A CATHOLIC PRIEST DENOUNCES THE SPANISH INQUISITION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 46, 14 March 1884, Page 25

A CATHOLIC PRIEST DENOUNCES THE SPANISH INQUISITION.

In a recent lecture on Luther delivered by Father Dalton at the Church of the Annunciation, Kansas City, the clergyman thus alluded to the Inquisition : — „ "As a Catholic priest, I, to-night, denounce the terrible cruelties of the Inquisition. And in the denunciation every Catholic priest and Jayman joins. The tribunal of the Inquisition was established by King Ferdinand for political purposes. He believed the Jews and Moors of his kingdom were plotting against him : for this special purpose this tribunal was erected. He also claimed that zeal for religion necessitated it. The king nominated the inquisition, and the tribunal derived all its jurisdiction from the king. Eanke, a Prostcstant German historian, says : •It was in spirit and tendency a political institution. The Pope had an interest in thwarting it, and did so, but the king had an interest in constantly upholding it.' " Catholic priests and bishops were the victims of this tribunal as well as Moors. Pope Sixtus IX. issued a bull against the Inquisition and when he failed to destroy the tribunal he invited the sufferers to flee to Rome for asylum. The Catholic Church is no way responsible for the cruelties of the Inquisition. . As a twin scare-crow to frighten away honest investigation into the doctrine of the Catholic Cburch her enemies erect the horrible figures marked ' The massacre of St. Bartholomew.' History supplies the facts by which this hideous picture is divested of the ecclesiastical garb. It was Charles IX. of France, instigated by his mother, Catherine de Medici, .who compassed the massacre of the Huguenots in Paris on the night P>f August 24, 1 572. Neither Charles nor his mother was solicitous in behalf of the Church, nor did they at any time manifest any opposition to the spread of Protestantism. Coligny, who was an Huguenot, was charged for sedition, and it was publicly mooted that his aspirations reached even to the royal throne. His death was the result of his alleged treasonable designs. The who^sale massacre of his co-religionists was cordially deplored by the Church. The Archbishops of Lyons and the Bishops of Bordeaux, Toulouse and other cities in France called upon the fleeing Calvinists to take refuge in their respective palaces. When the Pope ordered aTe Dswn sung it was not in thanksgiving for the massacre, but for the preservation of the French king from a violent death. The Pope had not even heard of the slaughter. " The king had misled Gregory XIII. by sending him on the very night of the massacre the following message : * By the destruction of a few seditious men, the king has been delivered from immediate danger of death and the realm from the perpetual terror of civil war.' The same message was forwarded to each of the courts of Europe. Sismondi, a Protestant historian, says the Pope's Nuncio in Paris had not the least idea of the design of Charles."