Bernard on the "spiritual blindness" of the Jewish people. But it forbids the crude narrative of a unilaterally persecuting medieval Church: the same institution that imposed distinctive signs simultaneously prohibited, under pain of excommunication, popular massacres.

The Spanish Inquisition and the paradoxical protection of conversos

More paradoxical still: in several Spanish cities of the 15th century (Cordoba, Seville, Toledo — the latter in Castile, not Andalusia), the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition coincided with the reduction of anti-converso pogroms. The conversos feared the ordinary Christian crowd — which suspected them of double-dealing and regularly massacred them since 1391 — far more than the Holy Office. Several archival studies show that some 16th-century conversos preferred to appear before the royal Inquisition, whose procedure was written, codified and susceptible to acquittal, rather than be delivered to popular animosity or municipal justice^[95]. This moralises nothing and does not exonerate the institution — social pressure was immense, and many conversos secretly attached to Judaism paid dearly for it — but it contradicts the narrative according to which the Inquisition would have been the worst enemy of converted Jews in modern Spain.

Is the distinction exonerating?

No — and the strongest objection must be heard first. The limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood") statutes, which barred descendants of Jews or Muslims from access to certain civil, military and religious offices, are a Spanish Catholic invention of the 15th–16th centuries: an objective, racist in fact, indefensible fault — criticised by several popes (Nicholas V from 1449; Pius V vainly tried to place a non-limpio man), but persistent^[96]. And the executed Judaizing conversos — the bulk of the some 2,000 executions of the first decades — remain, in an institution that should never have existed in this form, a human drama and an ecclesial failure. What the distinction makes possible is to refuse the amalgamation with the Shoah that some militant discourses no longer hesitate to make. Neither racial ideology, nor industrial killing, nor ambition of total extermination, nor contempt for the juridical dignity of victims — none of the specific markers of the Nazi genocide — is found in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition. To see this is to honour historical truth; not to see it is to betray the memory of real victims of modern antisemitism.

Objection 6 — "The Inquisition burned witches"

As seen, the bulk of witches executed in Europe were outside Catholic inquisitorial jurisdiction — in the Holy Roman Empire, Catholic as well as Protestant lands, as well as in Switzerland, Scotland and Sweden. In Catholic inquisitorial countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal), witch-hunting was significantly more moderate, precisely because inquisitors — trained in canon law and critique of evidence — refused confessions extorted by village panic. Salazar Frías's report (1612) is the archetype of this inquisitorial restraint in the face of popular demonological fury.

Objection 7 — "The Galileo affair proves the Church's obscurantism"

Galileo was not tortured nor condemned to death. Declared "vehemently suspect of heresy" for having held heliocentrism as a true doctrine contrary to the Scriptures, he was condemned to formal prison — a penalty immediately commuted to house arrest — and obliged to abjure^[97]. The trial remains an ecclesial error, explicitly recognised by John Paul II on 31 October 1992 after an eleven-year study commission. This public recognition is proof that the Catholic Church knows how to recognise its historical faults without thereby abandoning the doctrine of magisterial infallibility — which does not extend, precisely, to disciplinary judgments of Roman congregations.

Objection 8 — "The Inquisition proves the Church cannot be trusted"

This is the deepest and most serious objection. It deserves a two-stage answer. First stage: the faults of historical Inquisitions can neither be denied nor minimised by real figures. Every unjust execution is, in itself, a spiritual failure of the Christian community. Second stage: these faults engage the moral responsibility of the Christians of the time and of the ecclesiastical structures that produced them — but not the holiness of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. This is the classic distinction between the sins of members and the holiness of the Church itself, developed by John Paul II in the apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente (1994)^[98], then by the International Theological Commission in Memory and Reconciliation (7 March 2000)^[99], and liturgically assumed in the Day of Pardon of Jubilee 2000.

On 12 March 2000, first Sunday of Lent of the Jubilee, John Paul II presided in St Peter's Basilica over a ceremony unprecedented in the history of the Catholic Church: the Day of Pardon. Seven public requests for pardon were pronounced, one of which directly concerned faults committed in the service of truth.

"Let us pray that each one of us, acknowledging that men of the Church in the name of faith and morals [...] have sometimes had recourse, they too, to non-evangelical methods [...]." — Invitation to prayer, Day of Pardon, St Peter's Basilica, 12 March 2000^[100]

"Lord, God of all men, at certain times in history, Christians have [...]" — Kyrie eleison. — Prayer of Saint John Paul II, Day of Pardon, 12 March 2000 (prayer taken up again in his letter of 15 June 2004)^[101]

This public repentance rests on the preparatory work of the International Theological Commission in its document Memory and Reconciliation: the Church and the Faults of the Past (7 March 2000), which distinguishes with precision between objective holiness of the Church (gift of Christ, indefectible) and historical responsibility of her sons (real, but not touching the ecclesial mystery in its substance)^[102].

This gesture is rigorously Catholic. It renounces no dogma; it assumes a historical truth; it refuses both hagiographic denial and ideological repentance that adopts the adversary's propaganda as its own. It is exactly the model of discernment that this article asks for.

