POPES AND INQUISITORS

Then we come to the long string of Popes who adopted the name "Innocent" when they donned the white robes of "the Vicar of Christ." We know little about some of them, but others are so well known, and there is so little dispute about their character, that the name is a mockery. All that the Catholic editor could do in such cases was to make a few of those neat little cuts with his scissors that at least make the record seem grayish instead of black. For instance, under "Innocent III" the old article spoke about the "horrible massacre" of the Albigensians which he ordered. The word "horrible" has been cut out; it was, no doubt, too strong an expression for the fact that only a few hundred thousand men, women, and children were savagely massacred because they would not bow to Rome. No one doubts the religious sincerity and strict personal conduct of Innocent III, but this article does not give the reader the least inkling of the perfidy, dishonesty, and cruelty into which his fanaticism led him.
It is different with Innocent VIII, an elderly roue who got the papacy in the fight of the factions and immensely promoted the debauchery of Rome and the Vatican. The old article said, moderately enough:

"His youth, spent at the Neapolitan court, was far from blameless, and it is far from certain that he was married to the mother of his numerous family."

As he was credited by public opinion with only 16 children the censor must have thought this excessive, so cut out the whole passage. Naturally he cut out also the later passage: His curia was notoriously corrupt, and he himself openly practiced nepotism in favoring his children, concerning whom the epitaph is quoted: "He guiltily begot six sons and as many daughters, so that Rome has the right to call him Father." Thus he gave to his undeserving son Franceschetto several towns near Rome and married him to the daughter of Larenzo de Medici (the greatest prince of Italy).

All this is cut out of the new edition of the Encyclopedia, which was to appeal to all by its accuracy. There is not the least doubt in history that the Pope had children, that his son Francheschietto was one of the vilest and most dissipated young men of Rome, and that Innocent was aware that the Papal Court was sinking deeper and deeper into corruption. The notice of the Pope in this edition is a calculated deception of the reader.

It is almost as bad with the notice of Pope Innocent X; and the deception here is the more wicked because Innocent X ruled after what Catholic apologists call the Counter-Reformation, which is supposed to have purified the papacy and the church. The notice in the old edition at least gave a hint of his character by saying:

"Throughout his pontificate he was completely dominated by his sister-in-law Donna Olimpia Maidaechini (a woman of masculine spirit). There is no reason to credit the scandalous reports of an Illicit attachment. Nevertheless the influence of Donna Olimpia was baneful, and she made herself thoroughly detested by her inordinate ambition and rapacity."

This was a mild and inadequate expression of the notorious historical fact that for 10 years this vile woman openly sold -- clerics, even bishops, queuing at the door of her palace -- every ecclesiastical office in the Power of the papacy; and it suppresses entirely the scandal of the Pope's "nephews," The license granted her was so enormous that folk had every reason to assume that She had been Innocent's mistress. Yet in the new edition of the Encyclopedia the main part of the moderate passage I quoted from the older edition is cut out. An incorrect date, no doubt. Each such notice of a Pope to the middle of the 17th century is thus doctored, to protect the modern Catholic myth of a Counter- Reformation.

We come a few pages later to "Inquisition," and here you will expect that X has surpassed himself. Not a bit of it. He has changed little -- because the article even in the old edition was written by a French Catholic, Alphandery. X has just touched it up a little and put his mark at the end of it. It is as scandalous a piece of deception of the public, since it is not stated and cannot now easily be verified that Alphandery was a Catholic, as for the Encyclopedia Americana to have got Japanese propagandists to write the long section in it on Japan. It opens with a show of flooring at once the critics of the Inquisition. They are supposed to say it began in the 12th century, whereas it goes back to the early church, even to Paul. This is throwing dust in the eyes of the reader. "Inquisition" does not mean persecution or prosecution for heresy but "searching out" heresy, and it was the Popes of the early 13th century who created the elaborately organized detective as well as penal force which we specifically call the Inquisition.

