Truth shall out. None can stop that forever. Just have a look with an opened eye. Your senses are to be used, not be suppressed of fear of ‘unknown’. You are a free soul. Not a slave. Open yourself to the truths and react. Why bother to end up your life in a fake belief build up on the blood and flesh of fellow humans, you too are a human. Why you are silent? Is the power and money shuts your mouth. Does your brain and heart are function less? So shame on you…
Now read an excerpt from another site..
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THE HOLY INQUISITION
Since its inception, the Church sought to suppress heresy, by which it meant whatever it perceived to be giving an alternative interpretation of Christian tents. Among the early examples of suppressed heretics are the Gnostic Christians.
A landmark in the war against heresy was the thirteenth-century campaign against the sect of the Cathars of the Languedoc region of southern France – the so-called rejected the Old Testament, arguing that its god was really the devil, chose John’s Revelation as their central text, and believed in reincarnation; they advocated a life of simplicity and purity, shunned meat and fish, and condemned war and capital punishment. They enjoyed much respect among the population, which helped thwart early attempts by successive papal emissaries to make them renounce their creed. But Pope Innocent III grew impatient, declaring that “anyone who attempts to construe a personal view of God which conflicts with Church dogma must be burned without pity”. In 1209, he finally ordered a crusade to stamp out the sect and its followers; because he was clever enough to decree that all land owned by Cathars could be confiscated at will, many nobles from northern France joined in on the side of the Church. The town of Beziers fell on July 22; when the abbot commander was asked how to distinguish a Cather from a Catholic, he reportedly replied, “Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own,” and by the end of the day wrote to the Pope, “Today Your Holiness, twenty thousand citizens were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age or sex.” Such slaughters followed in other towns for two decades, making hundreds of thousands of victims (many of them ordinary Christians and leaving the Cathars severely crippled.
With the Roman Catholic Church’s political influence in western Europe now firm enough, in 1231 Pope Gregory IX institutionalized suppression in the form of the Inquisition, a special tribunal for heretics, manned mostly by Dominicans and Franciscans. The Cathars were its first target. On 16 March 1244, over 200 initiates were seized from the Cather fortress of Montsegur, which had withstood a year-long siege, and thrown into a fire at the foot of the fortress. Hundreds more perished at the stake as a result of Inquisition trials over the next century, till the movement died out.
In 1252, Pope Innocent IV (another “innocent”) sanctioned the use of torture in Inquisition trials to obtain confessions of heresy as well as the names of other heretics. While immediate confessions were at times treated leniently (though often with excommunication, humiliating penitence, or confiscation of property), heretics who refused to “recant” were handed over to secular authorities to be executed.
The Inquisition spread to France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. In Spain, it was established by King Ferdinand and Queen Isebella of Castile (1478), where it targeted mostly converts from Judaism suspected of relapsing to their original faith. The methods used were so brutal that in 1482, Pope Sixtus IV noted that the Spanish Inquisitors “without observing juridical prescriptions, have detained many persons in violation of justice, punishing them by severe tortures and imputing to them, without foundation, the crime of heresy, and despoiling of their wealth those sentenced to death, in such from that a great number of them have come to the Apostolic See, fleeing from such excessive rigor and protesting their orthodoxy.” He appointed a Grand Inquisitor, the dreaded Dominician Tomas de Torquemada, who, far from lessening the severity of the Inquisition, made ample use of torture and confiscation to terrorize his victims, thousand of whom ended at the stake. Spain extended the Inquisition to Holland, then its possession, and to some of its colonies, such as Peru and Mexico, for the benefit of native converts.
Portugal followed Spain, with its King Joao III establishing the Holy Inquisition there in 1536, at the request of Jesuit missionaries such as Francis Xavier, it spread to Portugal’s empire in Asia.
About that time, Protestants were added to the list of heretics in all Catholic countries.
