This article, written by my wife Anne, is in response to the comments by "Why" to this article on Roger Simon's excellent blog. Because Anne is Catholic, this addresses the history of the Catholic church.
Regarding the contention that the number of people killed in the Inquisition will never be known, nonsense. The documents are preserved; they can be studied; they have been studied. The exact figures are very well known.
Look in "The Spanish Inquisition" by Henry Kamen. This is a scholar who spent 30 years studying the actual documents of the Inquisition. And he has the facts, to prove that Inquisition was nothing like the hysterical claims. Kamen is the leading scholar in the field. The book goes into exhausting detail--lots and lots of detail-of the actual documents.
Here is a quote from "Triumph" by Crocker about heresies and the church: "The Church proceeded by custom and tradition...Such complacency and conservatism meant the Church did not feel terribly threatened by small, scattered outbreaks of religious eccentricity. These, as a rule, either collapsed without a papal push or were met with swift, vigilante justice before they came to the Church's attention. When local priests and bishops did see violent mobs converging on known or suspected heretics, the men of the cloth almost always tried to intervene on the side of peace, tolerance, and prayers for the conversion of the wayward. This was an extremely unpopular position--something the mob regarded as akin to intervening on the side of child molesters--but the Church believed in peaceable restraint" (p 170). “
Recall the way the church treated Martin Luther. After Luther called for the pope to be assassinated, bishops to be thrown down, etc. , the church spent many years and endless attempts to reason with Luther. He was finally called before Diet (investigation) of Worms (a town) where Luther refused to reconcile with the church and so he was...put to the rack? Hung? No, the church cast him out of the church. The meanies!! How vicious can you be?
Here is the Crocker's "Triumph" on the Inquisition: "the Inquisition remained a part of Spanish life for 350 years...Modern scholarship has since established beyond doubt that the litany of abuses and crimes that have made the phrase "the Spanish Inquisition" notorious was dramatically overblown by a torrent of Protestant and secularist propaganda to which the Church...did not even bother to respond...It appears safe to say that far fewer people perished in 350 years' worth of the Spanish Inquisition ( 4,000) than were killed in a single day in the American Civil War. The comparison isn't flip, for the issues were similar... “(p 228).
The specific event condemned as “THE Spanish Inquisition” occurred for a few decades in the 1500s. Its death toll was approximately 300.
Now, compare the secular courts to the Inquisition. In one year of Queen Elizabeth's reign 6,000 people were executed. That's 6,000 in one year by the secularist courts, and 4,000 in 350 years by the church. These were brutal times. Kamen's book recounts hundreds of instances of people trying to transfer their cases into the Inquisitional courts to escape the much more brutal civil courts.
Whoever wrote the statement from Rice University is seriously fact challenged. The statement that the church was "several competing sects” is wrong, although anti-religion scholars such as the Jesus Seminar continue to push this theory.
Specifically, Church councils didn't start under Constantine. On the contrary, there were many church councils, starting in the 60's AD, (the Jerusalem council, mentioned in the bible) which kept beliefs to the central truths and condemned other beliefs as heresy. Telling the believers what was true and what was heresy is exactly what the church is supposed to do.
While some other religions are not hierarchical, the ancient Jews had a High Priest and church structure. That came to end in 70 AD with the fall of the temple and the end of priestly Judaism.
It is also wrong that the church developed a hierarchy only after Constantine. Any casual reading of the documents from that era reveals a church structure. In 90-95 AD, Bishop Clement (to Catholics, Pope Clement) wrote to the Corinthians settling a dispute in typical church-structure fashion.
But the figure of 900,000 killed is not simply wrong, it's painfully wrong. As I have said, the documents exist, and they prove no huge number of people were killed, especially by the standard of those times.
As far as treatment of the Indians, the Church was crucial to their survival.
When some men under Columbus enslaved a group of Indians in the late 1400's, the pope promptly excommunicated everyone who had anything to do with slavery. That papal bull is still in effect today. Any Catholic who has a slave or supports slavery, since the late 1400's, is excommunicated.
The church fought tirelessly for the rights of the Indians, frequently pitting the church against Spanish conquistadors. In 1537 a papal bull insisted on equal rights for the natives and as fellow communicants.
Spanish priests who volunteered to go to South America were given the last rites before they left, because of the danger. They gave up everything, their friends, their countries, their language, the food they liked, everything, for the love of other people. They were frequently murdered by the very natives they came to convert. All too frequently, they lived alone in gritty, poor huts and died alone of starvation.
One French priest who went to Canada saw his other fellow priests tortured and eaten by Indians. He himself was tortured, had his fingers bitten off and, but managed to escape. He later returned, and was finally killed.
This is what religious people were willing to do for the natives.
Compare that to the secular government of the United States. Today, the US has a miniscule number of native Americans [most of them in the formerly Catholic Southwest]; South American is nearly all native. South American governments were strongly influenced by Catholicism, while the United States government was and is explicitly secular.
Surely even the most causal perusal of history reveals that the Christian religion has done huge amounts of good, and relatively little wrong. Context counts and so does a true weighing of good and evil. What would the Romans have done to the Indians? Or the Huns?
Only Christian western culture developed science. Only Christian western culture developed democracies. Only in Christian western society did you have a church fighting for the rights of individuals.
I could write books on any of these topics, but I've tried to trim it all down