The Inquisition revealed : $b in its origin, policy, cruelties, and history, with memoirs of its victims in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, England, India, and other countriesTimpson, Thomas
History
The Inquisition revealed : $b in its origin, policy, cruelties, and history, with memoirs of its victims in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, England, India, and other countries
Timpson, Thomas
Inquisition
Dr. Achilli, for many years “Deputy Master of the Sacred Palace,” and
himself a victim of that court at Rome, in a recent work, entitled,
“Dealings with the Inquisition,” testifies to the continued enormities
of that horrid tribunal. He says, “This disgrace to humanity, whose
entire history is a mass of atrocious crimes, committed by the priests
of the church of Rome, in the name of God and of His Christ, whose vicar
and representative the Pope, the head of the Inquisition, declares
himself to be--this abominable institution is still in existence, in
Rome and the Roman states. The Inquisition existed in full vigour during
the whole period of the pontificate of Pope Gregory. Pius IX. put on a
show of liberality; but this pope, believed so liberal by many, was
always secretly combined with the Jesuits and the Inquisition.”
Many were the victims of that atrocious court, sacrificed with fiendish
cruelty in the secret dungeons of the Holy Office. Appalling proofs of
this were discovered on the opening of the Inquisition, on the flight of
the pope, in February, 1848. The celebrated Father Prout, a Roman
Catholic priest, present on the occasion, in a letter to the London
_Daily News_, therefore, describes the scenes that were witnessed by the
citizens, at the opening of the dungeons of the Inquisition. “In one
part,” he states, “you see a quadrangular court, surrounded by strongly
barred dungeons; in another, a courtyard, along which extends a triple
row of cages, resembling the port-holes of a three-decker; in another,
skeletons in recesses; in another, a vault full of skulls, and piles of
scattered human remains, directly under a perpendicular shaft four feet
square, which ascended perpendicularly to the floor of the building
above, and was covered there with a trap-door; and in another, two large
subterranean lime-kilns, if they may be so called, shaped like a
bee-hive, in masonry, filled with layers of calcined bones, forming the
substratum of two other chambers on the ground floor, in the immediate
vicinity of the very mysterious shaft above-mentioned. These horrible
sights may be seen by every one in Rome. To-morrow,” says Father Prout,
“the whole population of Rome is publicly invited by the authorities to
come and see, with their own eyes, one of the results of entrusting
power to clerical hands.”
Father Prout is believed also to have written the following paper, which
was published, as a “Memorial regarding the tribunal of the Holy
Office, at the time of its suppression in February, 1849:”--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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