The INQUISITION & the Church

Many anti-Catholics on the Internet speak of the Inquisition as if it just happened last Tuesday. They stereotype the Catholic Church as an inherently oppressive and perverse institution. These Fundamentalist and/or church-cults, having no history of their own, nevertheless, attack various elements in the long history of Catholicism, assaulting "Christianity" itself. Distorting the truth, they become the very thing they seek to ridicule.

Anti-Catholic Bigots on This Issue are the NEW NAZIS

A wonderful booklet on this issue, and the main source for this page, was published back in 1950, The Truth About the Inquisition by John A. O'Brien and published by The Paulist Press. He writes:

In their efforts to discredit religion and disparage the Church, Nazi propagandists resurrected long buried incidents of the Inquisition and decked them out in lurid and gruesome colors and paraded them before the people. We recall standing before a book store window on Maria-Hilfenstrasse in Vienna in July, 1939, when the Nazi propaganda was in high gear, and seeing the bloodcurdling display of posters and pictures of imaginary scenes from the Inquisition. "See thee," Goebels was saying, "that is what will happen to you if we do not rescue you from the Church." (O'Brien, p. 5)

Well, there it is. The similarity goes much deeper, however. Kindred to these masters in hate, the anti-Catholic bigot makes a scapegoat of the Church, twisting the facts and the truth to their advantage, and even resorting to the BIG LIE. Name the issue, we see it repeated. O'Brien's long out-of-print booklet is a wonderful source for reflection and reference in dealing with this issue.