@Sea Breeze
Thank you for your thoughtful and heartfelt response. I truly appreciate
your desire to uphold Christ as the ultimate source of truth — on that point,
we are in complete agreement. Jesus Christ is the Truth, the Way, and
the Life (John 14:6), and no human institution, apart from Him, possesses truth
by its own merit. However, from a Catholic understanding, Christ did not leave
us orphans; He established His Church as a living, visible body through which
His truth would continue to be taught and safeguarded until the end of time
(cf. Matthew 16:18-19; 28:19-20; 1 Timothy 3:15). The Church is not a rival to
Christ’s truth, but rather His chosen instrument for making that truth
accessible to the world. When Catholics say the "fullness of truth"
is found in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, we mean that the
Church, by Christ’s will and the Spirit’s guidance, faithfully preserves and
teaches everything necessary for salvation — not that it replaces Christ, but
that it serves Him. I believe that where we both agree — on Christ as
the one and only source of truth and salvation — is a beautiful and essential
starting point for any sincere discussion between believers. You are absolutely
right that Jesus alone is the Truth (John 14:6). The Catholic Church fully
affirms this. When I spoke of the "fullness of truth" being found in
the Catholic Church, it was not in contradiction to Christ being the Truth, but
rather an expression of the Church's understanding that Christ, who is the
Truth, established a visible community — a Church — to preserve and proclaim
His truth to all nations until the end of time (Matthew 28:19–20; 1 Timothy
3:15).
I absolutely understand your sensitivity toward claims about "having
the truth," especially given your experience with the Watchtower. It is
tragic how many souls have been wounded by movements that twist the Gospel into
a system of fear and false promises. Catholicism, however, is not parallel to
the Watchtower. It does not claim new prophecies; it does not continually
revise its dogma; and it never teaches that human leaders can
"improve" upon Christ’s revelation. Its role is to guard the deposit
of faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3) and to hand it on faithfully
through the centuries under the Spirit’s protection. The Catholic
claim is not that an institution or a human hierarchy replaces Christ,
but rather that Christ Himself continues to work through His Body, the Church,
which He founded, animated by the Holy Spirit. In Catholic theology, the Church
is not merely a human organization; she is, mysteriously, the extension of
Christ’s presence in the world, safeguarding the Gospel in its entirety.
Therefore, saying that the fullness of truth subsists in the Catholic Church is
ultimately a confession about Christ's fidelity to His promises — not a boast
about human achievement.
Regarding the painful history you mentioned, particularly
concerning the Inquisition, I understand the strong emotions these topics
evoke. History must be faced honestly, without defensiveness but also without
distortion. It’s important to distinguish between the sanctity of the Church as Christ’s
body and the sins committed by individuals within it. No faithful Catholic
denies that grievous wrongs were committed in the name of Christ at different
times, including during certain phases of the Inquisition. Yet much of what is
popularly said about "50 million deaths" or "600 years of
terror" comes not from sober historical scholarship, but from hostile
sources — particularly from Reformation-era polemicists and later Enlightenment
critics — who vastly exaggerated and distorted events to discredit the Church.
Serious historians today, Catholic and secular alike, recognize that while the
Inquisition involved real injustices, the numbers and scope often cited are
grossly inflated and need to be seen in their proper context. So the
narrative that "50 million" people were systematically murdered under
19 consecutive popes during the Inquisition is, respectfully, historically
inaccurate. Modern secular and Protestant historians, even very critical ones,
generally recognize that the figures associated with the medieval Inquisition
are far, far lower — estimates for the Spanish Inquisition, for example, range
between 3,000 to 5,000 executions over several centuries, tragic indeed but not
a genocide by any historical standard.
The official ecclesiastical procedure against heretics indeed had its excesses, but events from hundreds of years ago should not be judged by today's standards. To understand this, let's look at the formation of the Inquisition. The heretics of old (Cathars, Waldensians, Bogomils, Hussites) were far from being pious religious dreamers. They burned down churches, cities, killed people, and lived or propagated abnormal civil and sexual lives. The state had to act against these actions. When the state began using the accusation of heresy for political purges, the Church intervened and did not allow the state to arbitrarily decide who was a heretic and who was not. Thus, the Inquisition saved many people's lives, but history books do not write a word about this.
