The Catholic Inquisition: “A Medieval Holocaust!”

The Catholic Inquisition: “A Medieval Holocaust!”

(Just one of their many victims)

After the Second World War, political prisoners (such as the Poles who suffered terribly in Auschwitz) would often comment, “If the Nazis didn’t kill you, then the ‘liberating’ Russians did,” for many Polish women were brutally raped and subsequently died at the hands of peasant Russian conscripts. Yet, the same can also be said of the catholic church, for this Latin monstrosity of a church would murder nearly as many people as those that died in World War II!

It should be stated that some writers now believe that the combined deaths of both world wars would be only slightly less than the massacres at the hands of the catholic church from the 4th century up until the 19th century. Several historians have offered figures of 50 million people being murdered during this period. Catholic writer John Cornwell also states how 1-10 million people were murdered during the Inquisition period alone, with 10,000 females (many under the age of ten) perishing in Germany, according to the Sunday Times, 23 August 1998. Only the Russian Darwinist dictator Joseph Stalin would come anywhere near to matching this figure, for he would exterminate around 35 million of his own people.

“The rule of Rome revived in a new form and was just as real under the popes of the 13th century as it had been under the Caesars of the 1st. It was just as oppressive, cruel and bloody under Innocent III (1198-1216) as it had been under Nero and Domitian. The reality was the same, though the forms had changed. The Caesars did not persecute the witnesses of Jesus more severely and bitterly than did the popes; Diocletian did not destroy the saints or oppose the gospel more than did the Inquisition of papal days…At the Lateran Council in 1513, after all the so-called heretics had been silenced by fire and sword, an orator, addressing the Pope, said, “The whole body of Christendom is now subject to one head, even to thee; no one now opposes, no one now objects” (Grattan Guinness, Romanism and the Reformation, p. 31).

Yet Gregory the Great, Nicholas I and even a 3rd-century synod all condemned any form of torture towards the laity (officially that is) as a violation of divine law. By the 12th century, however, the popes were in need of more money and quickly became generals, emperors, gods, and kings all rolled into one, and off they went fighting on behalf of their church to retain the wealth they already had and to seek even more, if and where possible.

Christianity was already secure in the United Kingdom long before Augustine arrived and started murdering Christians. Augustine fought very hard to replace Britain’s early form of Christianity; however, such Christians would not give up their religion so easily, nor would they accept the pope as their “supreme pontiff.” Many were martyred for not converting to Catholicism (Catholic Encyclopaedia, Vol. VI, p. 797).

King Henry IV passed special laws through Parliament, which allowed “heretics” to be tracked down and executed for not accepting catholicism (Thomas Armitage, History of the Baptists, Vol. 1, p. 323).

Upon Augustine’s death, the following words were inscribed on his tombstone:

“Here rests the lord Augustine who…reduced king Ethelbert and his nation from the worship of idols [that’s rich coming from the catholic church] to the faith [Catholicism, that should be] of Christ” (Bede, Vol. II, Chapter 3).

Bloody Mary executed 289 protestants by burning them alive at the stake. Even bishops Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer were not exempt from dying for their faith; and Latimer’s dying words to Ridley have gone down in Church history as being some of the most poignant:


The catholic church has long stated that heretics (meaning non-submissive, non-catholics) should be killed (Catholic Encyclopaedia, Vol. VII, p. 260).

The “popular” Thomas Aquinas, also had the following to say about “heretics”:

“They should be done to death” (Ethics, Vol. 1, p. 332).

The Council of Toulouse (1119 AD) affirmed that “heretics” who refused to attend mass and submit to Rome were to be punished severely (Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. V, p. 482).

Pope Urban once told his faithful:

“Go, soldiers…subdue these dastardly nations” (The World’s Great Speeches, 1954, p. 69).

And Pope Leo XIII ordered all religions to be suppressed, except catholics of course (Catholic Encyclopaedia, Vol. VII, p. 216).

There were also other popes, such as Alexander IV, Julius III, Clement V, and Benedict XIV, who each personally ordered and sanctioned torture and murder of all “heretics” (Rev. R.P. Blackeny, Manual of Romish Controversy, 1851, p. 100).

So, the Inquisition took root under papal orders, but under the leadership of one Thomas de Torquemada for 15 long and very bloody years.

This group of catholic fanatical jihadists were led by the bloodthirsty Dominicans, an order that is still in existence today.

Prior to Vatican II (1961-1965), archbishops and bishops had to take the following oath:

“I will do my utmost to persecute and oppose heretics and schismatics” (Cited by Samuel W. Barnum, Romanism, As It Is, 1879, p. 275).

In total, the Inquisition functioned from 1273 to 1870 AD.

