27. The more I reflect on the matter, all nine crusades were Children's Crusades. All those simple peasant soldiers were as ignorant as children, blindly following the exhortations of the popes to kill those Arabs who were defending their land.
28. It is a plausible excuse; but we must remember that it was fear of the heretic which inspired the foundation of the Inquisition; and that its victims were more likely to be rich men, whose goods were worthy of confiscation, than men whose wordly goods were few.
29. With the growth in knowledge and critical thinking, inevitably came the desire for more freedom. Both the papacy and the monarchies of Europe recognized this grave threat. It is no wonder, then, that an all-out war was declared on those who sought to free humankind from the twin shackles of king and pope. This was the true purpose of the Inquisition.
30. The accused heretics first were arrested and isolated from the outside world. They were considered guilty from the outset, and it was regarded as the God-given obligation of the inquisitor to shake loose confessions. Only in this way, it was believed, could the accuseds's souls be saved from the clutches of the devil. Defense lawyers were not allowed; the accused had to rely on his own resources.
In contrast, the prosecution was authorized to produce any number of witnesses, including blood relatives.
Testimony and hearsay by even the most unreliable witnesses, including children, were accepted as conclusive evidence of guilt. The accused was not allowed to challenge witnesses or even know who they were. The accused, however, was permitted to testify.
Not surprisingly, torture was the quickest and most effective method of obtaining a confession. The heretics first were dragged into the torture chamber and shown all the instruments of torment. If they did not confess their alleged guilt, torture was applied slowly with increasing intensity. These sessions usually lasted two to four hours, leaving the victims violated and shattered.
Often the torture instruments used in these interrogations were first sprinkled with holy water (water blessed by a priest). These numerous devices included:
THE THUMBSCREW. The accused's fingers were placed between clamps. The screws were turned until blood spurted and the bones were crushed.
THE BOOTS. This effective device was used to crush the shinbones.
THE RACK. The accused was stretched across a triangle frame, bound hand and foot to prevent movement. Wrists and ankles were secured by cords affixed to a jackscrew. When the screw was turned, the limbs were stretched execruciatingly until the wrists and ankles were pulled from their sockets.
THE STRAPPADO (Vertical Rack). The accused's hands were tied behind his or her back and raised by a rope attached to a pulley to the ceiling. The prisoner was then dropped repeatedly with a jerk to within a few inches of the floor. On occasion, weights were tied to the victim's feet to increase the shock and agony of the fall.
THE TOCA (Water torture). The accused was tied to a rack, the mouth was kept forcibly open, and a linen cloth put down the throat to conduct water poured slowly from a vessel. The severity of this torture depended on the amount of water released.
...The cruel and heartless methods used to punish persons accused of heresy indicates the depth of madness and misguided religious passion perpetrated by those who claimed to be doing God's will.
31. More than 40 barbaric exhibitions of torture and annhiliation from European Medieval days. Beyond these doors lies the true horror of the European Medieval days. The darkest days of its sordid past.
32. There is a permanent exhibition of torture instruments in Amsterdam - I once made a special point of going to see it. I think that every new recruit to Cardinal Ratzinger's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (or Holy Office) should be required to visit the exhibition and write a study paper on it.
Here are the tools of the Inquisitions of which the Holy Office is the heir. There are headcrushers, thumbscrews, ladder racks, breast rippers, knee splitters, oral, rectal, and vaginal pears, iron maidens, heretic forks, and Spanish spiders - with woodcuts, engraving and documents to show how they were used.
33. A more direct route to Jesus was found in the “Iron Virgin” of the Inquisition. She wore a cloak of wood and iron which when opened revealed an interior lined with spikes shaped like harrow teeth.. The figure stood above a trapdoor opening into a moat so that when the doors were opened and the spikes pulled out of the corpse, it would drop into the water below. The spikes were carefully placed so that two of them would enter the eyes, others into the chest, and still others into the abdomen.
34. The terror began in earnest with Gregory IX, who ascended the papal throne in the year 1227.
Two years later, at the Council of Toulouse in Languedoc, Gregory decreed that heretics had to be handed over to the secular arm for punishment. "It is the duty of every Catholic," he said, "to persecute heretics."
In the year 1232 he made his decisive move. He published a Bull establishing the Inquisition. Bishops were too lax and, in any case, they lacked the time and talent to do a thorough job. Heretics, that is, all opposed to any papal pronouncement, were to be handed over to the civil authorities for burning. If they repented, they were to be imprisoned for life. No pope ever took up the torch of terror with more enthusiasm.
In April 1233 he restricted inquisitors to members of the mendicant orders; soon, the Dominicans had the honor to themselves. The 27th day of July 1233 was a red-letter day for the pontiff: the first two full-time inquisitors were appointed - Peter Seila and William Arnald. They were the first in a long line of serene untroubled persecutors of the human race. As a curtain-raise, in 1239, two years before Gregory died, the Dominican Robert le Bougre went to Champagne to investigate a bishop named Moranis. He was accused of allowing heretics to live and spread in his diocese. On 29 May he sent 180 people, including the bishop, to the stake.
This was a return to barbarism. ..
History does not support the view that the Catholic church has always championed the rights of man. In the 13th century, it went so far as to teach what the early church condemned: heretics have no rights. They can be tortured without scruple. Like traitors to the state, heretics have put themselves outside the mercy of the law. They must be put to death.
No one pope for over three centuries opposed this teaching which should therefore by rights be a permanent part of Catholic doctrine. By means of it, the Inquisition achieved unprecedented power. The result was wholesale intimidation of those who had no protection against the charge or even slightest suspicion of heresy.
To the medieval Inquisition, everything was permitted. The Dominican Inquisitors, being the pope's appointees, were subject to no one but God and his Holiness. They were outside the juridiction of bishops and of civil law. In the Papal States they were a law unto themselves, acting as prosecutors and judges. Their guiding principle was: "Better for a hundred innocent people to die than for one heretic to go free."