Hence the perception of the Inquisition's scale and methods is unfair. Many have been led to believe that the Inquisition massively and easily burned people at the stake, while subjecting them to terrible torture. It is true that torture was used in certain cases, but this was due to the spirit of the times, and the Church practiced mercy here too: The inquisitorial court used one kind of torture, while the secular courts' torture instruments were only limited by imagination. It's not without reason that many caught criminals invented a religious element in court ("the voices said"; "God messaged") so that their cases would be transferred from the secular to the inquisitorial court, where they could hope for a milder punishment. Thus, the majority of inquisitorial trials were ordinary criminal proceedings, and not "dramatic collisions of conscience and power." Death sentences were only issued in severe and common-law cases. The number of these was not more than two or three individuals per year. The severity of punishments is also relative. Indeed, the punishments were harsh. But the medieval person could endure them. In less softened peoples today, the justice system still uses more cutting methods.
True religious judgments were rare, and only very significant or particularly violent heretics were executed (e.g., Jan Hus). However, two factors come into play here. In the Middle Ages, God was considered the King of kings. Anyone who offended the king was sentenced to death for treason. Teaching heretical errors about God or falsifying His word was thought in the past to offend the King of kings, thus heretics were also sentenced to death. But remember, in the Middle Ages, Christianity was the state ideology, the main force of social cohesion. Attacks against it violated societal interests. Open critics of the state ideology were always punished. It's no different today: And it's not necessary to think only of the mass executions of the French Revolution, the Nazi concentration camps, or the communist gulags. Just observe the activities of national security agencies. In many Western countries, if someone is a mover of a movement considered "heresy" by the establishment, then the state power monitors and possibly shuts it down. Not without reason. Modern freedom of speech is not as straightforward as many believe. In many European countries, openly or even covertly offending certain nationalities or deviations is punished with imprisonment. The essence doesn't differ much from the persecution of heretics, and the methods are not far from those of the Inquisition.
Spain is an exception. Not only because the Inquisition operated most harshly there, but because there, the Inquisition was primarily in the hands of the state, not the church. This led to many abuses and mercies, but fundamentally, there was a reason for it. Spain was full of seemingly converted Moors who pretended to be Christians but were actually spying and trying to bring Europe under the crescent. These people were indeed sought out by all means. However, it's evident that the Inquisition also served a counter-intelligence function here. Its name reflected this: Sanctum Officium Inquisitionis, the Holy Office of Investigation.
So, the Inquisition had many dark sides, but these were not the consequences of the institution itself, but of human fallibility. It stands that the sanctity of the Church is not diminished if some of its members commit sins, because such scandals are unavoidable. If the inquisitors operated conscientiously, they cannot be faulted, for with their rigor, they protected the common people from common-law, religious criminals. There were saints among them.
Many believe that "the Catholic Church burned at the stake those of different faiths." First of all, it was not simply "people of different faiths" who were burned, but rather the incorrigible rebels and deliberate religious subversives. Second, and most importantly, it was not the Church that burned them. The Church itself never burned anyone, either at the stake or otherwise. Death by burning is a terrible remnant of pagan Germanic law, which unfortunately, was adopted and maintained by virtually every state in the Middle Ages; and importantly, it was a state punishment, not an ecclesiastical one. Just because the state was so intertwined with the Church at the time and considered religious crimes as also state crimes: qualified as subversion and rebellion, hence sometimes the state power itself pursued the perpetrators of religious crimes with its often brutal means, including torture and burning at the stake. In determining the religious crime, ecclesiastical factors were of course consulted, and thus mixed courts were established, such as the Inquisition. The ecclesiastical factors unfortunately erred in often being too readily defenders of state excesses and not sufficiently opposing the cruel and often unjust methods of torture and punishment. In most cases, however, they did take action and it was the Church itself that repeatedly and vehemently spoke out against these barbaric customs. In distributing death by burning, everyone was equally guilty at the time: individuals, society, the people, cities, and states, not least the heresies themselves, which also extensively used torture and other forms of torment against Catholics.
Many also believe that "the Inquisition led hundreds of thousands to a horrendous death." However, the "hundreds and hundreds of thousands" is a mild exaggeration invented by the Spanish apostate Llorente and circulated by numerous fanatical anti-Catholic novelists. According to serious calculations, the number of victims of the Inquisition over 700 years falls well short of even the number of martyrs and those tortured during the English persecution of Catholics. Why do those who so readily mention the Inquisition remain silent about the much bloodier persecutions of Catholics in non-Catholic areas?
