Touching the Inquisition, part 1

As promised I will share with you about my time in Spain. But since the time has been so intense and I need to give some background information, I have decided to spread it out over two blog entries. In this first blog entry I will share about my own journey for caring for this subject and some information on the Inquisition as an institution. The next blog entry will then tell about the journey itself.

So, the Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition to be more precise, what is this history about? When you think of the Inquisition and you come from western Europe, you think of the catholic institution that went mainly against heretics and witches. And that is true for most of Europe. But in Spain, and from there in Portugal and the New World (Latin America) the Inquisition was an institution that worked at the purity of the catholic faith. This took place in the Spain of the Reconquista, conquered back from the Muslim dominion. Spain wanted to become a purely catholic country. This meant for the Jews and Muslims living in Spain, that there was a lot of social and religious pressure to convert, but also physical violence (pogroms). Under these pressures many people converted. These newly converted people (mainly Jews) were called conversos. They would practice the catholic faith for the outside world, but in their homes they would often continue with their Jewish customs, either out of conviction or because they would not see any problem of continuing them alongside their catholic faith. Then in 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic kings, signed the Alhambra decree, an edict of expulsion for all the Jews (and the few remaining Muslims) still living in Spain: within 4 months you had to convert or leave Spain. If you would leave, you had to leave behind all your possessions. For the newly baptized (no matter if it was out of free will or not) the rules of the Catholic church applied. Already since the second council of Nicea in 787 it was forbidden to keep any Jewish practices as a Christian on pain of excommunication. With the Spanish Inquisition your punishment would start with imprisonment, a lot of psychological pressure and possibly torture and condemnations that would go from having to live life in poverty, because all your property was taken away to death by burning on the stake. The Spanish Inquisition functioned for about three centuries and all this time the families of these conversos lived under fear of accusation. For the Jewish people this is part of the painful chapters in their history, together with the Crusades, the pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. Descendants of these Jewish people might still experience horror, loneliness, contempt, and an emptiness of knowing that they had been excluded from the Jewish culture and also from the Gentile (because they were never accepted as full members of the catholic society).

The history of the Inquisition has been on the radar of TJCII from the beginning and the need for healing of it also. In this light several prayer journeys to Spain were organized and a preparatory prayer journey to Portugal was organized in 2018. I went on the journey to Portugal and we learned a lot about the Inquisition and about the lack of dealing with this history as a Body of Messiah. When in May 2021 a virtual TJCII summit was organized in South America, we prayed for this with our Dutch intercessors. While praying I felt the depth and the heaviness of the wound that the Catholic church had made with the Inquisition in South America. I understood, that we would need our protestant and evangelical brothers and sisters to hold up our arms in prayer and to help us deal with this wound. This started for me a journey of walking with our TJCII intercessor in Argentina, during which God connected me more and more to South America and gave me a growing burden for the history of the Inquisition. Because of this I also started to learn Spanish. And this year I saw the opportunity to travel through Spain from France on the way to Portugal and spend some time in Spain. I felt it was important to touch this history of the Inquisition where it all began.

In the past year I also found out, that the only Dutch pope that we have had in history, Pope Adrian VI, was bishop of Tortosa and Great inquisitor the years before he became Pope. I had no idea that there was a Dutch connection, but this gave me even more authority in intercession! So, up to Spain I went, vamos!

Venue of the Tortosa Disputation

A synagogue that has been converted into a church

The last street name in Tortosa’s Jewish quarter

Physical evidence of Barcelona’s Jewish quarter

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