Crisis Calls Bring Inquisitorial Parallels

Civil liberties continue to slowly go the way of the buffalo:

Britons flying to America could have their credit card and email accounts inspected by the United States authorities following a deal struck by Brussels and Washington.

By using a credit card to book a flight, passengers face having other transactions on the card inspected by the American authorities. Providing an email address to an airline could also lead to scrutiny of other messages sent or received on that account.

Meanwhile, Mexicans continue to migrate across the southern border, having to furnish no paperwork of any sort. I suppose the fellows haven't got email. That must be it.

Anyway, I've been reading a book on the Inquisition. Many parallels between the provisions of the Patriot Act and the institution of the Inquisition have emerged. The author of the aforesaid book, Henry Kamen notes:

[The sixteenth-century Jesuit Juan de] Mariana admitted that the new harsh measures [inquisitorial procedures] were a deviation from the normal charitable procedure of the Church; but, he says, it was held 'that at times the ancient customs of the Church should be changed in conformity with the needs of the times'...

Crisis times required crisis measure: the message was implicit in every major directive issued by Ferdinand in these years, and helps to explain the unusual cooperation he obtained throughout Spain...

The unprecedented activities of the Holy Office were deemed acceptable only as an emergency measure, until the crisis has passed.

I would apologize for the redundancy, except that I think it imperative. The crimes of the Inquisition were inexcusable; that they paled in comparison to modern day atrocities, at least in terms of scale is beside the point. The Holy Office was not, ipso facto, immoral. Stamping out heresy was important to the Church. She had a duty, a duty that still remains, of watching out for her flock and leading souls to salvation. I can’t help but pause to note the importance of this point. There were many such inquisitions in Europe; there was one in France for example. But the institution itself was not intrinsically evil, even if it was slightly abhorrent. The Church has battled heresy almost from the get-go; the first anti-pope emerged less than a century and a half after John wrote his Revelation, and heretics had reared their ugly heads years prior to that. I pronounce no judgment on the efficacy of the early Inquisition, due to my ignorance of its details, but I will readily defend the right of the Church to stand up for truth. Only an age such as ours, which is so apathetic to truth, could fail to notice the importance of right thinking. Whether or not the Church was right, indeed is right, is a question for the ages. But right or not, She would be absolutely useless if She didn’t fight for truth. If there is anything more worth fighting for, I cannot quite think of what it could be. Even the defense of innocent life is wrapped up in truth, namely the truth that innocent life should be preserved.

Now then, the crimes of the Inquisition were due to its abuse of power, its break from the "normal charitable procedure of the Church". This occurred, and only could have occurred, by the docility of the "Old Christians" who allowed calls of crisis to trump their Christian concern and charity.

We see much the same thing happening today. Ordinary measures are insufficient to fight terrorism. The terrorist is a new creature who posits a new set of rules with which to fight him. In other words, truth is mutable, which is simply an admission that is not truth at all. There is little that bothers me more than such blatant intellectual dishonesty. It is one thing to believe that the heroes of yesteryear inhabited a different world, that is, that their culture and customs were different. It is an altogether different thing to pretend that the men of yesteryear were not men at all, that we have no more in common with them then we do with the common swallow. If murder was immoral for the first cave men, and it most certainly was, it is just as immoral for the enlightened modern. If it was immoral for the Inquisition to burn "heretics" because of obviously false testimony, it is just as immoral for the Republic of the United States to do whatever it will with terrorists on the same cheap charges.

I do not profess to know whether or not the secret courts of President Bush have been abused like the Inquisition was, though it helps to remember that the latter institution was relatively benign or even inactive for long periods of time. The secret courts, if not dissolved, could very likely become even more corrupt than was the feared Inquisition. I have no proof of this, of course, save for that of historical parallel; and while the slippery slope is a "logical fallacy", it is nonetheless one which shows a very reliable rate of recurrence. If Presidents and Congressmen came of the mold and character of Washington or Cincinnatus I might have hope that the provisions of the wretched Patriot Act would be abolished once the "crisis" had abated, but the dubious nature of the assertion, coupled with the dubious nature of our enemy, and thus the perpetuity of the crisis, leads me to feel quite the contrary. If anyone feels otherwise I would be forced to conclude that his Christian charity has trumped his common sense.

This may seem a bit off topic. After all, what do email addresses and credit card information have to do with a benighted institution from antiquity? Yet the connection is readily made. Liberties, once surrendered, always tossed away in the midst of a crisis, are seldom returned. The Spaniards of yore realized this far too late. Complaints were made, but fell upon deaf ears.

Kamen explains:

By the mid-sixteenth century, the tribunal was constitutionally invulnerable…

Its impact and duration was to be much longer than anyone could have imagined in the beginning.

It is not necessarily too late to protest, but the longer the crisis measures are accepted, the harder they will be to uproot when they begin to become abusive. History shows that those that do not learn therefrom will suffer in its repetition.