Reviewing a book called Inquisition: The Reign of Fear by Toby Green, Quentin de la Bedoyere warns against apologetic attempts to rationalize the Spanish Inquisition. He was the science editor of the Catholic Herald, and the son of Michael, who edited the newspaper from 1934 to 1962.
The review was titled "Inquisition apologists are missing the point." It appeared (this version has been slightly trimmed) in the issue of 20 July 2007. For more articles from the archives, read here.
Unlike the Papal Inquisition of the 13th century and the Roman Inquisition of the 16th, the Spanish Inquisition was effectively wrested from more benign papal control and became a matter of local church and state. Despite protests from Rome it continued on its own way — with converted Jews and Moors, or their descendants, as the initial main enemy, to be supplemented later by those with Lutheran tendencies, sexual deviants and others suspected of heterodoxy.
