Judge The Deeds

>I believe that Catholics and Protestants are both Christians IN SPITE of their differences.

The Charge: The blood on the ledger. Inquisition, crusade, conquest, forced conversion, and the abuse crisis. Do not dodge a single item.

On the Sunday before Christmas in 1511, on the island of Hispaniola, a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesinos climbed into a pulpit in front of a congregation that included the governor, the royal officials, and the most powerful colonists on the island.

The Spanish had been in the Caribbean for nineteen years. The system in operation was the encomienda, under which a colonist was granted a number of Indians, in theory to protect and instruct them, in practice to work them. The mortality was catastrophic and everyone in that church knew it.

Montesinos took as his text the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and then he told the men in front of him that he was that voice, and that they were the wilderness.

He asked them by what right they held these people in servitude. By what authority they made war on people who had done them no harm. Why they kept them so oppressed and exhausted, without food, without care for their sickness, so that they died from the excessive labor. Whether these were not men. Whether they did not have rational souls. Whether the colonists were not obliged to love them as themselves.

And then the line that ends it. He told them that in the state they were in, they could no more be saved than the Moors or the Turks.

The congregation was enraged. A delegation went to the Dominican superior to demand a retraction and to demand that Montesinos be sent back to Spain. The following Sunday, the church filled with men expecting an apology.

Montesinos got up and preached the same sermon again.

We know about this because a colonist who was in the church that day, a man who himself held Indians under the encomienda, could not get it out of his head. He kept turning it over for years. And eventually he gave up his own holdings, freed the people he held, and spent the following half century fighting the system he had been part of.

His name was Bartolomé de las Casas, and almost everything we know about Spanish atrocities in the Americas we know because he wrote it down.

Hold that, because it is the thesis of this entire essay, stated in one biography.

The charge, at full strength!
This is the part of the series where I stop making arguments and just read the list. If you have been waiting for me to flinch, this is where it would happen.

The Inquisition. A permanent judicial apparatus for investigating belief, running from the thirteenth century into the nineteenth, with torture as an authorized instrument of interrogation and death by burning as an available sentence, carried out by the civil arm after the church court handed the condemned over.

The crusades. Nine major expeditions and a great many minor ones. The taking of Jerusalem in 1099, in which the slaughter of the city’s inhabitants was so complete that the Latin chroniclers, who approved, describe men riding through blood. The Albigensian Crusade, in which a Christian army was sent against a Christian region of France and killed on a scale that depopulated it. The sack of Constantinople in 1204, which I dealt with in Part Seven.

The conquest. The Americas. Demographic collapse across two continents on a scale that has no parallel, driven mostly by disease but accelerated everywhere by forced labor, war, and enslavement, conducted by Catholic powers under papal grants and with clergy present at nearly every stage.

Forced conversion and expulsion. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The Muslims expelled or forcibly baptized over the following century. The conversos and moriscos then investigated by the Inquisition for insincerity in a conversion they had been compelled into.

The Jews, across a millennium. Ghettos. The yellow badge, mandated at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Expulsions from England, France, Spain, and elsewhere. Blood libel accusations that led to massacres, sometimes with clergy participating and sometimes with clergy attempting to stop them. And the long history of Good Friday preaching that produced pogroms with reliable seasonal regularity.

And the abuse crisis. Which is not history. Which is the last seventy years. Thousands of children, in Ireland, in the United States, in Australia, in Germany, in Chile, and in every other place anyone has looked. And not only the abuse but the concealment: bishops who moved offenders between parishes, who settled with families under confidentiality agreements, who prioritized the reputation of the institution over the bodies of children, and who in a number of documented cases knew exactly what they were doing.

That is the charge. Every item on it is true. I am not going to relativize any of it, and I want to say something specific about the last one before I go further.

Nothing in this essay is offered as a mitigation of the abuse crisis. The arguments that follow are about historical atrocity and how traditions are corrected. The abuse crisis is a live wound with living victims, and the correct posture toward it is not analysis. It is shame. If you are a survivor of it, nothing I write here is addressed to you, and I would not blame you for closing this and not coming back.

Both ledgers, or this is propaganda
Now the first move, and it is not a defense of Rome. It is a refusal to let one column be counted alone.

If the argument is that a body which commits atrocities forfeits the name Christian, then the argument has to be run on everybody, and I am going to run it.

Geneva, the twenty-seventh of October 1553. Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician and theologian who denied the Trinity, was burned alive with his book chained to his leg. He had been arrested in Geneva, tried, and condemned by the city council. John Calvin had testified against him, had corresponded with him for years before that, had written that if Servetus came to Geneva he would not leave alive, and had requested only that he be beheaded rather than burned. The council refused the mercy.

Calvin defended the execution afterward in print.

Zurich, the fifth of January 1527. Felix Manz, one of the founders of the Anabaptist movement, was bound and drowned in the Limmat river for the crime of re-baptizing adults. The method was chosen as a joke: since he liked water, he could have water. His mother is said to have called out to him from the bank to stay firm.

Zwingli, who had been his teacher, approved.

And then the pattern, across a century. Anabaptists were executed in the thousands across Europe, by Catholic authorities, by Lutheran authorities, and by Reformed authorities. It is one of the very few things all three could agree on. Drowning, burning, beheading. The Martyrs Mirror, the Anabaptist record of it, runs to more than a thousand pages.

England. Mary Tudor burned close to three hundred Protestants in four years and is remembered for it. Elizabeth’s government then executed something on the order of two hundred Catholics, mostly priests, by hanging, drawing, and quartering, under laws that made the exercise of the priesthood treason. Both regimes had a theory about why theirs were the just executions.

The working file: the sources I checked, graded, including the ones that did not survive the check. This is where I show what I threw out and why.

Investigating Islam, Christianity, and the West — one primary source at a time.
 
© 2026 A. C. Rosenthal
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From: acrosenthal+the-god-question@substack.com
Sat, Oct 10, 2026 at 9:18 AM