Our Friend Ben

Some British tabloids have uncharitably described Pope Benedict XVI as the "Nazi pope," based presumeably on his teenage membership in the Hitler Youth. His real antecedents, though, are in the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which he long headed, and which was long known as the Holy Inquisition. That name, but little else, was discarded in the twentieth century. The Roman Catholic Blog has a link to this Associated Press story on the ouster of Thomas J. Reese as editor of the Catholic magazine America. This was a apparently a pre-papal act of then Cardinal Ratzinger, but it clearly bears the stamp of an authoritarian personality.

Many American Catholics think that the Catholic Church has put its intolerant and occasionally genocidal past behind it. Those who do ought to check out this entry about Torquemada in the Catholic Encyclopedia. This fragment caught my eye
At that time the purity of the Catholic Faith in Spain was in great danger from the numerous Marranos and Moriscos, who, for material considerations, became sham converts from Judaism and Mohammedanism to Christianity. The Marranos committed serious outrages against Christianity and endeavoured to judaize the whole of Spain.
That is an utterly dishonest slander, but not content with this outrageous justification, goes on to minimize the number of murders
Llorente computes that during Torquemada's office (1483-98) 8800 suffered death by fire and 9,654 were punished in other ways (Histoire de l'Inquisition, IV, 252). These figures are highly exaggerated, as has been conclusively proved by Hefele (Cardinal Ximenes, ch. xviii), Gams (Kirchengeschichte von Spanien, III, II, 68-76), and many others. Even the Jewish historian Graetz contents himself with stating that "under the first Inquisitor Torquemada, in the course of fourteen years (1485-1498) at least 2000 Jews were burnt as impenitent sinners" ("History of the Jews", Philadelphia, 1897, IV, 356). Most historians hold with the Protestant Peschel (Das Zeitalter der Entdeckungen, Stuttgart, 1877, pp. 119 sq.) that the number of persons burnt from 1481 to 1504, when Isabella died, was about 2000. Whether Torquemada's ways of ferreting out and punishing heretics were justifiable is a matter that has to be decided not only by comparison with the penal standard of the fifteenth century, but also, and chiefly, by an inquiry into their necessity for the preservation of Christian Spain. The contemporary Spanish chronicler, Sebastian de Olmedo (Chronicon magistrorum generalium Ordinis Prædicatorum, fol. 80-81) calls Torquemada "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the saviour of his country, the honour of his order".
The actual numbers were almost certainly much higher than any of these estimates, and hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes and had their property stolen. Very unfortunately, the Catholic Church continues to defend this theft, murder, and genocide.

So why am I not looking forward to this papacy? The outrages of the Inquisition, and the more recent scandal of the widespread cover up of priestly rape and pedophilia, were not accidental, but grew organically out of the authoritarian structure of the Church - a structure rooted not in the Gospels, but in imitation of Imperial Rome. The church ought to outgrow and cast off this un Christian excresence which has led to so much evil. Unfortunately, Ratzinger looks like the least likely man to do that job.

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