Who do they think they are?
The Grand Inquisitor of Spain assesses England’s own.
Auto-da-pie. Not exactly auto-da-fé?
I love a good interrogation. They are not simple things. A legitimate amount of pressure
must be applied at the right time. As the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, appointed by
Pope Sixtus IV in 1483, I demanded that those conducting an interrogatorio remain
cautious, circumspect, and charitable in their search for the truth. Rules are to
be followed not broken. Time is always on your side. The guilty should never escape
even through death or flight. If my Inquisitors found a deceased person guilty, his
or her remains were exhumed and burned. If the accused had fled to escape torture,
he or she was burned in effigy. The soul cannot elude righteous wrath.
In spirit, I believe Lord Justice Leveson adheres to my principles.
He targets heretics as implacably as I did. The nature of the heresy is different
now, of course. I was chosen by God to root out those who falsely professed their
religious faith or worshipped a false god. Leveson strikes at those who violate a
civil code and by so doing undermine the morality of the society on which they feast.
Modern ego:
Sir Brian Henry Leveson QC
Prima ego:
Tomás de Torquemada
Image attribution
Photo: Leveson, dailymail.co.uk
Photo: Torquemada, trutuv.com
Photo: Stephenson, belfast telegraph.co.uk
Photo: Brooks, hillingdontimes.co.uk
Torquemada’s opinion was interpreted by Will Coe, April 2012
Feel free to comment on this article..
Auto-da-pie versus auto-da-fé
Interested in historical fiction?
‘The Archer Prism’, an e-novel by Will Coe has sample chapters on this site.
Go to Ebooks to sample or the Kindle store to buy.
Editor shamed by Leveson Inquiry.
The nature of the interrogator has changed too. In my time, in my country, Leveson would himself have been a prey for any of the two dozen 'Holy Offices' I created. As a Jew, his choice would have been to flee, to accept the true religion as a converso, or risk being unmasked as a marrano (a Jew who converted to Christianity, but continued practicing his religion in secret). In England today, the roles have been reversed. Leveson is the grandest of Inquisitors while openly loyal to Judaism. No one in England or with interests in England can be shielded from his eviscerating glare.
I am disconsolate that the role of Inquisitor seems no longer to be the elimination of religious heresy, apostasy , sorcery, sodomy, polygamy, blasphemy usury and the like. Not in England at least. The grandest civil sin now appears to be hacking. Under Leveson, a vast team of Assessors, a limitless budget and an array of imposing venues have been dedicated to discovering and denouncing that most felonious of modern criminals, the hacker.
To hack: a verb that today is as different from its meaning in my century as the moon is from the sun. Hacking was part of the punishment while now it the crime. I was not a cruel man and indeed clamped down on the use of torture during interrogation. I would not allow more than eight litres of water to be used while administering the water cure (a restraint that modern-day American interrogators would do well to observe) and parts would only he hacked from bodies once they were found guilty. I therefore find it strange that to hack, to appropriate parts of private messages or conversations, is now the most heinous affront to the moral code of English society. I can only imagine that this is what happens when the Church is no longer regarded as the soul of the state.
That guardianship appears to have passed to the descendants of grubby pamphleteers. It is not the Jew who sucks at the blood of your people, nor the Moor who threatens to revisit his terror on your lands, it is the 'Aussies' who tear at the fabric of your country. They control the printed and moving pamphlets and instruct the people of England how to think. They answer to neither religious nor moral imperatives, only the pursuit of coin.
I shouldn't delve into the issue of ancestry without admitting my own past. Yes, my grandmother was a converso, a Jew who acknowledged the Roman faith as the true word of God (a connection that has falsely associated me with Adolf Hitler, who unlike me always denied his non-Aryan parentage). Australia was created as a home for criminals. Where, after a rigorously fair trial always overseen by at least two priests, I would have burned or beheaded those guilty of criminality, faint-hearted English justice sent those it convicted out of sight across the oceans. It is hardly surprising that the ethics of behaviour they took with them did not mirror those of the mother country.
When justice is not implacable it rebounds on itself. The converso who could not be trusted to respect the faith of Spain six centuries ago is now the English journo who obliges Australian masters and is guided in his faith by the tawdry church of the Press Complaints Commission. Leveson is tearing down that church with a vigour I commend. Its High Priests, the Murdochs, have been humbled.
It is fitting that the journos and their constabular acolytes are being driven to repentance by the very freedoms of the press and tv that they sought to exploit and profit from. However, as an auto-da-fé, public pie-throwing seems less salutary than the burnings and beheadings over which I presided. I accept that is intended only as a preliminary punishment and am confident that much worse will follow. What I do concede is that the auto-da-pie triumphed as a public spectacle. To protect the Queen and the faith of Spain, I oversaw the public execution of more than two thousand heretics. Massive crowds watched but they are puny in number besides those who saw Rupert Murdoch humbled.
If only I had commanded the reach of Leveson, the Catholic Church would still be the conscience of the world.