They operated arbitrarily and in secrecy. Anyone present at the interrogation - victim, scribe, executioner - who broke his silence incurred a censure that only the pope could lift. The inquisitors, like the pope, could make no mistake and do no wrong...
Torture was freely used. Only a hundred years ago, there was on display in the pope's House on the Corner the Black Book, or Libro Nero, for the guidance of
inquisitors. This manuscript in folio form was the charge of the Grand Inquisitor. Its popular name was the Book of the Death. This is part of what it said:
Either the person confesses and he is proved guilty from his own confession, or he does not confess and is equally guilty on the evidence of witnesses. If a person confesses the whole of what he is accused of, he is unquestinably guilty of the whole; but if he confesses only a part, he ought still to be regarded as guilty of the whole, since what he has confessed proves him to be capable of guilt as to the other points of the accusation...
Bodily torture has ever been found the most salutary and efficient means of leading to spiritual repentance. Therefore, the choice of the most befitting mode of torture is left to the Judge of the Inquisition, who determines according to the age, the sex, and the constitution of the party...If, notwithstanding all the means employed, the unfortunate wretch still denies his guilt, he is to be considered as a victim of the devil: and, as such, deserves no compassion from the servants of God, nor the pity and indulgence of Holy Mother Church: he is a son of perdition. Let him perish among the damned.
It would be hard to find any document so contrary to the principles of natural justice. According to the Black Book, a child must betray his parents, a mother betray her child. Not to do so is a "sin against the Holy Office" and merits excommunication, that is, exclusion from the sacraments and, if there is no amendement, exclusion from heaven...
The inquisitors never lost a single case. There is no record of an acquittal. When, rarely, the verdict was Not Proven, no one was declared innocent. If the accused was not actually guilty of heresy, no matter. Inquisitors believe that only one in every hundred thousand souls would escape damnation anyway.)
35. Efforts to stamp out heresy led to the establishment of the Holy Inquisition, one of mankind’s supreme horrors. In the early 1200s, local bishops were empowered to identify, try, and punish heretics. When the bishops proved ineffective, traveling papal inquisitors, usually Dominician priests, were sent from Rome to conduct the purge.
Pope Innocent IV authorized torture in 1252, and the Inquisition chambers became places of terror. Accused heretics were seized and locked in cells, unable to see their families, unable to know the names of their accusers. If they didn’t confess quickly, unspeakable cruelties began. Swiss historian Walter Nigg recounted:
“The thumbscrew was usually the first to be applied: The fingers were placed in clamps and the screws turned until the blood spurted out and the bones were crushed. The defendant might be placed on the iron torture chair, the seat of which consisted of sharpened iron nails that could be heated red-hot from below. There were the so called boots, which were employed to crush the shinbones. Another favorite torture was dislocation of the limbs on the rack or the wheel on which the heretic, bound hand and foot, was drawn up and down while the body was weighted with stones. So that the torturers would not be disturbed by the shrieking of the victim, his mouth was stuffed with cloth. Three-and-four-hour sessions of torture were nothing unusual. During the procedure the instruments were frequently sprinkled with holy water.”
The victim was required not only to confess that he was a heretic, but also to accuse his children, wife, friends, and others as fellow heretics, so that they might be subjected to the same process. Minor offenders and those who confessed immediately received lighter sentences. Serious heretics who repented were given life imprisonment and their possessions were confiscated. Others were led to the stake in a procession and church ceremony called the “auto-da-fé” (act of the faith). A papal statute of 1231 decreed burning as the standard penalty. The actual executions were performed by civil officers, not priests, as a way of preserving the church’s sanctity.
Some inquisitors cut terrible swathes. Robert le Bourge sent 183 to the stake in a single week. Bernard Gui convicted 930 – confiscating the property of all 930 – sending 307 to prison, and burning forty-two. Conrad of Marburg burned every suspect who claimed innocence.
Historically, the Inquisition is divided into three phases: the medieval extermination of heretics; the Spanish Inquisition in the 1400s; anf the Roman Inquisition, which began after the Reformation.
In Spain, thousands of Jews had converted to Christianity to escape death in recurring Christian massacres. So, too, had some Muslims. They were, however, suspected of being insincere converted clandestinely practicing their old religion. In 1478 the pope authorized King Fernidand and Queen Isabella to revive the Inquisition to hunt “secret Jews” and their Muslim counterparts. Dominican friar Tomas de Torquemada was appointed inquisitor general, and he became a symbol of religious cruelty. Thousands upon thousands of screaming victims were tortured, and at least 2,000 were burned.
The Roman period began in 1542 when Pope Paul III sought to eradicate Protestant influences in Italy. Under Pope Paul IV, this inquisition is a reign of terror, killing many “heretics” on mere suspicion. Its victims included scientist-philosopher Giordano Bruno, who espoused Copernicus’s theory that planets orbit the sun. He was burned at the stake in 1600 in Rome.
The Inquisition blighted many lands for centuries. In Portugal, records recount that 184 were burned alive. The Inquisition was brought by Spaniards to the American colonies, to punish Indians who reverted to native religions. A total of 879 heresy trials were recorded in Mexico in the late 1500s…
Lord Acton, himself a Catholic, wrote in the late 1800s: “The principle of the Inquisition was murderous..The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.”
36. There has been no more organized effort by a reeligion to control people and contain (giam giữ) their spirituality than the Christian Inquisition. Developed within the Church’s own legal framework, the Inquisition attempted to terrify people into obedience. As the Inquisitor Francisco Pena stated in 1578, “We must remember that the main purpose of the trial and execution is not to save the soul of the accused but to achieve the public good and put fear into others.” The Inquisition took countless human lives in Europe and around the world as it followed in the wake of missionaries. And along with the tyranny of the Inquisition, churchmen also brought religious justification for the practice of slavery.
