The Inquisition Continues

The inquisition by the Church of Rome began from the earliest times, and
has really never ended.  The one of the Middle Ages has been described  
as a standing mockery of justice, perhaps the most iniquitous that the 
arbitrary cruelty of man has ever devised.  It was marked by insatiable  
cupidity and truly was the Invention of Demons.  This cupidity replaced the
10 commandments with only one: "Bring Hither the Money".
St. Bernard is quoted as saying, "Whom can show me among the prelates who
does not seek rather to empty the pockets of his flock than to subdue their 
vices?"

It was written that the clergy of the Church of Rome was given to
drunkenness and robbery.

The arrogance of the clergy at the time can be summed up by the quote from
Pilichdorf:

"The worst man, if he be a priest, is more worthy than the holiest of laymen."

In the midst of the Middle Ages, simony was rampant.  Monasteries were
places of gambling and wine shops, and sexual perversions in the clergy was 
rampant.  Hence the need for the Pope so excommunicate certain priests in 
the middle of the 11th century and the papal admission that:

"Those charged with Divine grace participate in rapine and despoliation,
even in the shedding of blood."

1074 Excommunication of married priest was announced. 1123 the First Lateran
Council suppressed simony and marriage of priests. 1126 Pierre Bruys was 
burnt at the stake for complaining about church excesses.

Frere Raymond Jean was also executed for preaching against the church's 
abuses.

William Tyndale, the English ecclesiastical reformer and translator of the
first English language bible, many copies of which were seized and burnt by 
Church authorities, complained that:

"The Bishops burn who they list and whosoever displeaseth them."

Naturally enough, the church caught up with him.  Pope Alexander VI is
credited as saying:

"It is not God's wish that a sinner should die but that he should live and
pay."

The Franciscan splinter group, the Fraticelli, again called the pope an
Anti-christ.  But they were exterminated as heretics.  Their village of 
Magnalata was totally destroyed by Pope Martin V and EVERY RESIDENT killed.

In 1325 a Papal Bull 'Cum inter nonnullos' declared that it was heresy to
say that Jesus and his Apostles were poor.  The Inquisitors were ordered 
to prosecute any who believed that Jesus was a poor man.  The group of 114,
called the Spiritual Franciscans, who insisted that Jesus was
poor were all burned at the stake alive.

The Bohemians broke away from the church and separated into the Moravian
church after many wars and Crusades.  Apart from the church's avarice, they 
could not renounce the Gnostic Truths and accept the spurious claims of the 
church.

Gnosticism made so much sense and could refute so many of the clumsy lies
of the church that priest were prohibited from engaging in debates with 
Gnostics.  To divert attention, the church began building bigger and better 
Cathedrals with some of the money that it took from the people. ThUs who 
would not toe the line were finally crushed aby the brutality of the 
Inquisition.

The Papal Bull of MAy 15, 1252 authorized the Inquisitors to sieze the
goods of heretics in Italy, to imprison them, torture them, and on 
conviction, put them to death, all on minimal evidence. By many, the 
Inquisition has been described as a most elaborate extortion racket.  The
Inquisitors became incredibly rich and goods were confiscated before
conviction because it was taken for granted that no one escaped them.

The inquisitors worked on the presumption of guilt.  Prisoners of the
Inquisition had to pay for their own meals while incarcerated.  If they had
no money, they starved,and having had their property confiscated, many did.  It was Pope Gregory II who noted that too
many were starving.

The mechanism of false accusation of people with wealth eas extensively
used by the Inquisitors to gain more wealth for the church, for the rule 
imposed by them was such that anyone so accused had his or her property 
instantly confiscated.  Accusation was sufficient to confiscate the
property, for the church's inquisitor saw to it that no one who was accused
was ever freed.

Those accused were invariably put to death because of their confession
gained through horrendous torture, or else they were executed for being 
heretics and refusing to admit their guilt.

The accused could never win.  And in fact, with the exception of a few
personalities with extensive reputations, no one publically accused by the 
Inquisition was ever acquitted.

When the heretics wer to be burnt, the church, as a matter of formality,
would send these to civil court for execution.  And so it was that church 
historians wrote thta the church took no part in the corporal punishment of
heretics.  But if magistrates did not carry out the death penalty, they were
threatened with excommunication and subsequent arrest.  The only punishment
recognized by the church for heresy was burning alive.

But the church's deceit was exposed by a Bull from the Pope Leo X in 1521,
issued as a reponse to the Senate of Venice which had refused the numerous 
executions ordered by the Inquisition. Pope Leo wrote that his delegate was 
to compel the Senate of Venice, their Doge and his officals with the
church's censure and other appropriate legal measures to carry out 
the sentences and that from this Order there was no appeal.

In 1599 a Directive was published saying that judges were bound, under pain
of mortal sin, to execute witches.  Anyone who objected to the death 
sentence was suspected of complicity.  The records of inquisitors were not 
available to the civil courts.

When the magistrates of Brescia refused to burn some women comdemned as
witches wihtout seeing the records or the Inquisitors first, the Pope 
declared that they would be excommunicated within six days if they did not 
execute the women.  Many records were falsified by the inquisitors 
or course.

Every ruler and citizen was to assist them under threat of excommunication.
Torture was offically sanctioned in 1252 and was not abolished until 1816 
by Pope Pius VII.  For five and a half centuries, thousands upon thousands,
which then ran into millions, were slaughtered and many others had thier 
lives disrupted.  Even in England it is officially recorded that between
1542 and 1736 some 30,000 witches had been executed and England was 
relatively permissive in comparison to other countries.