Christians informed on Christians for trivial and minor issues. Informants, in return, gracefully received indulgences (meaning ‘less time suffering in purgatory’ when they died). Everybody was watching one another, during this time of a catholic police state.

All public executions (whether by boiling water, sword, hanging, strangulation, beheading, or being burnt alive) were done under orders from the church and in the presence of family members.

One writer offered the following concerning a slaughter that took place in France in 1572:

“…One of the most horrific and heinous of crimes in France in 1572, by the torturing and massacre of seventy thousand Huguenots in Paris and other major cities in France. This evil crime commenced at 3 o’clock in the morning of Sunday 24th August and continued until the Tuesday morning. This has become known as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day.”

After this slaughter, pope Gregory XIII was so elated at its success that he held a special mass of thanksgiving; bonfires and fireworks were also used in the celebrations.

Another writer offers the following and quite harrowing account from 1641:

“For example, in the seventeenth century (1641), the Catholics in Ireland fixed October 23 (the feast of Ignatius Loyola) as a massacre day for Christians and proceeded to kill 150,000 Protestants in one day, which is more than twice as many Catholics as were killed in armed combat fighting Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) in a year. Bible-believing Protestants were buried in the ground up to their necks till they starved; one man was forced to go to mass, after which they ripped him open and let him bleed to death. Another they sawed asunder, slit his wife’s throat, dashed out the brains of his young child, and threw the corpse into a pigsty to be eaten by swine. Several Christians were stripped naked, fastened to horses by ropes placed around their middles, and dragged through bogs until they expired. Thousands were mutilated by having arms, hands, and legs cut off and by being left to bleed to death. Three hundred were drowned in one day in the county of Tyrone, and fifty or sixty were put into one house which was set on fire.”

And one mustn’t be allowed to forget the thirty-year war (1618-1648 AD) in Germany where 50%, that’s half the country, were slaughtered by the catholic church during this horrific period of German history. For those that managed to escape alive and rebuild their lives, they then had to deal with the fact that most of their properties had been totally destroyed (Hugo Grotius, On the Laws of War and Peace, 1625).

The former catholic priest and Jesuit theologian Peter De Rosa graphically describes another such case:

“A Christian wife with child was arrested, stripped naked, her arms tied, the cords twisted painfully, transferred her to the potro, a trestle with sharp-edged rungs across it like a ladder. Her head was lower than her feet. The executioner poured water down her throat, some prisoners also had six to eight jars poured down them. Four days later this excruciating torture was repeated again in the presence of two Dominicans and one Episcopal vicar: her crime – unable to eat pork and wearing fresh undergarments on Saturday. She was released after only three years probably due to insanity” (Vicars of Christ, p. 235-237).

We then have another cruel and barbaric account, this time involving a ten-year-old girl:

“The Catholics proceeded to roast a ten-year-old girl over a fire and then killed a mother with her infant, after pursuing her into a cave in the woods” (Morland, History of the Evangelical Churches of Piedmont, p. 349).

We are once again offered another horrific account of such merciless and pointless barbarity:

“[Victims were] torn to pieces with hocks, laid on red-hot grills, rolled on broken glass, pulled apart by horses, eaten by wild beasts, whipped and starved to death.”

Such incidents of cruelty as this are even acknowledged by catholics themselves. For example, in the Rhemish New Testament, we read the following concerning Revelation 17:6, ‘drunken with the blood of the saints’:

“Protestants foolishly expound this of Rome, because heretics are there put to death [by Rome.] But their blood is not called the blood of saints, any more than the blood of thieves or man-killers, or other malefactors; and for the shedding of it no commonwealth shall give account.”

Throughout this highly controversial and torrid history of Catholicism (which lasted for over six hundred years, under orders from eighty so-called “infallible” popes), millions of innocent people had been tortured and murdered for not wishing to follow or convert to their false pagan religion.

Even Napoleon’s much-hardened soldiers were sickened when they found naked and insane people imprisoned under the floorboards in catholic prisons. They were so appalled at what they found, they released these religious prisoners and blew up the Spanish monastery that had so long held them. One can easily see where the Nazis got their cruel and wicked methods from.

Some of these prisoners were Jews who refused to convert to Rome. When Napoleon’s men released them and allowed them to have free worship services, they dedicated a special prayer for him. For non-Jews, the way the catholic church humiliated them was to display their badge of shame – cross symbols.

(The catholic church, or as it should be called, the church of Constantine, not only gives the real Church and Bible-believer a bad name but shamefully brings disgrace and utter contempt to the glorious and beloved name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Also one notes how due to political correctness and catholicism becoming more fashionable and mainstream, historians and spectators of world events have somewhat conveniently forgotten much of what Rome has done over the centuries. But God cannot and will not forget, or overlook all the innocent blood that Rome is guilty of shedding. One day He will summon her to give an account to Him!)