The unsubmissive spirit of the Middle Ages only seemed to exacerbate the Church’s demand for unquestioning obedience. The Church’s understanding of God was to be the only understanding. The was to be no discussion or debate. As the Inquisitor Bernard Gui said, the layman must not argue with the unbeliever, but “trust his sword into the man’s belly as far as it will go.” In a time burgeoning ideas about spirituality, the Church insisted that it was the only avenue through which one was permitted to learn of God. Pope Innocent III declared “that anyone who attempted to construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be burned without pity.”…
The Church turned to its own canon law to authenticate an agency which could enforce adherence to Church authority. In 1231 Pope Gregory IX estabhished the Inquisition as a separate tribunal, independent of bishops and prelates. It administrators, the inquisitors, were answerable only to the Pope. Its inquisitinal law replaced the common law tradition of “innocent until proven guilty” with “guilty until proven innocent”. Despite an ostensible trial, inquisional procedure left no possibility for the suspected to prove his or her innocence; the process resulted in the condemnation of anyone even suspected of heresy. The accused was denied the right of counsel. No particulars were given as to the time or place of the suspected heresies, or to whatkind of heresies were suspected…
The inquisitor presided over the inquisitional procedure as both prosecutor and judge… An inquisitor was selected primarily on the basis of his zeal to prosecute heretics. He and his assistants, messengers and spies were allowed to carry arms. And in 1245, the Pope granted him the right to absolve these assistants for any acts of violence. This act rendered the Inquisition, which was already free from any secular juridiction, unaccountable to even ecclesiastical tribunals..
Inquisitors grew very rich. They received bribes and annual fines from the wealthy who paid to escape accusation. The Inquisition would claim all the money and property of alleged heretics. As there was little chance of the accused being proven innocent, there was no need to wait for conviction to confiscate his or her property. Unlike Roman law that reserved a portion of property for the convicted’s nearest heirs, canon and inquisitional law left nothing. Pope Innocent III had explained that God punished children for the sins of their parents. So unless children had come forth spontaneaously to denounce their parents, they were left penniless. Inquisitors even accused the dead of heresy, sometimes as much as seventy years after their death. They exhume and burned the alleged heretic’s bones and then confiscated all property from the heirs…
The Inquisition was merciless with its victims. The same man who had been both prosecutor and judge decided upon the sentence. In 1244 the Council of Narbonne ordered that in the sentencing of heretics, no husband should be spared because of his wife, nor wife because of her husband, nor parent because of helpless children, and no sentence should be mitigated because of sickness or old age.
Although the Church had began killing heretics in the late fourth century and again in 1022 at Orléan, papal statutes of 1231 now insisted that heretics suffered death by fire. Burning people to death technically avoided spilling a drop of blood. The words of the Gospel of John were understood to sanction burning: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned” (John 15: 16)
By far the cruelest aspect of the inquisitional system was the means by which confessions were wrought: the torture chamber. Torture remained a legal option for the Church from 1252 when it was sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV until 1917 when the new Codex Juris Canonici was put into effect. Innocent IV authorized indefinite delays to secure confessions, giving inquisitors as much time as they wanted to torture the accused… In 1262 inquisitors and their assistants were granted the authority to quietly absolve each other from the crime of bloodshed. They simply explained that the tortured had died because the devil broke their necks.
Thus, with licence granted by the Pope himself, inquisitors were free to explore the depths of horror and cruelty. Dressed as black-robed fiends with black cowls over their heads, inquisitors extracted confessions from nearly anyone. The Inquisition invented every conceivable devise to inflict pain by slowly dismembering and dislocating the body. Many of these devices were inscribed with the motto “Glory be only to God”. The rack, the hoist and water tortures were the most common. Victims were rubbed with lard or grease and slowly roasted alive. Ovens built to kill people, made infamous in 20th century Nazi Germany, were first used by the Christian Inquisition in Eastern Europe. Victims were thrown into a pit full of snakes and buried alive. One particularly grusome torture involved turning a large dish full of mice upside down on the victim’s naked stomach. A fire was the lit on top of the dish causing the mice to panic and burrow into the stomach…
The tyranny inherent in the belief in singular supremacy accompanied explorers and missionaries throughout the world. When Columbus landed in America in 1492, he mistook it for India and called the native inhabitants “Indians”. It was his avowed aim to “convert the heathen Indians to our Holy Faith” that warranted the enslaving and exporting of thousands of Native Americans. That such treatment resulted in complete genocide did not matter as much as that these natives had been given the opportunity of everlasting life through their exposure to Christianity…
The Inquisition quickly followed in their wake. By 1570 the Inquisition had established an independent tribunal in Peru and the city of Mexico for the purpose of “freeing the land, which had become contaminated by Jews and heretics. Natives who did not convert to Christianity were burned like any other heretic. The Inquisition spread as far as Goa, India, where in the late 16th and early 17th centuries it took no less than 3,800 lives.
Even without the formal Inquisition present, missionary behavior clearly illustrated the belief in the supremacy of a single image of God… If the image of God venerated in a foreign land was not Christian, it was simply no divine. Portuguese missionaries in the far East destroyed pagodas, forced scholars to hide their religious manuscripts, and suppressed older customs.
Missionaries often took part in the unscrupulous exploitation of foreign lands. Many became missionaries to get rich quickly and then to return to Europe to live off their gains. In Mexico, Dominicans, Augustinians and jesuits were known to own “the largest flocks of sheep, the finest sugar ingenios, the best kept states. The Church, particularly in South America, supported the enslavement of native inhabitants and the theft of native lands. A 1493 papal Bull justified declaring war on any natives in South America who refused to adhere to Christianity…
Orthodox Christianity also supported the practice of slavery in North America. The 18thcentury Anglican Church made it clear that Christianity freed people from eternal damnation, not from the bonds of slavery…Slaves should, howver, be converted to Christianity, it was argued, because they would then become more docile and obedient..
Both the Inquisition and those supporting the practice of slavery relied upon the same religious justification. In keeping with the orthodox Christian belief in a singular and fearful God who rules as the pinnacle of hierarchy, power resided solely with authority, not with the individual. Obedience and submission were valued far more than freedom and self determination. The Inquisition played out the darkest consequences of such a belief system as it imprisoned and killed the bodies and spirits of countless people – and not simply for a brief moment of time. The Inquisition spanned centuries and was still in some places as late as 1834.
