"Saying the church is holy but the people transgress....well, I'm not buying it. The people are the church."
The Church is made up of people, but the Church is an institution, a legal entity, which by definition cannot even sin. The historical facts of the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Galileo trial etc. do not discredit the Church, firstly because the sanctity of the Church is not diminished if some of its members commit sins; secondly, because the anti-church historical perspective greatly exaggerates the significance of these events, while at the same time silencing many holy and righteous moments that would significantly change the perception of them.
Apostle Paul also found serious mistakes and sins in the early Church, but it never crossed his mind that the Church had ceased to be a Church and to be holy. He demands excommunication, not a new foundation: "It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans; for a man has his father's wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you" (1 Corinthians 5:1). Jesus said that sins and scandals are inevitable in a community, but the consequences are personal: "It is impossible that no offenses should come, but woe to him through whom they do come!" (Luke 17:1). ....so only "to him", not to the Church at al!!!
If, with the spread of the Church, the initial fervor cooled, and mass conversions brought with them the weeds, sometimes to an extent that it seemed to threaten to suppress the good harvest: there was never a time in the Church when shadows extinguished all light. Its indestructible holy vitality was shown anew by rising from its lows by its own strength: precisely in times of lethargy and moral low tides, it conceived and nurtured within its own bosom the heroes who brought a new religious dawn (great ecclesiastical innovators, founders of monastic orders; e.g., in the 13th and 16th centuries). The fact that the Church sometimes exhibits very great abuses and sad declines in the field of religious and moral life is due to:
1. The uncompromising purity and sublimity of the Catholic ideal, against which human nature, disciplined into strict discipline, is more prone to passionate rebellion than against indifferent or compromising educators.
2. With certain psychological regularity, great declines follow or accompany great upsurges; where there are no high mountains, there are also no deep valleys or chasms threatening.
3. The pervasive deficiencies among the ecclesiastical leaders in the Catholic Church have a stronger impact due to the hierarchical principle than in other congregations; and conversely, because here the priesthood is not a caste, not an Aaronic priesthood, but every generation of priests is recruited from among the faithful, and the decline in the moral and religious standard of the faithful also makes the renewal of the priesthood difficult.
"But what of the Jews? The church cannot claim the conversos were a threat?"
During the medieval and early modern Christian-Muslim armed conflicts, the Jews always fought on the side of the Muslims. The Jewish-Muslim relationship was not bad at all until the 20th century; in fact, Jews generally supported Islam over Christianity. It is not appropriate to project the current state (Israeli-Palestinian conflict) back into the past.
I suppose this would be justified by Jewish perspective historiography with the argument that they fared better under Muslim rule than under Christian dominion. The Christian perspective, on the other hand, suggests that this was because the Jews, using modern terminology, posed a national security risk as they potentially worked in the interest of Muslim rule. The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, remains a good one.
The Spanish Inquisition was indeed characterized by extraordinary severity and lasted a long time. However, due to its origin, purpose, and methods, it requires a separate assessment. The Spaniards, having just liberated themselves from 700 years of Arab rule, used it for political objectives to maintain their hard-won national independence and unity, while preserving a veneer of religious character. Its organizer, the creator of Spanish national unity and royal absolutism, was Catholic Ferdinand (reigned 1479-1516), with its first chief inquisitor from 1481-98 being Tomasso Torquemada OP (†1498). The Inquisition's task was not so much the persecution of heresies, as there were hardly any heretical movements in Spain at that time, but rather the detection and suppression of numerous conspiracies against the newly formed Christian kingdom. Its cruelty (prolonged investigative imprisonment, torture, burning at the stake, life imprisonment) was often condemned by the popes, though with little result. The institution was not abolished until 1820. Whether the political goal of the Spanish Inquisition, the maintenance of national unity, could have been achieved in another way is difficult to say today, not least because political power has since then continued to use every means for similar objectives.
The Inquisition has become a real hobbyhorse of anti-church movements. It is necessary to criticize the barbaric and cruel methods of jurisprudence characteristic of the era, which resulted from the amalgamation of Roman law, as well as Frankish and Germanic legal customs, but it is important to recognize that this was typical of the time. The excesses of some representatives of the Church must also be criticized. However, the viewpoint that seeks to portray the Church as a discredited institution because of the Inquisition should be rejected. The number of victims of the Inquisition was large, but nowhere near as many (hundreds of thousands) as biased historiography, such as that of the Freemasons, tries to present. It lacks any scholarly basis to conflate the characteristics and severity of the Spanish Inquisition with the operation of the Inquisition in general. In evaluating the Inquisition, more objectivity and a more unbiased processing of the available documents would be necessary than has been the case to this day.