It would be a gruesome task to detail the numerous instrument of torture invented by those pious servants of Lord Jesus Christ. Suffice it to say that some were designed to crush thumbs, stretch limbs to dislocation, break them, burn and suffocate, rip out flesh or wrench breasts and genitals. Gentler methods included suspending the accused with his or her hands bound behind the back, thus dislocating the shoulder joints; weights could be added to the legs for greater effectiveness. Historians and Christians scholars who sometimes attempt to “relativize” the Inquisition, claming that it was not as as black as portrayed, often fail to confront such revolting and unprecedented inhumanity. Equally inhuman was the culture of denunciation promoted by the Inquisition. With his typical irony, Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary. “As everyone knows, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention designed to make the Pope and monks more powerful, and a whole kingdom hypocritical. …. This Tribunal’s procedures are sufficiently well known. You can be jailed on the mere denunciation of the vilest characters; a son can denounce his father, a wife her husband. You are never confronted with your accusers; your goods are confiscated for the benefit of judges. That, at least , is how the Inquisition has behaved to this day; there is needed something divine there, for it passes understanding how men have suffered this yoke so patiently .”
The Inquisition did not judge only human beings; it also judged books, sentenced them and often burned them, to stop them from propagating ideas regarded as heretical, or simply susceptible of promoting free, independent thinking. “Indexes” of prohibited titles were published at regular intervals in many countries of Europe; besides the writings of Christian heretics (including a few great mystics), the indexes listed, for instance, those of Ovid, Dante, Rabelais, Machiavelli, Eramus, and the great works of Spanish literature. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church made it mandatory for authors to seek its permission – the obnoxious imprimatur – before publishing a work, which meant submitting to a censor in the first place. The Church in effect became the world’s first thought police; had this been in its power, it would have publicly burned ideas at the stake. Although this policy no doubt prolonged Europe’s Dark Ages, it also produced a backlash during the age of Enlightenment.
The Inquisition persecuted or threatened many thinkers. Perhaps the most dramatic case is that of Giordano Bruno, born in 1548 near Naples in southern Italy. Completing theological studies in a Dominican convent at Naples, he rebelled against Christian narrow-mindedness and read some of the banned philosophers. Threatened with a trial for heresy, he left the Dominican order at the age of 30 and traveled to Geneva, where he was drawn to Calvinism until he realized it was equally intolerant. He spent four years in France, where, under the protection of Henry III, he published his first works, then traveled to England where he wrote On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584). Returning to France, he moved on to Germany, where he published On the Immeasurable and Innumerable. Such works not only accepted Copernicus’s heliocentric, still regarded as heretic, but went further by arguing in favor of an infinite universe with multiple worlds: “Whoever denies the infinity denies the infinite power.” In 1591, Bruno took the risk traveling to Venice at the invitation of an aristocrat, where he taught mathematics and the art of memory. The next year, however, his host denounced him to the Inquisition, and he was soon extradited to Rome and thrown into a dungeon. Questioned for seven long years, occasionally tortured, Bruno refused to retract his theories. On February 8, 1600, he was awarded the death sentence as “an impenitent heretic, obstinate and stubborn,” but defied his judges with these words: “Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it.” He was burnt at the stake; His thoughts lived on and nourished later thinkers.
His contemporary Galileo was luckier. His astronomical research convinced him of the correctness of the Copernican theory, but he was forced to stop his teachings when this theory was condemned by the Vatican in 1616. He defended himself through a brilliant book published in 1632, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican, which resulted in the Inquisition summoning him to Rome the next year. Pronounced suspect of heresy, Galileo was compelled to formally abjure his theories and condemned to life imprisonment. He spent his last ten years under ho
use arrest, arranging to have another major work of physics clandestinely published in Holland, even though he had become blind by then – but not as blind as those who had arrogated to themselves the right to halt the flow of ideas.
The Inquisition was abolished in Spain as late as 1834. The abhorred phrase “Holy Office of the Inquisition” continued however to be used by the Vatican until 1908. The Church never apologized to the memory of its numberless victims; many prelates, in fact, long retained nostalgia for the good old, and dark, times.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 13 May 2009 13:00 )
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