The Last Of The Inquisitors

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31007, 12 March 1966, Page 4

The Last Of The Inquisitors

(A Fourth Lender tn “The Time*”]

Almost in an aside the “Pontifical Year Book” has announced that there is to be no more an Inquisitor. And even the Index is shown to be dormant, if not dead. Of course, the world had been long prepared for this piece of “aggiornamento,” the bringing up to date of the Roman Catholic Church which Pope John XXIII had in his mind and heart when he first broached the idea of a council seven years ago. Most of the world, perhaps, was unaware that the Inquisition lingered on, and that until a few months ago it was possible to be introduced to an Inquisitor. It must have been rather like meeting the last of the Mohicans.

The’legend will outlive the institution. Although the Inquisition originated in France in the thirteenth century to deal with the Albigensian heretics, it is with Spain and the divided postReformation Europe that its name will always be associated. At least that is true of Protestant Britain:

And they blest him in their pain that they were not left to Spain.

To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

That was Tennyson, making it the first concern of Sir Richard Grenville to save his sick sailors from “the Inquisition dogs.” And no doubt

Tennyson was right, and that would have been the first thing Grenville thought of before a sea fight. Many Elizabethan Englishmen and women believed that a Protestant who had the misfortune to set foot in Spain would be as quickly and automatically met by an Inquisitor armed with a thumbscrew as he is today by a customs officer armed with a piece of chalk. It was a belief that carried well on into the nineteenth century, though Borrow proved that even in suspicious, backward Bourbon Spain a foreigner could say outrageous things about the country’s habits and religion and get away with them.

Modern historians have taken a more dispassionate look at the Inquisition. They have pointed out that its officials were genuinely more interested in conversion than |in punishment, that its methods were often more scrupulous and its prisons less horrible than those of the civil powers, and that, in any case Protestants went on racking and burning with as much gusto as the Roman Catholics. This, if not actually white-washing, comes close to a Panglossian view of world i events. For it was Pangloss who comforted Candide by pointing out to him that, if he had not been taken up by the Inquisition and suffered a great many other unpleasant things, “you would not be here to eat preserved citrons and pistachionuts.” Most people would simply agree that the Inquisition was a Bad Thing.