Inquisition

Not a cheerful post today. I wish to write a few words about the death toll from the Spanish Inquisition.

First off, there is a Talmudic dictum that states, “whosoever preserves one life, it is accounted to him by Scripture as if he had preserved the whole world.” I believe the inverse of that is true: the innocent death of one human being is an incomparable tragedy and truly makes God weep.

That being said, I do not wish to deny any wrongdoing on the part of the Church. I do not want to give the impression that I am minimizing in any way the tragedy that came out of the Inquisition. What I wish to do in this post is simply counteract a distortion that is willingly used by the enemies of the Church to harm her and the just cause of Christ.

How many people do you think were killed by the Inquisition? Tens or hundreds of thousands? More? Do you think it is comparable to that silly figure tossed about in the media, that 5 million witches were burned at the stake during a 300 year period? Do you think the Inquisition killed more or less?

As a guess, I’ll bet you’ll say 100,000 to 250,000, total, over a couple of centuries. That’s what I would have guessed up to a few days ago.

The famous and prolific historian Will Durant (1885-1981) has used the figure of 4,000 to number those who were killed as a result of the 350-year long Spanish Inquisition. If you check the wikipedia article on the Inquisition and consult the sourced references, you’ll come up with a similar figure – 3,000 to 5,000. For the sake of this post, let’s use the highest figure, 5,000.

If you total Union and Confederate battle deaths in the United States Civil War, you come up with a figure of 212,938 over a period of four years. The rate of death for that conflict comes out to about 4,400 per month.

World War II is without doubt the most devastating modern war in terms of death toll, with estimates ranging around 83 million combined Allied and Axis military and civilian deaths. This conflict raged for six years, yielding a terrible rate of death of 37,900 souls per day.

And of course America lost 2,977 victims to a single instance of Muslim terrorism on September 11, 2001.

Okay, you say, wars and acts of terror are not comparable to an inquisition. I see your point.

Would it be more plausible to compare the Inquisition to living under a totalitarian regime? After all, “they” could come for you at any time, throw you into a cell for months or years, interrogate you, and hold your life in their hands. Let me throw two additional statistics out at you.

According to the well-sourced website necrometrics.com, 20 million people were killed during the 29-year reign of Joseph Stalin (the figure is a conservative compromise). That averages to about 57,000 victims a month, or 1,900 a day.

In a similar calculation from the same website, 40 million were murdered during the 26-year reign of Mao in China. That’s 128,000 a month, or 4,200 a day.

And just a reminder: the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao were officially atheistic societies.

Evil is evil; the death of any innocent life is a terrible crime, blood crying out from the ground for vengeance. I only wish to illustrate some perspective and proportionality concerning the Spanish Inquisition, as a defense against those who would mischaracterize it as part of an agenda to harm the contemporary Church.

Would you rather have lived in Spain in the 15th, 16th, or 17th century, or in Russia, China, or Germany during the 20th?