Conservapedia and the Inquisition
By Julio
Severo
Conservapedia
is an English-language wiki encyclopedia project written from an American
conservative, creationist and Christian point of view. The website (www.conservapedia.com) was
started in 2006 to counter left-wing bias and moral relativism present in
Wikipedia.
Schlafly
graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 with a J.D. in the same class with
future U.S. president Barack Obama. He was an editor of the Harvard Law Review
from 1989 to 1991.
Conservapedia
was founded by him to confront leftist lies, but also to dispel misconceptions
on major issues, including the Inquisition. It can be very helpful for
conservatives in Brazil, the largest Catholic nation in the world. There is a
movement among some Brazilian Catholics who originally actively advocated
pro-life issues, but now they are actively advocating the revisionism of the
Inquisition, even by downplaying the horror of people being burned at the
stake. For example, a
Brazilian Catholic, who is an immigrant in the U.S., said, “Even in
the popular image of the Inquisition fires, lies are predominant. Everybody
believe that condemned individuals ‘died burned,’ amid horrible suffering. The
flames were high, more than 16 feet high, to hinder suffering. The condemned
individuals (less than ten a year in two dozen nations) died suffocated in a
few minutes, before the flames could touch them.”
Conservapedia,
whose owner cannot be accused of being “anti-Catholic” or left-wing by
radicals, says about the
Inquisition:
The term
inquisition can refer to either an investigation by the Roman Catholic Church
into heresy, or to the department appointed to perform such investigations.
This is currently titled the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since
1965, but was formerly been titled the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy
Office, and prior to that the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and
Universal Inquisition. Several major inquisitions took place, under the
management of differing departments.
Many of these
inquisitions are known to have used brutal torture to extract confessions from
accused heretics. While many of these accused heretics would be allowed free
after repenting their views and stating their loyalty to the Church, a
significant number — consisting almost entirely of those who refused to repent
— were executed by a variety of deliberately painful methods including burning
at the stake while alive, boiling in oil and the “breaking wheel.”
Execution was
never carried out by the church directly for theological reasons, but by
secular authorities. This procedure was clarified in the Ad exstirpanda papal
bull written by Pope Innocent IV in 1252, which also authorized the use of
torture for extracting confessions from the accused and recommended burning at
the stake as the appropriate punishment for those found guilty and unrepentant.
Ad exstirpanda marked the beginning of one of the most brutal periods of
Inquisition.
The best known of
the four major inquisitions was the Spanish Inquisition, which ran from 1438
onwards. One of its primary tasks was enforcement of the Alhambra Decree by the
monarchs of Spain in 1492, ordering the immediate expulsion of all Jews from
the country and its territories.
The Office of the
Inquisition would not be established until 1542 by Pope Paul III, with its
stated objective “to maintain and defend the integrity of the faith and to
examine and proscribe errors and false doctrines.”
Portuguese
version of this article: Conservapedia e a
Inquisição
Source: Last Days Watchman
Recommended Reading on the
Inquisition:
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