Mass burnings in Spain and Portugal, held on Sundays and Holy Days, became
known as ACTS OF FAITH.  The executions occurred everywhere, in Italy, in
France, in Germany and so on. 400 were executed at Toulouse in a single day.  The executioner of Neisse
in Silesia constructed a special oven and roasted over 1000 people over a 
nine year period, including children as young as two years of age.

The inquisitors absolved each other and their torturers and executioners of
the guilt for the deaths.  Many of the women were gagged or had their tongues 
cut out before being walked to the stake so that they could not tell the 
crowds of their torture and rape in prison.  Witch-hunts were marked by 
sadistic sexual perversions as well, and girls as young as nine and a half
were eligable to be charged with witchcraft.

An inquisitor by the name of Flade who objected to his work and openly
stated that the confessions of the victums were false was himself arrested 
by the Archbishop and burned alive.

The rich were often targets to be blackmailed and falsely accused and so
were women who failed to consent to the lasciviousness of priests.  Civil 
authorities who criticized the Inquisition were themselves subject to it.

The Inquisitors were much hated, but they were attended by small armies who
could literally get away with murder, robbery and rape for they were above 
the law.  In 1252 the Papal Bull 'ad extirpanda' by Pope Innocent I, placed 
Inquisitors above the law.  Every ruler and citizen was to assist them under 
threat of excommunication.  Some of the Inquisitors were canonized. Examples 
include Pieroda Verona and Torquemada's chief protegee Pedro Arbues.  The
Inquisition achieved its aims of enriching the church and silencing its
critics.  The proceedings were held in private and secrecy.

As late as 1834 in Central and South America, heathen natives were tortured
and burnt for crimes against the 'truefaith'.  Their crimes were not 
believing in what the church demanded that they believe.  The inquisitors 
accompanied the missionaries to Central America where Mayan scribes had 
written that the Spanish invasion was the beginning of 'HELL' for them.

The arrogance and evilness of the church in regard to the Inquisition is
seen in the quote from Pope Pius X, -

"The naked fact that the church of her own authority has tried heretics and
condemned them to be delievered to death shows that she truly has the right 
of killing.  Who dares to say that the church has erred in a matter so grave 
as this?"

All of humanity has been outraged by the Inquisition.  However the
stranglehold by the church was so great that all critics were silenced 
one way or another.

In this century this Inquisition was taken over by the Nazis and the
Facists and there is no need to remind you of the atrocities in the
concentration camps.  And who was it that blessed Fascism and Hitlers's 
movement?  None other than the Papacy.  Apart from Mussolini and Hitler, 
Salazar, Peron, and most other Latin American Dictators are Roman Catholics 
in education and culture. Stalin trained for the priesthood in the Russian 
Church.  The relationship between their activities and their religious 
indoctrination is hard to miss.

Both Islam and Christianity indoctrinated and brainwashed their members
that it was thier duty to slaughter the unbelievers or whosoever refused 
to accept their particular version of the 'Truth'.  It is only the separation
of church and state as late as 1904 in France, and 1919 in Germany, and
the general awakening of people, that has put limitations on such vile
activities of the churchses, although in 1870 Unification of Italy and then
of Germany weakened the temporal powers of the papacy.

Even today, the Catholic church states that non-belief in its Dogmas will
be punished in the same way as the most atrocious crimes, and that a 
non-believer is subject to perdition.

The real Hell has been here on earth created by these churches and that is
why they will be destroyed, totally and forever.

In metaphysical terms it must be seen that there was a constant war between
Good and Evil in all the eras, but because this plane seems ruled by an Evil
Essense and was conductive to its manifestation, the controlling essense did 
manifest in all manner of evil.

Even in the cases where, as today, the church appears to be fighting for
the political, social, and economic freedom of people whom it loosely 
classifies as its members, the real aim is one of control of those people, 
spiritually, intellectually, economically, socially, and physically if at 
all possible.  The price for the apparent freedom it promises is demanded 
in its preaching and it is a very high price indeed: total spritual 
surrender and massive, surreptitious exploitation.

Today, unlike in former days, the church only preaches and incites and does
not actively take part in physical confrontations or clashes.  But it is 
still extremely active behind the scenes, often by bankrolling various 
movements when it sees situations developing which act contrary to its
best interest.  The church can deny and try to distance itself as much as
it likes, but the facts remain.  The transactions parove that this was so 
and those in charge knew and now that this was, and it occurring. The 
essense of control has remained evil and will remain evil until the
institution is totally destroyed.

Knowing what we do today about social psychology and programming of
thought, ect, it is easy to imagine that those caught in the clutches of  
the church's influence would be too frightened to deviate to any great 
degree.  Threatened continously with the punishments of a cruel and
vengeful God, it is no wonder then that Catholics and Christians in general
as a group suffer so much mental illness.  Their lives are rules by fear 
and guilt.  What his means, of course, is loss of energy, which is the result
of gross emotional exploitation.

Controlled by the Church meant backwardness in social terms and manipulation
of an ignorant people.  Classic examples are Spain and Italy, in which the  
church had a stranglehold and in which the people were kept poor and 
illiterate.

Money has also silence the church in speaking out against those who
committed crimes against humanity.  In our time, Mussolini and Hitler 
are perfect examples.  They paid the church, which willingly accepted, to 
remain silent! Even inside the United States, the anti-semitism taught by
the church prohobited the spred of information about what was acutally
happening as the Nazis and Facsist conducted their genecide.

In spite of the fact that Jesus' message was one of love, peace, and
harmony, the so-called Christian church (which claims to be his, but 
apparently is not) is the most efficient, exploitative, evil mechanism and  
institution of all the religions.  It is the most aggressive and militant 
of the religions, in spite of the fact that Islam is painted that way in 
the west today.  To reach the so-call Christian church's degree of evilness
and atrociousness Islam has a long way to go.

Posted: Thursday, May 08, 1997