Dignitatis Humanae (1965)

The Second Vatican Council definitively settled the doctrinal question of religious coercion with the declaration Dignitatis Humanae on religious freedom, promulgated by Paul VI on 7 December 1965.

"The human person has a right to religious freedom. [...] All men must be free from all coercion on the part of both individuals and social groups and of any human power, so that in religious matters no one is forced to act against his conscience nor prevented from acting, within just limits, according to his conscience, in private as in public, alone or associated with others." — Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae, no. 2, 7 December 1965^[103]

This declaration does not revoke Catholic doctrine on religious truth — Christ remains the way, the truth and the life — but it excludes any external coercion as a method of evangelisation, and it inscribes freedom of conscience as a principle of Christian anthropology at the heart of the Magisterium. It is, within Catholic doctrine itself, the theoretical end of any possible justification for an Inquisition.

Why the evangelical germ excludes sacred violence

The motive is not conjunctural but evangelical (quotations: Jerusalem Bible, unless otherwise stated). "You do not know what spirit you are of," Jesus says to James and John who wanted to bring down fire from heaven on hostile Samaritans (Luke 9:55 — the long lesson of the Vulgate; the AELF liturgical translation retains only: "But Jesus, turning, rebuked them"). Peter's gesture cutting off Malchus's ear, immediately reproved by Christ (John 18:11), already founds non-coercion. "My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my people would have fought" (John 18:36 — partial quotation). Religious coercion, attested as a medieval and modern practice, is in reality foreign to the proper germ of the Gospel — and its contemporary rejection by the Church is not a concession to liberalism, but a more faithful rediscovery of the native doctrine.

The Inquisition remains a grave dossier of Christian history. It must be held with rigour, without letting oneself be intimidated by black propaganda nor seduced by an apologetic that would have everything be normal for the time. The just position holds six affirmations together.

1. There was not one Inquisition but several — medieval, Spanish, Roman, Portuguese, colonial — distinct in date, authority, procedure and repressive intensity. Any discourse that does not make this distinction, in one direction or the other, misses the subject.

2. Adding up the estimates by institution recalled above — 7,500 to 10,500 executions over six and a half centuries^[104], all Inquisitions combined (this article's own estimate) — gives an order of magnitude bearing no relation to the "millions" of propaganda, but dramatically high and unacceptable in the light of the Gospel. None of these lives should have ended at the stake; none can be reduced to a figure.

3. Inquisitorial procedure, framed by canon law, was technically more written than contemporary civil justice — written dossier, recusal of enemy witnesses, confirmation of confession outside torture after an interval of at least 24 hours (a rule later than Ad extirpanda, often ignored) — with no guaranteed advocate and no centralised appeal, and without thereby making religious coercion morally defensible.

4. Torture is condemned by the Catechism (nos. 2297–2298), all religious coercion rejected by Dignitatis Humanae (1965), and the death penalty held to be inadmissible (Catechism no. 2267 revised in 2018): the contemporary Church has thus decided, from 1965 to the Day of Pardon (12 March 2000), against the very methods of the historical Inquisitions.

5. The distinction between the sins of members and the objective holiness of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ allows a Catholic to assume this history in truth, without renouncing anything of the faith. The International Theological Commission, in Memory and Reconciliation, formalised this distinction: the sinner is in the Church, but the Church herself remains indefectibly holy, because her holiness does not depend on the holiness of her members but on the fidelity of Christ who sanctifies her.

6. The Catholic Church has also produced, within herself, the critical resources for her own limitation: Salazar Frías refusing extorted confessions in 1612, the Rhenish bishops protesting against Conrad of Marburg in 1233, the papacy condemning massacres of Jews via Sicut Judaeis and Lacrimabilem Judaeorum, John Paul II opening the archives in 1998, the Catechism condemning torture in 1992. This structural self-criticism, doctrinally rooted and historically attested, is itself an apologetic argument.

The Inquisition is therefore neither the honour of Catholicism nor its refutation. It is a part of its history, seriously researchable since 1998, which demands of everyone — believer or not — the same intellectual discipline: open the archives, read, distinguish, refuse both militant falsehood and pious blindness. It is by doing this work, and not by circumventing it, that Catholic conscience honours at once the memory of victims, historical truth, and the objective holiness of the Church which nothing — neither the abuses of her sons, nor the calumnies of her adversaries — can reach.

• The Bloody Legend of the Spanish Inquisition — specialised dossier on Spain, Contreras-Henningsen archives, Salazar Frías.
• The Crusades — another dossier where real context and real faults must be held together.
• History Argues in Favour of Catholicism — historical continuity of Catholicism.
• What If History Was Not as We Were Always Told? — reading history with method.
• Answers to Protestantism — historical and doctrinal objections.
• The Council of Trent — Catholic response to the Reformation.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) — the reformer, his theology, his consequences.
• If God Exists, Why Evil and Suffering? — moral evil, freedom and responsibility.
• Why Catholicism Is the True Religion — sins of members and truth of the Church.