Napoleon later boxed up and shipped off to France some 3,000 crates of files which had been collated by Rome’s secret police on over 100,000 people. However, some of these boxes were lost and destroyed during the dispatch to France. Some documents did find their way onto the black market, and the catholic church was forced to pay extortionately high prices to get this sensitive material back.

Second World War

During the war, many of Hitler’s top generals and senior officers were practising catholics. The SS was also successful in duplicating the Jesuit structure for its sadistic troops. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Jews persecuted during this reign of terror were not only forced by the Nazis to publicly wear yellow bonnets but also compelled to wear the Star of David for all to see.

(For the record the catholic church never excommunicated Hitler, and even after his cowardly suicide, which was a ‘mortal sin’ for catholics at that time, he was nevertheless still ‘honoured’ by receiving a full-blown blasphemous requiem mass by Pius XII. He was even reported to have said: “I am completely convinced that I am acting as the agent of God. I am now a catholic and will always remain so.”)

During this period, catholic bishops, monks, and priests helped the Ustashi, with support from Archbishop Stepinac. (This ‘faithful’ prince of his church was later made cardinal by Pius XII). It is reported that 820,000 Serbian Greek Orthodox Christians were slaughtered by Rome.

Such atrocities are nothing new, as this article has already outlined, for we also read how catholic priests ordered the deaths of “heretics” in Krizevci, Yugoslavia. A priest called Peric said, “Kill my sister.” She was Greek Orthodox.

In 1949, 49 Protestants in South America were targeted and threatened with death if they refused to attend mass and hand over their Bibles, they would face death (Christian Science Monitor, 12 Sept. 1950).

So, one must ask the question, “Where did all this religious and bigoted intolerance come from?” According to De Rosa, the pagan Roman emperor Constantine was incredibly tolerant, as we can read in a letter he sent to his eastern rival Licinius. Of course, this could be mere propaganda, but it’s worth sharing nevertheless:

“We have long considered that freedom of worship should not be denied. Rather, each man’s thoughts and desire should be granted him, thus enabling him to have regard for spiritual things as he himself may choose. This is why we have given orders that everyone should be allowed to have his own beliefs and worship as he wishes.”

De Rosa continues to offer the following:

“It is ironic that no document in Church history, not even from the Second Vatican Council, is as tolerant, generous or wise as the Edict of Milan, composed by two bloodthirsty warriors.”

The Inquisition was agreed, planned, and later initiated in the “Holy Office” of the Vatican. This institution is now called “The Congregation For The Doctrine Of Faith” and is still in operation today.

Joseph Ratzinger, the former pope, once led this office for 15 years, but only through “political means.” However, some South American catholics have been involved, directly and indirectly, in destroying protestant churches (Time Magazine, 5 Oct. 1953).

We are offered the following and rather interesting statement:

“It [the Vatican] has no army and no Inquisition of its own, nor is any single kingdom in Europe willing any longer to act as its executioner. It utterly lacks the power, to persecute directly or indirectly…it is too weak politically to deft modern society by reintroducing medieval tortures, massacres, religious crusades and the auto da fe. But it is as willing as ever and awaits the opportunity only.”

Post-Vatican II

Before Joseph Ratzinger became pope, he gave a speech in Spain, in which he expressed his opinion that the Inquisition was:

“Not as dark as is thought.” He went on further to justify it by saying: “It fought against fanaticism” and its methods were “much more humane” than is generally appreciated (Sunday Times, 23 Aug. 1998).

Although the official bloodthirsty Inquisition has long ceased, Cromwell stated the following about a new wave of inquisition that commenced in 1903, under pope Pius X and dubbed the “black terror.” This time, however, it used more indirect and subtle methods of controlling and silencing those who would dare to rebel and question their church’s views and beliefs:

“Sister Lavina [Byrne] is a Roman Catholic nun, a member of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary…Byrne wrote a book published in 1994 called Women on the Altar. It modestly advocated ordination for women…copies of the book quickly sold out in Britain… at the behest of the Vatican, the press recently removed the 1,300 copies of the book it had left. It is deciding whether to incinerate or pulp them. Byrne has no idea who reported, or “delated” her book to Rome. But she believes it was the work of right-wing Catholic women in England who target women “dissidents” and bombard the Vatican with complaining letters and calls for radical action.”

