I am always amazed at the boldness of revisionist historians.
It is not revisionist history to require you to use a term properly. The term Protestant was never applied to any group prior to the Reformation. So there were not Protestants persecuted by the Catholic Church during the Inquisitions. That is just a ploy used by some to garner sympathy for their position and raise hatred and bigotry against Catholics.
The term 'Protestant' came into being in the aftermath of the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), to refer to those who objected to the Diet's intolerance towards evangelical attitudes within Germany.
So you admit your error.
But the fundamental Christian beliefs and practices which became predominant in the sixteenth-century Reformation predated it.
It is quite clear that the Vaudois, Albigenses, Waldenses and other groups who endured the terror of the early Inquisitions were heretics to Rome but their beliefs were much like those of the Reformers i.e. they were the forerunners of the Protestants and this was acknowledged by the reformer Martin Luther.
Forerunners are not the same as actual Protestants otherwise Luther would simply have joined them as they were still in existance at the time.
You also seem to have forgotten the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Pope Gregory IX (1227-41) declared it the duty of every Catholic to persecute heretics. A heretic was anyone who did not give allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.
I have not forgotten the Counter-Reformation but it's intent was again to clean up the Church from the inside. It was not directed at Protestant but at Catholics, just as the Inquisition was.
As for your claim concerning some directive given by Pope Gregory IX, I will have to see the actual quote and a verifiable source since you have proven yourself so unreliable thus far to provide accurate historical accounts.
The Inquisitions (Roman, Medieval and Spainish) endured for centuries
Yes 3 centuries approximately. The mid 1200's to the mid 1500's
- the Spanish Inquisition had to be suppressed by Napoleon as late as 1809!.
But the Pope had terminated it in the mid 1500's it was the local government authorities that continued it against Papal instruction. It was later revived temporarily with the proviso that there was to be no torture or killing.
In his History of the Inquisition, Canon Llorente, who was Secretary to the Inquisition in Madrid from 1790-92 and who had access to the archives of all the tribunals, estimated that about 300,000 condemned were burnt at the stake - including Protestants, Jews and Moors.
I would like to see a specific verificable reference to this text as its veracity is questionable.
We also have to remeber that those who were killed during the Inquisition were killed by the civil authorities for treason.
The Catholic Church limited the treatment of the accused to torture which was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth.
It was not of ecclesiastical origin, and was long prohibited in the ecclesiastical courts. Nor was it originally an important factor in the inquisitional procedure, being unauthorized until twenty years after the Inquisition had begun. It was first authorized by Innocent IV in his Bull "Ad exstirpanda" of 15 May, 1252, which was confirmed by Alexander IV on 30 November, 1259, and by Clement IV on 3 November, 1265. The limit placed upon torture was citra membri diminutionem et mortis periculum -- i.e, it was not to cause the loss of life or limb or imperil life. Torture was to applied only once, and not then unless the accused were uncertain in his statements, and seemed already virtually convicted by manifold and weighty proofs.
How many victims were handed over to the civil power cannot be stated with even approximate accuracy. It is a matter for historians to argue and choose which numbers best fit thier inherent biases as you have clearly done in your amatuer historical research.
We have nevertheless some valuable information about a few of the Inquisition tribunals, and their statistics are not without interest. At Pamiers, from 1318 to 1324, out of twenty-four persons convicted but five were delivered to the civil power, and at Toulouse from 1308 to 1323, only forty-two out of nine hundred and thirty bear the ominous note "relictus culiae saeculari". Thus, at Pamiers one in thirteen, and at Toulouse one in forty-two seem to have been burnt for heresy although these places were hotbeds of heresy and therefore principal centres of the Inquisition. We may add, also, that this was the most active period of the institution. These data and others of the same nature bear out the assertion that the Inquisition marks a substantial advance in the contemporary administration of justice, and therefore in the general civilization of mankind. A more terrible fate awaited the heretic when judged by a secular court. In 1249 Count Raylmund VII of Toulouse caused eighty confessed heretics to be burned in his presence without permitting them to recant. It is impossible to imagine any such trials before the Inquisition courts. The large numbers of burnings detailed in various histories are completely unauthenticated, and are either the deliberate invention of pamphleteers, or are based on materials that pertain to the Spanish Inquisition of later times or the German witchcraft trials (Vacandard, op. cit., 237 sqq.).
The Medieval Inquisition was given permanent status by Pope Paul III in 1542, as the first of Rome's Sacred Congregations, the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Inquisition. Not one of the eighty Popes from the thirteenth century disapproved of the Inquisition. The persecution, torture and killing of 'heretics' has never been repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church.
Again the reinstatement of Medieval Inquisition is directed at Catholics within the Church and its permanent status is in no way similar to the original Inquisitions as the civil authorities are being kept completely out of the process and again no torture being allowed.
The Church has denounced the acts of the Inquisition as extreme, even though they occurred in different times under different sensibilities than we hold today. However they were no worse than the persecutions under the Protestants during the Reformation.
That such intolerance was not peculiar to Catholicism, but was the natural accompaniment of deep religious conviction in those, also, who abandoned the Church, is evident from the measures taken by some of the Reformers against those who differed from them in matters of belief. As the learned Dr. Schaff declares in his "History of the Christian Church" (vol. V, New York, 1907, p. 524),
"To the great humiliation of the Protestant churches, religious intolerance and even persecution unto death were continued long alter the Reformation. In Geneva the pernicious theory was put into practice by state and church, even to the use of torture and the admission of the testimony of children against their parents, and with the sanction of Calvin. Bullinger, in the second Helvetic Confession, announced the principle that heresy could be punished like murder or treason."
This does not make what the Catholic Church did right but it reflects that those were different times and that they were not alone in their errors.
