in Naples or Milan, which then belonged to
Spain, so great was his abhorence of its cruelties.

To sum up: I have endeavored to show that the Church disavows all
responsibility for the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, because
oppression forms no part of her creed; that these atrocities have been
grossly exaggerated; that the Inquisition was a political tribunal; that
Catholic Prelates were amenable to its sentence as well as Moors and Jews,
and that the Popes denounced and labored hard to abolish its sanguinary
features.

And yet Rome has to bear all the odium of the Inquisition!

I heartily pray that religious intolerance may never take root in our
favored land. May the only king to force our conscience be the King of
kings; may the only prison erected among us for the sin of unbelief or
misbelief be the prison of a troubled conscience; and may our only motive
for embracing truth be not the fear of man, but the love of truth and of
God.

II. What About The Massacre Of St. Bartholomew?

I have no words strong enough to express my detestation of that inhuman
slaughter. It is true that the number of its victims has been grossly
exaggerated by partisan writers, but that is no extenuation of the crime
itself. I most emphatically assert that the Church had no act or part in
this atrocious butchery, except to deplore the event and weep over its
unhappy victims. Here are the facts briefly presented:

First--In the reign of Charles IX. of France the Huguenots were a
formidable power and a seditious element in that country. They were under
the leadership of Admiral Coligny, who was plotting the overthrow of the
ruling monarch. The French King, instigated by his mother, Catherine de
Medicis, and fearing the influence of Coligny, whom he regarded as an
aspirant to the throne, compassed his assassination, as well as that of
his followers in Paris, August 24th, 1572. This deed of violence was
followed by an indiscriminate massacre in the French capital and other
cities of France by an incendiary populace, who are easily aroused but not
easily appeased.

Second--Religion had nothing to do with the massacre. Coligny and his
fellow Huguenots were slain not on account of their creed, but exclusively
on account of their alleged treasonable designs. If they had nothing but
their Protestant faith to render them odious to King Charles, they would
never have been molested; for, neither did Charles nor his mother ever
mani