It next scores by remarking that the early Fathers did not favor Punitive measures. How on earth could they have dreamed of them under Roman law and when they were an illicit sect themselves. It says that there was little persecution for heresy from the 6th to the 12th century, the Dark Age; which amuses us when we recall that 99 and a fraction percent of the population of Europe were illiterate and so densely ignorant that folk could not tell one doctrine from another and just attended Sunday services in Latin. Then we get the germs of the cowardly and debased modern Catholic apology: that the church was always reluctant to persecute but the zeal of the peoples and princes of Europe forced its hand. Of course, both writers make much of the famous persecution decree of Frederick II -- the great heretic who appealed to the other kings to abolish the Papacy -- but are careful not to mention the savage action of the papacy which dictated it or the fact that Frederick never applied the law. Torture the gentle church particularly disliked and only borrowed it from secular law: in which the church had enforced it for centuries for clerical offenses like blasphemy. They both say: "We must accept the conclusion Of H. C. Lea and Vancandard that comparatively few people suffered at the stake in the medieval Inquisition." That is a total perversion of Lea's words -- he refers to the first half of the Middle Ages when there was no Inquisition -- and they grossly mislead the reader by coupling Vacandard's name with his. Canon Vacandard was one of the most reckless of the French apologists.

But I cannot go phrase by phrase through this Catholic rubbish. In spite of all its sophistry and suppressions it leaves the Inquisition the most scandalous quasi-judicial procedure that ever disgraced civilization, yet it is not the full truth. It is true that it does not tell the lie that American apologists now do -- that the Roman Inquisition never executed men -- and it does not even mention, much less challenge, the definite figure of 341,042 victims of the Spanish Inquisition which Llorente, secretary of the Inquisition, canon of the church, and Knight of the Caroline order, compiled from its archives. Its sophistry gets it so muddled in regard to this important question of the spanish Inquisition that it first says the people regarded heresy as "a national scourge" and the Inquisition as "a powerful and indispensable agent of public protection," and then tells how the greed of the Inquisition "rapidly paralyzed commerce and industry." It does not tell how while Spain was still Catholic the fierce anger of the people destroyed the Inquisition.

This book would become another encyclopedia if I were to analyze in this way all the articles, especially on religious matters, that are in this new edition of the Britannica foisted on the reader as the common teaching of our historians, philosophers or sociologists, nor can I stop at every little specimen of the zeal of the group or phalanx of writers who mask themselves with an X. Even the article "Ionia" has suffered from their clumsy treatment. In a fine page in the last edition Dr. Hogarth summed up:

"Ionia has laid the world under its debt not only by giving birth to a long series of distinguished men of letters and science but by originating the schools of art which prepared the way for the brilliant artistic development of Athens in the 5th century."

This and the best evidence for it are cut out, but X does not put his crooked mark here. He appends it to the next section, which is on the geology of the Ionian Isles! In my own historical Works, I have laid great stress on the significance of Ionia and I have found my readers puzzled. They will not get much help from this mutilated article.

The historical section of the article "Italy" -- a country which is described as 97.12 percent Catholics even now that Communists and Socialists dominate it -- ought to have been revised, not in a Catholic sense, for it was far too lenient to the papacy, but to harmonize with the modern teaching of history. Instead of this being done X is allowed to add a gushing section on the beautiful accord of the Pope and Mussolini, the "unexampled scenes of enthusiasm" in Rome when the infamous compact was signed, and the joy of "300,000,000 Catholics" through-out the world, This in face of the notorious fact that the Fascists themselves bitterly attacked Mussolini for signing the Treaty and all that has happened since. The Chicago professors might ask Professor Salvemini what he thinks of it. The total impression given to any reader who ploughs through the history of Italy in this article from the time of Charlemagne onward is, as far as the relations of the Italians with the Popes are concerned, false; but I doubt if anybody ever does read these historical articles in encyclopedias from beginning to end.