“Masters of Torture”

Handout #11 // February 6, 2006

Here are some facts about certain “masters of torture” that generally are not included in many history textbooks or encyclopedias here in America:

· “Inquisition” (per Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language): (Meaning #4): “In some Catholic countries, a court or tribunal established for the examination and punishment of ‘heretics’. This court was established in the 12^th century by ‘father’ Dominic, who was charged by Pope Innocent III with orders to excite [Roman] Catholic princes [i.e., rulers] and people to extirpate [i.e., destroy completely] ‘heretics’.” ‘Heretics’ were often innocent Christians who read the Holy Bible or who disagreed with papal ‘absolute’ authority and/or doctrines.

· Dave Hunt, author of A Woman Rides the Beast, tells us the following about the Inquisition: “The Medieval Inquisition had flourished for centuries when Pope Paul III, in 1542, gave it permanent status as the first of Rome’s Sacred Congregations, the ‘Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Inquisition’. Known more recently as the ‘Holy Office’, its name was changed in 1967 to the ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’…”

F. Tupper Saussy, author of Rulers of Evil, states: “…The Roman Inquisition…had been administered since 1542 by the Jesuits.” He also tells us: “Pontifex Maximus [i.e., the pope of Rome] has laundered the Inquisition’s name twice. In 1908, Pope Pius X renamed it ‘the Holy Office’, which [Pope] Paul VI transformed into [the] ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’ in 1965.”

· Author Dave Hunt states: “To wring out confessions from these poor creatures [Ed. Note: during the various Inquisitions], the Roman Catholic Church devised ingenious tortures so excruciating and barbarous that one is sickened by their recital.”

· Bishop William Shaw Kerr, a Church historian, tells us: “The most ghastly abomination of all was the system of torture. The accounts of its cold-blooded operations make one shutter at the capacity of human beings for cruelty. And it was decreed and regulated by the popes who ‘claim’ to represent Christ on earth…”

Peter de Rosa, Catholic historian & former Jesuit, tells us in Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy: “Of eighty popes in a line from the thirteenth century on, not one of them disapproved of the theology and apparatus of Inquisition. On the contrary, one after another added his own cruel touches to the workings of this deadly machine.”

· John Daniel, author of The Grand Design Exposed, states: “It is so very hard today to imagine how anyone could watch and inflict systematic tortures [Ed. Note: as occurred during the so-called ‘Holy Inquisitions’] designed to bring its victims the most severe and agonizing pain, to the very point of death, yet denying death, and then start the process all over again – even on an animal, much less another human being.”

The murderous Office of Inquisition STILL exists, albeit under its new name of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”. To learn more about torture, religious genocide, and Inquisition, please visit www.pastorbutch.com (click on the “Tackling the Tough Topics” box) or www.tacklingthetoughtopics.net, and please read “Death by Government and Death by Church”, “Bloody Hands & Wicked Hearts”, and “Deceitful Revisers and Editors of History”. To order Dave Hunt’s A Woman Rides the Beast for $16.20 postpaid, call 1-909-987-0771.