Cromwell again states the following about this new wave of inquisition:

“To silence the modernists, he [Pius X] established a worldwide spy and propaganda network. It was directed by a grotesque individual – clumsy, overweight, myopic, with steel-rimmed spectacles – called Umberto Benigni. A former journalist and editor, Benigni used the most up-to-date media methods, stringers, telegrams, copying machines, to collect anonymous information on Catholic priests and scholars the world over. He had a liking for secret codes and nicknames, referring to Pius X in his cables as “Mama”….at Benigni’s suggestion, Pius X insisted that Catholic ordinands must take an anti-modernist oath. This involved assent to all papal teaching, both as to content and as to the “sense” in which the Vatican meant it to be understood. Such internal assent went beyond anything dreamt up even by Stalin or the worst imaginings of George Orwell. The oath survives to this day in a new but similarly encompassing formula taken by Catholic ordinands, seminary teachers and Catholic university theologians. The pernicious result of Pius X’s campaign was the shackling of free and imaginative Catholic thinking, discussion and writing for the next 50 years. In the 1950s, a number of Catholic thinkers attempted to break out of the constraints imposed by Pius X, but Pius XII resumed the campaign. In an encyclical entitled “Of Human Nature,” he declared that, once the pope has pronounced on a topic of faith or morals, all discussion must end, even among competent theologians.”

The late catholic theologian, Bernard Haring, had the following to say about his contempt for the Vatican ‘thought police’:

“I would prefer Hitler’s courts, to another papal interrogation. Hitler’s trials were certainly more dangerous, but they were not an offence to my honour.”

However, on 16 June 2004, The Times newspaper reported that the Vatican had issued a statement in which they once again tried to play down their bloodthirsty past. They claimed that out of the 125,000 known trials of suspected “heretics” in Spain, only 1% of the defendants were executed, far fewer than commonly believed. Many of the burnings at the stake were carried out by civil rather than religious tribunals.

Pope John Paul II also said:

“…that actions which had disfigured the face of the Church had to be viewed in their historical context.”

To think that the “secular” powers of the day, all living in catholic controlled countries, somehow took it upon themselves to arrest, torture, and then murder innocent people, without any oversight whatsoever from the catholic church, is not only fanciful but incredibly insulting to the victims who paid the ultimate price at the hands of such barbarians. And while Rome would like to have people think that the suffering and subsequent “de-programming” that many of the victims of the Inquisition went through was for their own good, much like the way the North Koreans do to their citizens, isn’t it more truthful to say that this was done primarily for one purpose? Namely, to retain power over people and not to lose their financial empire? We find exactly the same thing in Scripture with the Pharisees and their hatred of Jesus:

“If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation…Then from that day forth, they took counsel together for to put him to death” (John 11:48-53).

And according to the Protestant newspaper The English Churchman Rome was behind smuggling stolen arms back in 1999, during the Kosovan war:

“The arms were mostly Russian but included NATO arms stolen from Germany…The consignment was ordered in the name of Father Luciano Augustina, a Roman Catholic priest in Scutari…Rodney Atkinson, of Free Nations, said recently, ‘The Vatican was using Caritas to provide cover for NATO and German arms smuggling to the KLA. They may also have provided Iran, the world’s leading terrorist state, with the same cover in Bosnia. The Vatican’s goal is a single European Catholics superstate” (Issue no. 7679, 6-13 Jan. 06.)

Sanctions should have been imposed against Rome.

With all the killings throughout the history of the Church, sometimes at the hands of the Protestant Reformers as well, all those that name the name of Christ really should have heeded the following quote:

“The Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour of souls, sent fishermen, not soldiers, for the propagation of his gospel.”

Finally, may I leave the reader with one more sombre statement from Grattan Guinness:

“I have stood in that valley of Lucerna where dwelt the faithful Waldenses, those ancient Protestants who held to the pure gospel all through the dark ages, that lovely valley with its pine-clad slopes which Rome converted into a slaughterhouse. Oh, horrible massacres of gentle, unoffending, noble-minded men! Oh, horrible massacres of tender women and helpless children! Yes, ye hated them, ye hunted them, ye stuck them on spits, ye impaled them, ye hanged them, ye roasted them, ye flayed them, ye cut them in pieces, ye violated them, ye violated the women, ye violated the children, ye forced flints into them and stakes, and stuffed them with gunpowder, and blew them up and tore them asunder limb from limb, and tossed them over precipices and dashed them against the rocks; ye cut them up alive, ye dismembered them; ye racked, mutilated, burned, tortured, mangled, massacred holy men, sainted women, mothers, daughter, tender children, harmless sacrificed them in heaps, in hecatombs, turning all Spain, Italy, France, Europe, Christian Europe, into a slaughter-house, a charnel house, an Akeldama.”




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