Halley’s Bible Handbook and the Inquisition
By Julio
Severo
I had
read, from cover the cover, “Halley’s Bible Handbook” thirty years ago. With
its focus on the Bible and the way the Bible was central for America’s patriotism,
Halley helped me understand the history of the Church and cherish the evangelical
foundations of America.
The
patriotic evangelical handbook had also other U.S. presidents praising the
Bible:
President U.S. Grant: “The Bible is the sheet anchor of our liberties.”
President Andrew Jackson: “That book, Sir, is the Rock upon which our republic.”
President John Quincy Adams: “So great is my veneration for the Bible, that the earlier my children
begin to read it the more confident will be my hopes that they will prove
useful citizens to their country and respectable members of society. I have
made it a practice for several years to read the Bible through in the course of
every year.”
I
loved this Bible-centered patriotism!
The
edition available to us in Brazil then was a translation from the American
edition published in 1962 by Zondervan. The original English handbook had
already sold over a million copies in America in the early 1960s.
Some
time ago I needed its informative resources, because some Brazilian Catholics,
active in the conservative and pro-life movement, began to downplay the horrors
of the Inquisition and preach a strange revisionism to sanitize it.
In my
view, Catholics today have no culpability for the crimes of their church
centuries ago. But the advocacy of the revisionism of the Inquisition, which
committed many of those crimes, is fully incompatible with the conservative and
pro-life movement and unity.
One
of the most strident revisionists is a Brazilian who is an immigrant in the
U.S. who has said,
“The myth of the Inquisition has
been the most extensive and lasting campaign of slander and defamation in
history to this day, with multi-million dollar funding, and it seems this
campaign will have no end. Those who created it were not Illuminatis or
communists. It was created by Protestants, who keep promoting it even today,
and the irradiant center is U.S. churches.”
Downplaying
the horrors of the Inquisition, he also 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.”
Of
course, honest pro-life Catholics would never agree with this
misrepresentation. Conservapedia, owned by Catholic homeschool teacher Andrew
Schlafly, said,
“Many [Catholic] 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.’”
To
confront the emergence of a strident revisionist movement in Brazil, I acquired
the latest U.S. edition of Halley’s Bible Handbook, thinking that it could
bring more information on the Inquisition than the much older Brazilian edition
I had read decades ago. But how surprised I was when I verified the modern
Bible handbook (Zondervan, 2000) had only one reference on the Inquisition. In
this solitary mention, Halley said that the Catholic Church “formed the
Inquisition to persecute Protestants.” Nothing else.
Besides,
the new American edition removed all the references of U.S. presidents praising
the Bible. No more the Bible and patriotism together. No more condemnation of
the Inquisition.
How different
from the old edition that has 24 mentions! Fifty years ago Zondervan was a real
evangelical publishing house, but in 1988 Zondervan
was bought by a secular publishing house, HarperCollins, which
publishes demonic books, including the Satanic Bible.
Does
this explain why the current edition of Halley’s Bible Handbook is fully
sanitized (or Satanized?) from its many historic references on the Inquisition?
Why an evangelical publishing house would cut off significant information on
the Inquisition while its parent organization does not cut off blatantly
satanic books is a mystery. But to please Satanists and pro-Inquisition
radicals is not the evangelical way. To censor U.S. presidents praising the
Bible is not the evangelical way.
Instead
of censoring, a new Halley should add Ronald Reagan praising the Bible. In
fact, it should make a prominent display of Reagan proclaiming 1983 as the Year of the Bible in
the United States. But the new edition has no U.S. president praising the Bible
and no condemnation of the Inquisition.
While
Halley’s latest edition (published in 2000) has only one mention of the
Inquisition, the 1962 Brazilian edition published by Edições Vida Nova has 24 references
of the Inquisition, including:
The horrors of the
Inquisition, ordered and sustained by the popes, over a 500-year period, when
untold millions of people were tortured and burned, represent the most brutal,
bestial and demonic picture in all the History. (Page 645.)
Pope Innocent
III, 1198-1216: Banned Bible reading in the vernacular. Ordered the
extermination of heretics. Established the Inquisition. Had Cathars massacred.
More blood was shed in his papacy and his close successors than in any other
time in the Church’s History, excepting the papal effort to smash the
Reformation in the 16 and 17 centuries.
The Inquisition,
named “Holy Office,” was established by Innocent III and perfected under the
next pope, Gregory IX. It was the ecclesiastical court charged to imprison and
punish heretics. It required everyone to give information on heretics. All
suspects of heresy were liable to tortures, without knowing who had accused.
The procedure was led secretly. The inquisitor gave the sentence and the victim
was delivered to civil officials to be imprisoned for life or burned. His
possessions were confiscated and split between the Church and State.
In the period
immediately after Innocent III, the Inquisition executed its most deadly work
in Southern France (see Cathars), but it was charged also with vast multitudes
of victims in Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Later, it was the main
agency of the papal effort to smash the Reformation. It is stated that in the
30 years between 1540 e 1570 nothing less than 900,000 Protestants were killed,
in the war impelled by the pope to exterminate Waldensians. Imagine cruel and
brutal friars and priests leading the work of torturing and burning at stake alive
innocent men and women; and they did it in the name of Christ, by the direct
command from their “vicar.” The Inquisition is the most infamous fact in the
History. It was created by the popes and used by them, for 500 years, to
maintain them in power. (Page 688.)