37. Most Catholics are unaware of the history to which the pope alluded, an if, Catholics are to be "liberated by the truth", then they must know what that truth is.)
38. God is very clear here, folks, he doesn't want witches to live. We are supposed to be killing witches! If we don't, we are disobeying God. Jesus would weep tears of joy if He leaned down off His cloud and sniffed up the burning flesh of a witch this Halloween. Wouldn't that ruin Satan's little birthday party! Praise God! It's just a shame that the United States Government has placed restrictions on the Biblically-mandated practice of witch burning. [I]
39. The witch hunting mania that convulsed Western Europe during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries may not have revealed the existence of supernatural demons but it did generate an extraordinary array of human monsters ~ the witch hunters ~ a pathological righteous brotherhood that devoted itself to ferreting out suspected handmaidens of the devil.
40. It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that God will never permit such a thing to happen.
41. Justice was perverted and thousands of innocent man and women died on the false evidence of envious or vengeful accusers.)
42. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore, the Church…gathered up its halters, thumbscrews. and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest.. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or cry.
43. The charges brought against the hundreds of women and men were senseless, and the trials themselves travesties of justice.
44. Milton Meltzer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A History of Persecution, The Blue Sky Press, New York, 1999: A witchcraft craze lasting more than 400 years – from the 14th through the 17th centuries – caused the deaths of millions in Europe, the great majority of them women. The craze arose in the Middle Ages and lasted well into the Age of Reason. Long after, in the 20th century, the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, led an organized campaign of persecution – often called a witch-hunt – of the Jews in Germany and Europe that led to the deaths of six million men, women, and children.
The Bible of witch-hunting appeared in 1486.. It was a book of great length called theMalleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches. The first printed encyclopedia of magic and witchcraft, it was written by two Dominician priests of Germany, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.
Two years earlier, Pope Innocent VIII had authorized the two priests to wipe out witchcraft in Germany. Their manual on persecution was a tool in the hand of every judge and witch-hunter for three centuries. The Malleus was reprinted in 14 editions very quickly. It became one of the most influential of all early printed books. The Malleus begins by challenging the opinion that witches do not really exist. The true faith, it says, “teaches us that certain angels fell from heaven and are now devils” who “by their very nature…can do many wonderful things we cannot do.” The authors state that Satan and demons can do harm by themselves, or by acting with or through witches. It dealt in much detail with the practice of witchcraft and with the judicial procedures to be used against it.
The two priests spoke from experience, for they themselves had tried 50 people for witchcraft, 48 of whom were women. The Malleus became the authoritative guide to organized witch-hunting. The hunts were initiated, and carried out by church and state…The Malleus told how to use torture to force confession and further accusations. The common practice was to strip the accused naked, shave off all her body hair, subject her to thumbscrew and the rack, to spikes and bone-crushing devices, and to beat her and starve her.
When the whirlwind of persecution descended in the 15th century, the toll was immense. Nicholas Remy, a judge from Lorraine, France, who presided over witch trials, wrote that after spending much time grilling witches, he knew that “they are justly to be subjected to every torture and put to death in the flames.. and that its very awfulness may serve as an example and a warning to others.” Remy sent between two and three thousand victims to the stakes between 1595 and 1616…
Torquemada (1420-1498), the Spanish churchman known as the Grand Inquisitor, is credited personally with burning more than ten thousand people and with condemning another 97 thousand in less than two decades.
For 12 years, from 1581 to 1593, witch persecutions raged through the cathedral city of Trier in Germany. The bishop of Trier, Peter Binsfield, ordered the death of some 6000 people..
In the 1620s the area of Wurzburg, Germany, saw spectacular examples of wholesale extermination. The bishop of Wurzburg burned 900 people for witchcraft…The archbishop of Trier burned 268 witches from 22 villages between 1587 and 1593. In two of these villages, by 1595 only one woman was left alive.
Jews were another group that suffered especially during the height of the witch-hunts. In the New Testament, John 8:44 calls the Devil the father of the Jews. It is in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9 that the “synagogue of Satan” is first mentioned. Church leaders accused Jews of worshiping Satan and giving their children to the demons..
In England, under the Protestant rulers Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, persecution was severe. And they were not the only Protestant rulers to break bones on the rack or brand with hot irons. In the Netherlands, too, the whip, steel pincers, and burning at the stake were much in evidence.
Martin Luther, who lived from 1483 to 1546 and was the founder of Protestantism, reinforced the superstition of his time. His writings testify to the Devil’s assaults upon him, and he often refers to the evil actions of witches – among them he includes his opponents. He thought the power of witches was awesome; he once wrote, “I should have no compassion on these witches, I would burn all of them.”
Spurred on by the Malleus, Germany had the worst history of witchcraft persecution, but other countries – France, Switzerland, Sapin, Sweden, Scotland – all swelled the total number of murders. When the terror reached its peak, doubters felt obliged to voice a belief in witches. Denying the existence of witchcraft placed people in great danger of themselves being accused.
45. James A. Haught, Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of religious Murder and Madness, Prometheus Books, New York, 1990, p.73-76: During the 1400, the Holy Inquisition shifted its focus toward witchcraft, and the next three centuries witnessed a bizarre orgy of religious delusion. Agents of the Church tortured untold thousands of women, and some men, into confessing that they flew through the sky on demonic missions, engaged in sex with Satan, turned themselves into animals, made themselves invisible, and performed supernatural evils. Virtually all the accused were put to death.
Pope Gregory IX originally authorized the killing of witches in the 1200s, and random witch trials were held, but the craze didn’t catch fire until the 15th century. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull declaring the absolute reality of witches – thus it became heresy to doubt their existence. Prosecutions soared. The inquisitor Cumanus burned 41 women the following year, and a colleague in the Piedmont of Italy executed 100.
