The Inquisition, established to judge heretics, is, therefore, an institution whose severity and cruelty are explained by the ideas and manners of the age. We will never understand it, unless we consider it in its environment, and from the viewpoint of men like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Louis, who dominated their age by their genius. Critics who are ignorant of the Middle Ages may feel at liberty to shower insult and contempt upon a judicial system whose severity is naturally repugnant to them. But contempt does not always imply a reasonable judgment, and to abuse an institution is not necessarily a proof of intelligence. If we would judge an epoch intelligently, we must be able to grasp the viewpoint of other men, even if they lived in an age long past.
But although we grant the good faith and good will of the founders and judges of the inquisition--we speak only, be it understood, of those who acted conscientiously--we must still maintain that their idea of justice was far inferior to ours. Whether taken in itself or compared with other criminal procedures, the Inquisition was, so far as the guarantees of equity are concerned, undoubtedly unjust and inferior. Such judicial forms as the secrecy of the trial, the prosecution carried on independently of the prisoner, the denial of advocate and defence, the use of torture, etc., were certainly despotic and barbarous. Severe penalties, like the stake and confiscation, were the legacy which a pagan legislation bequeathed to the Christian State; they were alien to the spirit of the Gospel.
The Church in a measure felt this, for to enforce these laws she always had recourse to the secular arm. In time, all this criminal code was to fall into desuetude, and no one to-day wishes it back again. Besides, the crying abuses committed by some of the Inquisitors have made the institution forever odious.
But in abandoning the system of force, which she formerly used in union with the State, does not the Church seem to condemn, to a certain degree, her past?
Even if to-day she were to denounce the Inquisition, she would not thereby compromise her divine authority. Her office on earth is to transmit to generation after generation the deposit of revealed truths necessary for man's salvation. That to safeguard this treasure she uses means in one age which a later age denounces, merely proves that she follows the customs and ideas in vogue around her. But she takes good care not to have men consider her attitude the infallible and eternal rule of absolute justice. She readily admits that she may sometimes be deceived in the choice of means of government. The system of defence and protection that she adopted in the Middle Ages succeeded, at least to some extent. We cannot maintain that it was absolutely unjust and absolutely immoral.
