This is the transcript of the video, Catholic Inquisition Myths Busted by Real Historians on the YouTube channel, Lux Veritatis (6-5-25); production by Kenny Burchard. Citations will be in blue font.
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Summary: Did the Catholic Church really kill 50, 68, or even 100 million people during the Inquisition? Learn what real historians say about the Inquisition’s actual scope.
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We’ve all heard of Hitler killing six million Jews and millions of others as well, and many have become aware that Stalin starved ten million Ukrainians, and that Mao murdered 60 million of his own people. The Catholic Church, however, puts all of them to shame, if we are to believe certain polemicists who are out to make her look as evil as they can. Determining mere facts by means of reputable historians quickly goes out the window for people like this. It’s contrary to the Great Cause of battering Catholicism. Non-Catholic Christians and the secular world have used the Inquisitions, the Crusades, and the Galileo incident, as “clubs” to bash the Church for almost 500 years. I did so myself, in my Protestant apologist days. But such critics almost invariably distort the known facts in order to do so.
Some years ago, a Protestant asserted that “an estimated 50-68 million people” were killed by the Catholic Church in the Inquisition. I asked him to give me a name of any reputable historian who would assert or defend these ridiculous figures. To his credit, he did provide one: David A. Plaisted, who wrote an 84-page self-published treatise in 2006 called Estimates of the Number Killed by the Papacy in the Middle Ages and Later”. It’s available online for free at Internet Archive. But Plaisted is not a historian at all, let alone any sort of expert on medieval history or the Inquisition in particular.
His treatise is, however, helpful in one respect. He surveys the various numbers that have floated around — often deriving from hundreds of years ago, in effect becoming a witness to the chaotic and incoherent nature of these reputed numbers. One also notes that these totals are arbitrarily attributed to different entities: the Catholic Church, or the papacy, or the dreaded Inquisition. These are different things, of course, and many of these anti-Catholic pseudo-historians of the past thought nothing of equivocating between all three and even throwing in reputed numbers of the dead from European wars, as if “Rome” and no one else was responsible for all those. On p. 2, Plaisted summarizes the numerical chaos: “The numbers given include 50 million, 68 million, 100 million, 120 million, and 150 million. . . . Frequently the figures are stated without any information about where they came from or how they were computed.”
These numbers are ludicrous on their face, not only because of the absurd gaps between the estimated numbers, but also because it’s thought by real historians that the population of Europe was 74 million in 1340 and 50 million in 1450, due to the Black Death. It was about 70 million in 1550 and 78 million in 1600. Considering these historical facts alone, there is no way that the numbers could have been anything remotely like any of these figures. On page 3, he cites John Dowling in his book, History of Romanism from 1847. Dowling estimated that “more than 50 million” had been killed by Catholics between 606 and 1847, which he describes as “an average of more than forty thousand religious murders for every year of the existence of popery.”
19th century Presbyterian W. C. Brownlee somehow settled on a figure of 68 million in 1834, and it’s still tossed out today as a favorite in anti-Catholic polemics. And so on and so forth. Plaisted at length concludes on p. 41 that “there is enough evidence to show that the figure of 50 million killed for their faith by the Papacy in Europe is reasonable.”
Wikipedia has a page entitled, “Historical revision of the Inquisition.” It cites historians such as Edward Peters, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On p. 122 Peters wrote:
The Inquisition was an image assembled from a body of legends and myths which, between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, established the perceived character of inquisitorial tribunals and influenced all ensuing efforts to recover their historical reality.
Regarding some typical numbers, he stated on p. 87: “The best estimate is that around 3000 death sentences were carried out in Spain by Inquisitorial verdict between 1550 and 1800, a far smaller number than that in comparable secular courts.” The other book cited in this article is The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (published by Yale University Press, 1998; fourth revised edition, 2014), by Henry Kamen, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and professor of history at various universities, including the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Kamen observes on p. 60:
Taking into account all the tribunals of Spain up to about 1530, it is unlikely that more than two thousand people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition.
And on p. 203 he noted:
It is clear that for most of its existence that Inquisition was far from being a juggernaut of death either in intention or in capability. . . . it would seem that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fewer than three people a year were executed in the whole of the Spanish monarchy from Sicily to Peru, certainly a lower rate than in any provincial court of justice in Spain or anywhere else in Europe.
I don’t “defend” the Inquisition as a practice (and in fact it was my biggest objection to Catholicism, prior to my conversion). My position is that of the early Church and almost all Christians today: that religious tolerance and freedom is infinitely preferable. But we also ought to try to properly and accurately understand it in the context of its time (the Middle Ages and early modern periods). In those days, all Christians (minus only a few small groups like Quakers) believed in capital punishment for heresy, because they thought that heresy was far more dangerous to a person and society than physical harm. The heresy would lead people to eternal misery in hell, so they reasoned.
In the Middle Ages, all heretics were pretty much regarded as obstinate and in bad faith or possessing an evil will, etc. Christians today take a much more psychologically nuanced approach, and hold that much heresy is (erroneously) believed sincerely and in good faith; hence the adherent is less culpable and not guilty enough to be punished. We’ve also learned that coercion is pointless. We must persuade nonbelievers through reason and the power of God’s grace. This was the original Christian position, anyway.
What Protestants often do, however, in direct proportion to how much they are anti-Catholic, is to exercise a double standard in condemning the Catholic Church for engaging in this practice in the past, and exaggerating grotesquely by throwing out ludicrous numbers of how many were “murdered” by the Catholic Church. At the same time, they almost always ignore the persecutions and intolerance of Protestants, which were no different in principle, or in scope, than Catholic practices.
The belief in the death penalty for heresy was mostly a product of the Middle Ages, and the Protestants who came at the end of that period — with very few exceptions — did not dissent from it at all. To utterly ignore these facts, all the while loudly and continuously condemning the Catholic Church, is to engage in dishonest historical revisionism and to ignore the goal of objectivity and fairness of analysis.
My Related Articles
The Inquisition: Its Purpose and Rationale Within the Mediæval Worldview [2-21-06]
Killing Heretics: Any Conceivable Biblical Rationale? [6-5-10]
Catholic Inquisition Murdered “50-68 Million”? [April 2014]
Reply To Gavin Ortlund: Albigensian Crusade [2-6-24]
Reply To Gavin Ortlund: Catholic Inquisitions; Hus [2-7-24]
My Related Web Pages
Inquisition, Crusades, & “Catholic Scandals”
Protestantism: Historic Persecution & Intolerance
Photo credit: copyright 2025 by Lux Veritatis.
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