Soon afterward, two Dominician inquisitors, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, published their infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Withches’ Hammer) outlining a lurid litany of magical acts performed by witches and their imps, familiars, phantoms, demons, succubi, and incubi. It described how the evil women blighted crops, devoured children, caused disease, and wrought spells. The book was filled with witches’ sexual acts and portrayed women as treacherous and contemptible. “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, wich is in women insatiable,” they wrote. Modern psychology easily perceives the sexual neusoris of these priests – yet for centuries their book was the official manual used by the inquisitors sending women to horrible deaths.
Witch-hunts flared in France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and nearly every corner of Europe – finally reaching England, Scotland, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Most of the victims were old women whose eccentricities roused suspicions of neighbors. Others were young, pretty women. Some were men. Many in the continental Europe were simply citizens whose names were shrieked out by torture victims when commanded to identify fellow witches.
The standard Inquisition procedure of isolating and grilling suspects was followed – plus an added step: the victims were stripped naked, shaved of all body hair, and “pricked”. TheMalleus Maleficarum specified that every witch bore a numb “devil’s mark”, which could be detected by jabbing with a sharp object. Inquisitors also looked for “witches’ tits”, blemishes that might be secrets nipples whereby the women suckled their demons.
If the body search failed, the torture began. Fingernails were pulled out. Red-hot tongs were applied to breasts. “The women’s sex organ provided special attraction for the male torturer,” researcher Nancy Van Vuuren wrote. Bodies were stretched on racks and wheels. “Arms came out of sockets and trysts with the Devil came out of the unlikeliest mouths”, novelist Erica Jong wrote. Virtually every mangled and broken victim confessed – and was executed on the basis of the confession.
In the Basque region of Spain, church records dutifully report that Maria of Ituren admitted under torture that she and sister witches turned themselves into horses and galloped through the sky. In a district of France, 600 women confessed to copulating with demons.
The complete death toll is impossible to learn. Some historical records exist; others are gone. Various accounts say 5000 witches were killed in the province of Alsace, 900 in the city of Bamberg, about 2000 in Bavaria, 311 in Vaud, 167 at grnoble, 157 at Wurzburg, 133 in a single day in Saxony. Some entire villages were exterminated.
The mania continued until the 18th century. In Scotland, an old woman was burned in 1722 after being convicted of turning her daughter into a pony and riding her to a witches’ coven. In Germany, a nun was burned alive in the marketplace of Wurzburg in 1749 after other nuns testified that she climbed over convent walls in the form of a pig. The last legal execution of a witch occurred in Switzerland in 1782. By that time, various scientists and scholars had raised enough doubt about the reality of witchcraft to bring an end to the madness.
A profound irony of the witch-hunts is that they were directed, not by superstitious savages, but by learned bishops, judges, professors, and other leaders of society. The centuries of witch obsession demonstrated the terrible power of supernatural beliefs.
46. Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side Of Christian History, Chapter 8, The Witch Hunts, pp. 114-138: The Church created the elaborate concept of devil worship and then, used the persecution of it to wipe out dissent, subordinate the individual to authoritarian control, and openly denigrate women…
It took the Church a long time to persuade society that women were inclined toward evil witchcraft and devil worship… In the 13th century the Church began depicting the witch as a slave of the devil…
Pope John XXII formalized the persecution of witchcraft in 1320 when he authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcery. Thereafter papal bulls and declarations grew increasingly vehement in their condemnation of witchcraft. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis Desiderates authorizing two inquisitores Kramer and Sprenger, to systematize the persecution of witches. Two years later their manual, Malleus Maleficarum, was published with 14 editions following between 1487-1520 and at least 16 editions between 1574-1669. A papal bull in 1488 called upon the nations of Europe to rescue the Church of Christ which was “imperiled by the arts of Satan”. The papacy and the Inquisition had successfully transformed the witch from a phenomenon whose existence the Church had previously rigorously denied into a phenomenon that was deemed very real, very frightening, the antithesis of Christianity, and absolutely deserving of persecution.
It was now heresy not to believe in the existence of witches. As the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum noted, “A belief that there are such things as witches is so essential a part of Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion savors of heresy.” Passage in the Bible such as “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” were cited to justify the persecution of witches. Both Calvin and Knox believed that to deny witchcraft was to deny the authority of the Bible. The 18th century founder of Methodism, John Wesley, declared to those skeptical of witchcraft, “The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible. And an eminent English lawyer wrote, “To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament.
The persecution of witchcraft enabled the Church to prolong the profitability of the Inquition. The Inquisition had left regions so economically destitute that the inquisitor Eymeric complained, “In our days there are no more rich heretics..it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future.” By adding witchcraft to the crimes it persecuted, however, the Inquisition exposed a whole new group of people from whom to collect money. It took every advantage of this opportunity. The auther Barbara Walker notes:
“Victims were charged for the the very ropes that bound them and the wood that burned them. Each procedure of torture carried its fee. After the execution of a wealthy witch, officials usually treated themselves to a banquet at the expense of the victim’s estate”
In 1592 Father Cornelius Loos wrote:
“Wretched creatures are compelled by the severity of the torture to confess things they have never done.. and so by the cruel butchery innocent lives are taken; and, by a new alchemy, gold and silver are coined from human blood.”
47. Malise Ruthven, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, p. 119:
The bible of these macabre killers was the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a book written by two fanatical Dominican priests and published in 1486. For the book's authors no deceit was too devious, no torture too extreme to be used in the pursuit of confessions. Nor was there any room for skepticism or moderation; "Not to believe in witchcraft," read the book's motto, "is the greatest of heresies."
One of the most famous of the Malleus was the French lawyer-philosopher Jean Bodin (1529-96). Possibly the first to formulate a "legal" definition of a witch ~ "someone, who, knowing God's laws, tries to bring about some act through an agreement with the Devil"
Bodin was hideously efficient in his prosecution of suspected witches. He personally tortured young children and invalids in the effort to extract confessions, and proclaimed that burning condemned witches brought death too quickly ~ in not much more than half an hour. In 1580, towards the end of his life, Bodin wrote a book of his own, Demonomanie. Harsher and more insidiously circumstantial even than the Malleus, it was well received and widely read.
