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news
worldnews
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italy
1464687
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# Inquisition wasn't quite as bad as people think, says Pope
By Bruce Johnston in Rome 12:01AM BST 16 Jun 2004
The Vatican sought to play down the terrors of the Inquisition yesterday,
claiming that far fewer people were tortured and executed for heresy than was
popularly believed.
The reassessment by Church historians was seized on by the Pope to qualify the
apology he made for the Inquisition during the Church's millennium
celebrations.
The research emerged from a conference of scholars convened in 1998 to help
the Pope assess the impact of the Inquisition, which often used brutal methods
to suppress alleged witchcraft and doctrinal unorthodoxy.
Church officials said that statistics and other data demolished myths about
the Inquisition, including that torture and executions were commonly used.
"For the first time we studied the Inquisition in its entirety, from its
beginnings to the 19th century," said Agostino Borromeo, a professor of
history of Catholic and other Christian confessions at Rome's Sapienza
University. Prof Borromeo said that while there were some 125,000 trials of
suspected heretics in Spain, research found that about one per cent 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.
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