In the
Netherlands, the Reformation was at once welcome; Lutheranism, and later
Calvinism; Anabaptists were already numerous. Between 1513 and 1531, 25
different Bible translations were published in Dutch, Flemish and French. The
Netherlands were part of the domains of Charles V. In 1522 he established the
Inquisition in those nations, and he had Lutheran books burned. In 1546, he
banned the printing and ownership of the Bible, in Vulgate or other
translations. In 1535, he decreed “death, by fire,” of Anabaptists. Philip II (1566-98),
successor of Charles V, issued the same decrees of his father and, with the
assistance of Jesuits, advanced persecutions with bigger fury. By a sentence of
the Inquisition, all the population was condemned to death, and under Charles V
and Philip II over 100,000 were massacred with unbelievable savagery. Some were
chained to a stake close to fire and roasted slowly until their death; others
were thrown into dungeons, whipped, tortured in wooden horses, before being
burned. Women were burned alive, put into narrow coffins, trampled by
torturers. Those trying to escape to other nations were intercepted by soldiers
and massacred. After years of non-resistance, suffering outrageous cruelty,
Protestants in the Netherlands joined together under the leadership of William of Orange
and, in 1572, began the great revolt. After unbelievable sufferings, they
conquered, in 1609, their Independence; Holland, in the North, became
Protestant; Belgium, in the South, Roman Catholic. Holland was the first nation
to have public schools supported by taxes, and to make legal the principle of
religious tolerance and free press. (Page 700.)
In Spain, the
Reformation never made headway, because the Inquisition had already been
established there. All effort for freedom or independence of opinion was implacably
smashed. Torquemada (1420-98), a Dominican monk and supreme inquisitor, in 18
years burned 10,200 people and condemned 97,000 to life imprisonment. Victims
were usually burned alive in the squares, creating religious feasts. From 1481 to
1808, there were at least 100,000 martyrs and 1,500,000 people were deported. “In
the 16 and 17 centuries, the Inquisition extinguished the literary life of Spain,
almost taking Spain from the sphere of the European civilization.” When the
Reformation began, Spain was the most powerful nation in the world. Its current
status of insignificancy among the nations shows what papacy can do to a
nation. (Page 701.)
Halley
says that millions perished in the Inquisition.
Jews
talk about thousands and thousands of Jewish victims. In 2013, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Pope Francis at the Vatican, and gave the
leader of the Catholic Church “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth
Century Spain,” a Jewish book that largely revolves about Spanish Catholics
questioning, torturing, and punishing the Jews, exposing how thousands of them
were expelled from Spain or burned at the stake.
In
stark contrast, the Brazilian
revisionist who is an immigrant in the U.S. assures that the numbers
are not millions or thousands. He said that the condemned individuals were less
than ten a year in two dozen nations… and died with no torture and suffering!
How
to explain the inconsistency in the numbers of the Inquisition’s victims?
Renowned Catholic historian Paul Johnson, in his book “A History Of
Christianity” (published in the United Kingdom in 1976), explained: “Many
countries would not admit the Inquisition at all… There was the destruction of
records.”
Even
though the Brazilian
immigrant considers himself as a Catholic whose specialty is to
fight the Soviet propaganda, which for him is advanced today by Putin’s Russia,
he is equally determined to fight the “myth of the Inquisition,” which he said
“has been the most extensive and lasting campaign of slander and defamation in
history.”
In
fact, last July he said that the elimination of myths like the Inquisition from
the popular conscience is infinitely more important than removing a Marxist from
the presidency of a nation.
If
you thought that the Soviet propaganda was the most extensive and lasting
campaign of slander and defamation in history, you are wrong, according to the Brazilian
immigrant, who in a recent comment mockingly referred to the
Inquisition’s enemies as “champions of faith.” He said:
“I have never
seen a communist, when exercising the most ferocious and slanderous
revolutionary verbiage, descending the abysses of malice and wickedness enjoyed
in this country by the champions of faith.”
So is
the U.S. worse than the Soviet Union because during centuries it championed the
anti-Inquisition propaganda?
“In
this country” can only mean the U.S., where he is living right now as an
immigrant. If anti-Inquisition evangelicals (and also Jews) are worse than
communists, what is the Brazilian
immigrant doing living in the largest Protestant nation in the
world? (To understand more about the Brazilian immigrant, read this article in Conservapedia.)
If
the U.S. anti-Inquisition propaganda was supposedly worse than the Soviet
propaganda, why is he after the U.S. citizenship?
The
Soviet propaganda was actually one of the most repulsive things the world has
ever seen, but the anti-Inquisition “propaganda,” including through the efforts
of Halley, was one the most necessary things the United States has ever done
for the world. Different from the Soviet Union, the American “propaganda” was connected
to the Bible and a patriotism clearly founded on evangelical principles.
Why
promote a propaganda to sanitize the Inquisition and slander and Satanize the
United States for its historic opposition to the Inquisition? The result of
this satanization is the current Halley’s handbook: No Bible and patriotism
together. No reference to U.S. presidents praising the Bible.
Why
not spend their efforts to fight the abortion propaganda?
Source: Last Days Watchman
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