Moreover, the Inquisition itself was only partly an ecclesiastical institution, as we have already explained. It should also be added that the best-performing Spanish Inquisition was a state institution, established to monitor and neutralize the traitorous dealings of Arabs who remained in Spain after the long Moorish occupation and had ostensibly converted to Christianity, as well as the Jews who secretly allied with them. To this end, the judges of the Spanish Inquisition always first sought to determine whether the suspected Arabs and Jews could legitimately claim their baptismal certificates, that is, whether they were indeed living a Christian life or merely using baptism as a cover. This led to a unique mixing of religious and civil elements in the Spanish Inquisition. The Church cannot be held so responsible for the Spanish Inquisition to the extent that, on the contrary, it was the Roman Curia that protested against the actions of the Spanish Inquisition in many cases, seeing them as an unwarranted interference by the Spanish crown in ecclesiastical legal matters.
But what does the world know about this! The "Spanish Inquisition" is a hobbyhorse on which the enemies of the Church have happily ridden for a hundred years. Experts can refute the horror stories circulating about it a hundred times, but for some people, what matters is not whether something is true, but whether it can be used as a trump card against the Catholic Church. In 1590, Antonio Pérez, the private secretary of Philip II, fled to France and then to Germany due to murder and treason charges. While there, he wrote a detailed report for the Protestants about Spain's deeds. But in revenge, he added two or more zeros to every number, thus inflating the number of victims to several million over a hundred years. The countries of William of Orange and Elizabeth I enthusiastically spread these writings that discredited the Spanish, which became known as La Leyenda Negra - The Black Legend. This, in turn, spread in the public consciousness through Anglo-Saxon historiography and has become indelibly embedded. Since then, no one has ever done so much harm to their own country.
Furthermore, while there were undeniable abuses (and the
Church has frankly acknowledged and repented of these failings), it is also
true that many aspects of the Inquisition were actually intended to ensure
fairer trials compared to secular courts of the time, which often meted out far
harsher and less regulated punishments. The Church
herself has acknowledged and repented for these sins, especially under recent
popes like St. John Paul II, who called Catholics to confess past failures and
seek reconciliation. None of this is meant to excuse real sins committed by individuals in the
name of the Church. As Catholics, we mourn those failures deeply, recognizing
that the Church is a divine institution carried in fragile, sinful human
vessels. Yet these failures do not invalidate the Church’s divine foundation,
any more than Judas' betrayal invalidated Christ's mission. If we were to judge
the validity of a community purely by the sins of its members or leaders, no
Christian group could stand — not the early Church, not Protestant bodies, not
any of us.
You mention supporting the "catholic" (universal) church but not
the "Papal Church." I would simply encourage reflection on this:
Christ prayed for His followers to be one (John 17:21), not fractured into
countless independent groups each claiming to represent His teaching. The visible
unity of the Church, maintained through apostolic succession and the Petrine
ministry, is not a man-made invention but a divine safeguard against the
endless division that plagues Christianity today. The pope, as bishop of Rome
and successor of Peter, serves not as an emperor, but as a visible sign of
unity and servant of the servants of God. His role is not to replace Christ’s
headship but to bear witness to it and to preserve the communion that Christ
Himself willed for His people.
You mentioned that you and others, once trapped in the
errors of the Watchtower, were rescued by the relentless mercy of Christ. For
that, I give heartfelt thanks to God. Truly, salvation is the work of Christ,
not the work of men. Yet if Christ willed to entrust His Gospel to human
witnesses, through the apostles and their successors, then it must also be that
He would safeguard that witness through the Holy Spirit, even amid human
frailty. That is the Catholic conviction: that the Church’s endurance across
centuries, despite corruption, persecution, and weakness, is a sign not of
human glory but of divine faithfulness. I truly respect your journey
out of the darkness of the Watchtower and into the light of Christ. It is a
profound testimony to God’s grace. My hope is simply that, in continuing to
seek the fullness of the truth found in Christ, one might recognize that Christ
continues to work through His Church — wounded though her members may be — and
that He invites all believers not just to an invisible, subjective unity, but
to the visible, historical communion He founded.
Finally, I agree with you entirely that the term
"catholic" in its original sense — universal — belongs to all true
Christians. The Catholic Church, however, believes that this universality is
visibly manifest in her sacramental life, apostolic succession, and unity of
faith. It is not a matter of triumphalism but of deep humility, recognizing
that whatever good we have is a gift received, not something earned. I say all of this not to argue, but out of fraternal charity and the desire
for deeper understanding.
Thank you again for your sincerity. I hope you will receive this response
in the same spirit of charity and truthfulness in which you offered yours. I am
grateful for every conversation that brings us closer to the one Lord we both
seek to love and serve with all our hearts.
Pax Christi.
Som resources you may find useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhlAqklH0do