The inquisitor of Lorraine, Nicholas Remy, was Bodin's contemporary and, if not his intellectual equal, certainly his persecutional peer. During 15 years of judging witchcraft cases he was responsible for the execution of approximately 900 people.
When his eldest son died in 1582, Remy inevitably suspected witchcraft, later accusing and condemning a beggar whom he had turned away shortly before his son's death. As Remy explained, "Witches have a most treacher manner of applying their poison, for having their hands smeared with it, they take hold of...a man's garment as it were to entreat and propitiate him." Like Bodin, Remy retired an honoured man and wrote a book about his experiences. His main regret in life, he confessed, was that he did not kill more witch children.
By far the most lethal of the witch hunters was Jesuit-trained Peter Binsfeld, Suffragan Bishop of Trier, Germany, in the late 16th century.
A relentless witch prosecutor who insisted that "light" torture amounted to no torture at all. Binsfeld is said to have been responsible for the deaths of about 6,500 men, women and children.
His Treatise on Confessions by Evildoers and Witches was considered by many of his contemporaries to be one of the great legal works of it's day. Few voices were raised in opposition to the bloody business of witch hunting. When Dutch scholar Cornelius Loos, horrified at the enormity of Binsfeld judicially sanctioned murders, attempted to protest in the name of humanity, he was condemned and made to recant publicly.
The fact that most of the witch hunters sincerely believed in the rightness of their murderous pursuits does not make their perverse logic, immoderate prejudice and inhumam methods any less horrifying today.
Henri Bogeut (1550-1619), a French lawyer credited with exterminating about 600 "witches", was, for example, able to help condemn one pious suspect on the grounds that the crucifix she wore on her rosary had a minute flaw in it ~ a clear indication, said Boguet, that she was in league with the devil.
Pierre de Lancre, French King Henry 1V's official witch hunter in the Basque country, was equaly skilled at detecting the presence of of Satanism. For reasons that are obscure but that seem to have had morbid sexual undertones, de Lancre became convinced that all 30,000 (including priests) inhabitants of the Labourd district were witches.
When news of de Lancre's conclusions became known, thousands fled their homes, some emigrating as far as Newfoundland to escape the inevitable conflagration. In the space of four months de Lancre burned some 600 of the people who remained, then returned to Paris in triumph to be made state counselor by a grateful King Henry.
The most notorious of the English witch hunters was a puritanical, failed lawyer named Matthew Hopkins.
Unlike some of his counterparts on the Continent, Hopkins, who flourished for a relatively brief period in the 1640s, only managed to kill about 600 people. In addition, because of a parliamentary decree, he was obliged to forgo his early method of identifying witches ~ throwing the suspects, trussed, into a river to see if they floated, if they did they were considered guilty, as the devil was supporting them…
One of the methods he used most successfully was a form of psychogical torture, in which victims were forced to walk constantly, without food or sleep, until, exhausted or delirious, they confessed to witchcraft.
48. (Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 1952, Harper and Brothers, N.Y.): The scariest part is the fundamentalist mind that could justify such cruelty, for any cause, most ironically, a 'spiritual' one.
Fundamentalist ignorance and superstition reached a peak in the 1600's, instigated by the church, who taught that the Devil was everywhere, and that any undesireable manifestation could be and probably was the result of witchcraft and devils. Hail, wind, lice, sour milk, or a difficult mule could all be blamed on the woman next door. Expressing doubt about the existence of witches was tantamount to being a witch, and anyone voicing opposing opinions was suspect, to be watched, and targeted.
The Christian obsession with the Devil and witchcraft actually fostered and propagated what they tried so hard to repress; and as it was then, it is today.
"In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism, and true religion."
49. Since the fourth century after Christ there have been three anti-Jewish policies: forced conversion, expulsion, annihilation. The second appeared as an alternative to the first, and the third emerged as an alternative to the second… The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.
The process began with the attempt to drive the Jews into Christianity. The development was continued in order to force the victims into exile. It was finished when the Jews were driven to the death. The German Nazis, then, did not discard the past; they built upon it. They did not begin a development; they completed it.]
50. By the middle of 1997, I was in a state of moral shock. The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment more scandalous than Hochhuth's. The evidence was explosive. It showed for the first time that Pacelli was patently, and by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at the same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazis’ persecution.
51. Consider the Holocaust: the anti-semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful… The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.
52. The distinguished Roman Catholic author Malcolm Hay wrote to Jules Isaac 40 years ago that “Auschwitz would have been impossible had it not been for the poisonous lies with which the churches have infected Christian populations for at least 1600 years.”
No more than 40 years ago, the subjects of Christian antisemitism and the Christian sources of antisemitism were generally considered taboo.
In recent years, research on the Holocaust, together with a growing tolerance for discussion within the churches, has revealed the crucial role played by the Church in the persecution of Jews in Christendom.
53. p.105: Luther’s attitude toward the Jews became one that before too long was blatantly antisemitic. In 1542, Luther published a tract, Concerning the Jews and Their Lies, soon followed by another essay, which excoriated the Jews in Language that equaled in virulence anything uttered against them before or since. Luther, in language both sarcastic and scatological, renewed all the old charges of the past, perpetuating patterns with which we have become familiar during the course of these talks: Jews are poisoners; Jews are usurers; Jews are parasites on Christian society; Jews consort with Satan himself; Jews are doomed to Hell. In Luther’s writings a new locution of an old image of the Jew emerged: the Jew as “Anti-Christ”
Luther did not leave to his readers’ imagination what he conceived as the appropriate agenda to deal with the Jews. He was quite explicit: their synagogues should be burned, their books seized; they should be forced into back-breaking manual labor; better still, they should be expelled from their territories.)
