• The Terrifying Inquisition
    Awake!—1986 | April 22

    • The Inquisitorial Procedure

      The inquisitors, Dominican or Franciscan friars, would assemble the local inhabitants in the churches. They were summoned there to confess to heresy if they were guilty of it or to denounce any heretics known to them. Even if they suspected someone of heresy, they were to denounce the person.

      Anyone​—man, woman, child, or slave—​could accuse a person of heresy, without fear of being confronted with the accused or of the latter even knowing who had denounced him. The accused rarely had someone to defend him, since any lawyer or witness in his behalf would himself have been accused of aiding and abetting a heretic. So the accused generally stood alone before the inquisitors, who were at the same time prosecutors and judges.

      Those accused were given at the most a month to confess. Whether they confessed or not, the “inquiry” (Latin, inquisitio) would begin. The accused were held in custody, many in solitary confinement with little food. When the bishop’s prison was full, the civil prison was used. When it overflowed, old buildings were converted to prisons.

      Since the accused were presumed guilty even before the trial began, the inquisitors used four methods to induce them to confess to heresy. First, threat of death on the stake. Second, shackled confinement in a dark, damp, tiny cell. Third, psychological pressure by prison visitors. And, last, torture, which included the rack, the pulley, or strappado, and torture by fire. Monks would stand by to record any confession. Acquittal was virtually impossible.

      Penalties

      Sentences were pronounced on Sundays, in church or in a public square, with the clergy present. A light sentence could be penances. Yet this included the compulsory wearing of a yellow felt cross sewn to the clothes, which made it well-nigh impossible to find employment. Or the sentence could be public flogging, imprisonment, or being handed over to the secular authorities for death by fire.

      The heavier penalties were accompanied by the confiscation of the condemned person’s property, which was shared by the Church and the State. The surviving members of the heretic’s family thus suffered greatly. The houses of heretics and of those who had given heretics shelter were torn down.

      Also, dead people reported to have been heretics were tried posthumously. If they were found guilty, their bodies were exhumed and burned, and their property confiscated. Again this brought untold suffering to the innocent surviving members of the family.

      Such was the general procedure followed by the medieval Inquisition, with variations according to time and place.

      Pope-Approved Torture

      In 1252 Pope Innocent IV published his bull Ad exstirpanda, officially authorizing the use of torture in the ecclesiastical courts of the Inquisition. Further regulations for the way torture was to be used were promulgated by Popes Alexander IV, Urban IV, and Clement IV.

      At first the ecclesiastical inquisitors were not allowed to be present when the torture was administered, but Popes Alexander IV and Urban IV removed this restriction. This enabled the “questioning” to continue in the torture chamber. Similarly, as originally authorized, torture was to be applied only once, but the papal inquisitors got around this by claiming that renewed sessions of torture were merely “a continuation” of the first session.

      Soon even witnesses were being tortured to make sure they had denounced all the heretics they knew. Sometimes an accused person who confessed to heresy was tortured even after confessing. As The Catholic Encyclopedia explains, this was “to compel him to testify against his friends and fellow-culprits.”​—Volume VIII, page 32.