Vatican to Help Research on Inquisition (Claims Torture/Death #'s Lower)

VATICAN CITY -- Church, academic and cultural experts will work together to gather documentation on religious and civil trials for witchcraft, heresy and other crimes against the faith during the Inquisition, the Vatican said Tuesday.

Officials from the Vatican, the Italian Culture Ministry and the Center for Research on the Inquisition at the University of Studies of Trieste signed a collaboration agreement.

Earlier this year the Vatican presented researchers' findings that victims of torture and burning at the stake during the Inquisition were far fewer than widely thought.

Pope John Paul II has noted that the Catholic Church has asked pardon for "errors" committed during the Inquisition, while noting there is need to find out how much popular impressions of the period are rooted in reality.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-vatican-inquisition,0,4375435.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

Actually, witchhunters just chatted up accused witches, offering them tea and crumpets and asking politely that they please abandon their Satanic rituals, baby eating and demon anus licking.

It was all very sweet. Sort of like a quilting bee, except with rectal/vaginal pears and thumbscrews. It's all good.

their literature to help their position. And the Protestants weren't innocent of a bit of witch hunting too, and the Catholic establishment inflated Protestant numbers, too.

There was so much propaganda flying from BOTH sides that it's going to take a lot of archeological work and some really disinterested historians to sort out what actually happened. (Let the atheist historians do it!!)

Nobody was innocent - don't think I'm trying to say that; when it comes to heresy and witch hunting, I say a pox on both their houses and why the hell would any thinking person want to belong to organizations that did such terrible things. But as an historian, I'd like to see evidentiary history win out. I hate history based on propaganda.

Pcat

Around Halloween, a town in Scotland 'pardoned' all the 'witches' they had ever burned at the stake.

I believe it was something like 2500. In just one small town in Scotland.

So imagine the number it amounted to all over Europe!

After this 'study' the claim will probably be made that there were only half a dozen or so, everywhere.

Any study like this should only be done by an objective group, not a vested interest.

on the hunt,industry,government,religion blended together you got fascism, popes invented it not Mussolini.

:scared:

The Church does not get to 'say' how many were killed in the inquisition, the same way we don't trust Nazis to tell us how many Jews they had killed. The main difference was that the Inqusition was spread out over 400 years.