54. p 151: According to historian Lucy Dawidowics, “A line of antisemitism descent from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler is easy to draw” Both Luther and Hitler were obsessed by a demonologized universe inhabited by Jews. As we trace the history of antisemitism to 20thcentury Western Europe, we note that there is a direct conceptual and philosophical chain connecting the Christian Reformation and the rise of Hitlerism.)
55. First, their synagogues should be set on fire.. Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed...Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds...Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more...Fiftly, passport and traveling privileges should be absolutely forbidden to the Jews...Sixthly, they ought to be stopped from usury (charging interest on loans)...Seventhly, let the young and strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spade...and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses...We ought to drive the rascally lazy bones out of our system.. Therefore away with them.
To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine đoes not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden – the Jews)
56. Christianity did not create the Holocaust; indeed Nazism was anti-Christian, but it made it possible. Without Christian antisemitism, the Holocaust would have been inconceivable...Hitler and the Nazis found in medieval Catholic anti-Jewish legislation a model for their own, and they read and reprinted Martin Luther's virulently antisemitic writings. It is instructive that the Holocaust was unleashed by the only major country in Europe having approximately equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants. Both traditions were saturated with Jew-hatred.
For nearly 2000 years, the Christian world relentlessly dehumanized the Jew, enabling the Holocaust, the ultimate consequence of this dehumanization, to take place.
During the long, dark years of the Middle Ages, Jews were frequently given the option of baptism or expulsion, baptism or torture, baptism or death.
57. Here in part is what Luther wrote in C.E. 1543. Note that Adolf Hitler seemed to use it as a general guide for implementing the earlier phase of his "final solution" against the Jews:
Let me give you my honest advice:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our LORD and of Christendom.
Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.
Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.
Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.
Fifth, I advise that safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay at home.
Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them, and put aside for safe keeping.
Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hand of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow.
58. There can be little doubt that the Holocaust of the Jews in the 1930’s and 1940’s is, at least partially the direct result of 2000 years of Christian anti-Judaism. Moreover, honesty demands that the root of much Christian anti-Jewish slander be located in the New Testament itself, especially the Gospels…
59. After 19 centuries of Christianity, the extermination of 6 million Jews, among them one-and-a-half million children, carried out in cold blood in the very heart of Christian Europe, encouraged by the criminal silence of virtually all Christendom, including that of an infallible Holy Father in Rome, was the natural culmination of this bankrupcy. A straight line leads from the first act of oppression against Jews and Judaism in the fourth century to the holocaust in the twentieth.
60. Pope John Paul II visits Israel. He pays tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, and he leaves the following prayer between the ancient stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem:
“God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.”
61. It is no secret that many atrocities committed against the Jews over the past 2000 years can be traced to the seeds of suspicion and distrust sown in the NT. Since the very beginning of Christianity, believers have regarded the Jew as the wayward children of God and the enemies of Jesus. These anti-Jewish sentiments are clearly reflected in the Book of Acts. Jews are variously called "stiff-necked," "betrayers," and "murderous people" (Acts 7: 51-53). This theme is reinforced in Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians (2:15-16) in which he blames the Jews for the death of Jesus...The Book of Mathew (27:25) describes the Jew as pronouncing a curse upon themselves: "His blood be on us and our children!" Although this statement is now considered by most scholars to have been fabricated by the author of Mathew, throughout the centuries it served to excuse and justify the killing of Jews.
Perhaps the strongest anti-Jewish emotion is registered in the Gospel of John. It is ironic that here, in what many Christians call the "love book," are statements vilifying and damning the Jews...It was only a matter of time until these and other derogatory biblical sentiments fueled the fires of bigotry. The Jews became the targets of distorted theology based on ignorance, bias, and the overwhelming authority associated with biblical writing.
...Early on, Christians looked upon the Jews as "Christ killers" and enemies of Christianity. The venomous attitudes spread quickly from the Christian community to every sector of society, and eventually led to the vicious persecution of Jews, especially after Christianity became the official religion of Rome under Constantine in the fourth century.
The Christian clergy encouraged Roman emperors to deal harshly with the Jews. Pagans were forbidden to convert to Judaism and many restrictions were placed on Jewish life. Marriages between Jews and Christians were punished by death. The Roman Emperor Theodosius II (A.D 408-450) forbade Jews to hold public office or to build synagogues. The Emperor Justinian (A.D 483-565) went further: He condemned the Jews as heretics and ordered their synagogues to be confiscated by the state and trasformed into churches.
Justinian also legalized the pillaging and burning of synagogues by Christian bishops and monks.
The anti-Jewish laws set down in Spain were even harsher. In 694 the seventh Council of Toledo declared all Jews to be slaves, and ordered their property and possession confiscated. The Council also decreed that Jewish children were to be taken from their parents at age seven to be raised by the clergy and later married to Christians.
...Noted historian Solomon Grayzel estimates that 10,000 Jews were slain in Central Europe during the First Crusade. The prolonged and hideous massacre of Moslems and Jews - men, women and children -when Jerusalem fell added to the number of victims. Many Jews were burned to death in their synagogues.
In 1215, during the reign of Pope Innocent III, it was decreed that all Jewish males older than thirteen and Jewish females older than eleven must wear a yellow patch on the front and back of their garnments. This "badge" was regarded as a mark of shame, symbolizing the continuing hostile division between Christians and the so-called murderers of Christ.
...This murderous persecution of Jews continued throughout the Middle Ages. On June 4, 1391, the Archdeacon of Ecija incited a riot in Seville, Sapin, which resulted in the killing of 4000 Jews. The same summer, in city after city across Europe, Jews were burned out of their homes and synanogues. The number of Jewish deaths is placed at 50.000.
From its beginning, Protestantism was as anti-Semitic as Catholicism. Martin Luther, founder and leader of the Protestant Reformation (1517) persecuted the Jews vehemently..
This brings us to what is perhaps the most appalling epoch of anti-Semitism the world has witnessed. The mass extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazi forces during World War II was the result of many social, political, cultural, psychological, and religious factors. Christianity, however, must bear partial liability.
