Rome, Italy, Jun 9, 2005 / 22:00 pm
Italian journalist Vittorio Messori responded this week to an article in the Communist daily Il Manifesto that portrays as truthful the black legend about the Inquisition.
In a column translated from Italian by the Spanish daily La Razon, Messori maintains that “the imprudence—or shamelessness—of these ideologies never ceases to amaze me. A publicist named Adriano Petta published an article called ‘The Skeletons of the Holy Inquisition’. Dejá vu, of course. We’re talking about two and half centuries ago.”
According to Messori, the article “would not be worth reading were it not for the fact that it was published in Il Manifesto, one of the two or three newspapers in the entire Western world that still carries the title ‘Communist daily’on the front page.”
Messori noted that many other historical publications have been more precise in their accounts. “Just one year of the French Revolution, the reign of terror of 1793, left more victims that all of the centuries of all the inquisitions combined (the Protestants, in fact, did not fool around: the Geneva of Calvin was lit up by the bonfires, Lutheran Germany engaged in witch hunts as if they were a national sport; the last massacre encouraged by the Puritan pastors of Salem, Massachusetts, came at the threshold of 1800.)”