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One of the most popular genres of anti-Catholic literature featured the alleged revelations of former priests about the inner workings of the Church. Unfortunately, the Catholic urban legend of the Inquisition, defined in Reformation and post-Reformation polemics as a universal Catholic machinery of repression centered in Rome, has remained a part of the normal cultural and political language of today. Though the rise of secular historical studies in the late nineteenth century began to dismiss this popular caricature of the Inquisition, not until the second half of the twentieth century did serious historical study show the complicated and diverse nature of the Inquisition from country to country and century to century. The Inquisition as depicted in Reformation anti-Catholic propaganda is perhaps the most persistent image of Catholicism, appearing in everything from later editions of John Fox’s Book of Martyrs to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” to D.W. That was the image that would be carried to the American colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. The fear of a Spanish invasion to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I led to a government-sponsored propaganda campaign that painted the Catholic Church as a violent, deceitful enemy of liberty and the true faith. This creation of an all-powerful and all-encompassing theocratic “Inquisition” had a powerful impact in England. But it was through works like Montanus’ and the Apologie that the Inquisition became in the popular culture the brutal machinery that slaughtered millions of Protestants.
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The Spanish Inquisition was a political and social tool primarily targeting conversos, well-to-do Catholic families with Jewish ancestry. It also propagated the idea that Spanish leadership was ignorant of it and, at the same time, controlled by it. Its author was Reginald Montanus (a pseudonym), and it created the image of the Spanish Inquisition as persecuting the innocent, its leadership venal and deceitful, every step in the procedure a violation of civil and natural law. William’s Apologie was based largely on A Discovery and Plaine Declaration of Sundry Subtill Practices of the Holy Inquisition of Spain, published in 1567, translated into numerous languages, and still in print 200 years later. It painted a picture of the Inquisition as the power behind every Catholic throne, controlling kings who became mere puppets in its hands. But it helped to shape the popular image of the Catholic Church, through the Inquisition, as the historic enemy of true religion, the subverter of political liberty, and the natural enemy of anyone who loved freedom. Intended as a propaganda tool in the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, the tract was less a defense of revolution than a Calvinist apologia. Written by French Huguenot Pierre Loyseleur de Villiers, this anti-Catholic political tract became hugely popular in England and helped to define for centuries the public image of the Inquisition, and therefore, the Catholic Church. I have also focused on those that primarily helped to create persistent Catholic urban legends in the United States. But in selecting this inglorious list, I have tried to focus on those books that had the most widespread influence in creating and sustaining Catholic urban legends in the popular mind. Through the centuries, we have seen these urban legends flourish in a host of books meant to titillate the general population by instructing them in the alleged facts of the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith.Īttempting to pick the five most influential books in creating Catholic urban legends is both daunting and a matter of opinion. The simple answer is that many are as old as sixteenth-century Reformation propaganda, which formed the roots of nineteenth-century American nativism, which evolved into the leftist European anti-clericalism of the post-World War II period. I’m often asked where Catholic urban legends come from. They are considered the product of an informed mind and can crop up anywhere from the floor of the Senate to an editorial in your local newspaper. These legends create the cultural shorthand of anti-Catholicism that is so much a part of the American scene. From game shows to comedy sketches, from allegedly serious scholarship to anti-Catholic tracts stuck under windshield wipers in the parish parking lot, Catholic urban legends are the myths of history that everyone-including many Catholics-assumes to be true.