Adolf Hitler was a Catholic. He never left the Church, nor was he excommunicated. In his discussion with Bishop Berning of Osnabruk in April 1933, Hitler remarked: "As for the Jews, I am carry on with the same policy which the Catholic Church has adopted for 1500 years." Hitler claimed to be following the Church's lead, planning to do what Christians had done throughout history - namely, murder Jews.
There was no doubt that Nazi anti-Semitism was derived, at least in part, from Christian anti-Semitism, which grew out of the foundation laid by the Catholic Church and the later teaching of Luther. The Nazi credo was equally a part of German nationalism. Together, Christian bigotry and German nationalism spawned the insanity that murdered 6.000.000 Jews.
62. The synanogue is worse than a brothel...it is the den of scoundrels and the repair of wild beasts... the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults...the refuge of brigands and debauchees, and the cavern of devils. It is a criminal assembly of Jews...a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ..a house worse than a drinking shop.. a den of thieves; a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, the refuge of devils...)
63. Brown, Ibid., p. 12: St. Bernard charged the whole Jewish people with “a stupidity bestial and more than bestial,” an “intelligence coarse, dense, and as it were bovine” because they did not follow the Lord..
64. Brown, Ibid.: Augustine, the great theologian, says in a sermon: "The Jews hold him, the Jews insult him, the Jews bind him, crown him with thorns, dishonor him with spitting, scourge him, hang him upon the tree, pierce him with a spear...The Jews killed him."
In another sermon he characterized the Jews as "willfully blind to Holy Scripture," "lacking in understanding" and "haters of truth." )
65. Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side Of The Papacy, p. 6: The mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.)
Tài Liệu Tham Khảo Chọn Lọc:
Arthur Frederick Ide, Unzipped The Popes Bare all: A Frank Study of Sex & Corruption in the Vatican, AAP, Inc., Austin, Texas, 1987.
Joanne Carlson Brown & Carole R. Bohm, Editors, Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, Ohio, 1989.
Ernie Bringas, Going By The Book, Past and Present Tragedies of Biblical Authority, Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., Charlottesville, VA, 1996.
Gary Wills, Papal Sin, Doubleday,New York, 2000; Why I Am A Catholic, Houghton Mifflin Company, NY, 2002
Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, Morningstar and Lark, Orlando, FL., 1995
John Dollison, Pope-Pouri, A Fireside Book, New York, 1994
James A. Haught, Holy Horrors: an Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness, Prometheus Books, New York, 1990.
John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism: A Bishop rethinks The Meaning of Scripture, Harper, San Francisco, 1991.
Milton Meltzer, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A History of Persecution, The Blue Sky Press, New York, 1999.
Malise Ruthven, Torture: The Grand Conspiracy, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, p. 119
Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, Paladin Book, Sussex University Presss, Great Britain, 1975
Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1988.
Trần Quý Nhu, Búa Phù Thủy [Chuyển ngữ từ cuốn Malleus Maleficarum của hai linh mục Heinrich Kramer và James Sprenger], Giao Điểm, 2003.
Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs For The Kingdom of Heaven, The Book that accuses the Roman Catholic Church of degrading women and undermining the sexuality of believers, Penguin Books, New York, 1990.
Richard L. Rubenstein & John K. Roth, Approaches To Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy, John Knox Press, Georgia, 1987.
Robert G.L. Waite, Hitler and Nazi Germany, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., NY , 1969
Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965, Indiana University Press, IN., 2000.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, , Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 2002
Mark McKain, Anti-Semitism, Greenhaven Press, MI, 2005.
David A. Rausch, A Legacy of Hatred: Why Christians Must Not Forget The Holocaust, Moody Press, Chicago, 1984.
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Khi Trung Tá Trần Thanh Chiêu tấn công bao vây chùa Xá Lợi vây bắt các sư sãi, thì nơi hậu liêu của chùa Xá Lợi, sát vách với cơ quan USOM trên đường Ngô Thời Nhiệm có một lỗ hổng to để thày Trí Quang chui sang và người dùng chiếc xe Ford Falcon đưa ông Trí Quang ra Tòa Đại Sứ ở đường Hàm Nghi là Doctor Strong cố vấn cho ông bộ trưởng Bộ Cải Tiến Nông Thôn Trần Lê Quang. Tôi phải nói rõ như vậy để quý vị bớt cuồng tín và nghe hơi nồi trõ đi.
Chuyện đất nước VN bị ngoại bang nhúng tay ám hại vì quyền lợi của Hoa Kỳ quá nhiều. Ngay sau này ai cũng chửi TT. Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, cho đến nay thì Kissinger đã há mồm nói sự thật việc Hoa Kỳ bán đứng VN CH cho Việt Cộng. Nhưng bụt chùa nhà không thiêng khi tôi nói về mật ước Ba Lê mà chúng tôi gồm có GS Nguyễn Ngọc Huy, Thượng nghị sĩ Phạm Nam Sách, GS Nguyễn Văn Tại, HQ. Đại tá Đỗ Đăng Công và cá nhân tôi hiện diện và khám phá ra sự thật này trình lên TT. Thiệu....
Nhiều người mù sờ voi la ầm ỹ cả lên. Nếu có dịp nào bà TNHH ghé San Jose chúng tôi sẽ xin hầu chuyện bà về lịch sử với những hình ảnh dẫn chứng để bà hiểu rõ hơn về lịch sử cận đại. Ngõ hầu có viết gì thêm thì viết cho chính xác.
Biết thì thưa thốt không biêt dựa cột mà nghe. Chúng ta không nên chấp những kẻ tay sai VC luôn luôn bẻ cong lịch sử. Gây rối loạn hàng ngũ người Việt quốc gia tị nạn cộng sảng tại HN. Không bết bà đã về VN lần nào chưa. Nhưng Thẩm Phán Lê Duy San đã về VN rồi. Còn tôi 33 năm luu vong thề không đầu hàng bọn chó chết cộng sản.
