"The children's children cannot be held accountable for the misdeeds of their forefathers."

You would hardly credit it, but I found this statement in the Catholic Encyclopaedia whilst reading up on religious freedom!


Whilst there is no precise heading for religious freedom, my search did come up with an article on religious tolerance. Not so much with how Catholics should be treated, but more how they should treat others.


It is a bit of a tortuous read, as many things are in Catholic writings, but there are some notable doozies that should get the attention of even the most fundamentalist papists; the title of this post being just one.

I feel it is correct to put this into some sort of context, should my detractors choose such a trope against me, and this particular statement was made in respect to how Catholics should perceive their position on the historical Inquisitorial courts of yesteryear, going on to state;

It is, however, unjust to hold modern Protestantism, in the one instance, and Catholicism in the other responsible for these atrocities.

Who should we hold responsible then?

Material heresy on the other hand, i.e. an error in faith entertained undesignedly and unconsciously, is in itself neither sinful nor punishable, except where the error is itself inexcusable. In excusable error are all who possess subjectively the firm and honest conviction that they have the true faith of Christ, thus including the vast majority of non-Catholics, who were born and educated in their particular form of belief. 

Still in the context of the Inquisitorial courts, this particular apologia appears to absolve the participants of their participation in the proceedings on the grounds that they were merely in error with regard to their faith. However, a notable absense from this absolution is that numerous - although not as high a number as some might think - of these inquisitors are directly responsible for the deaths of (using their own statistics) "only a few thousand capital sentences carried out for heresy in Spain, and these were over the course of several centuries."

Oh! That makes it okay then.

Except it doesn't. Even if we accept Paul's statement in Acts;

28 ‘It is the decision of the holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities,
29 namely, to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meats of strangled animals, and from unlawful marriage. If you keep free of these, you will be doing what is right. Farewell.’”

The Catholic Encyclopaedia goes on to state that;

The Ten Commandments are precepts bearing on the fundamental obligations of religion andmorality and embodying the revealed expression of the Creator's will in relation to man's wholeduty to God and to his fellow-creatures.

And that the Catechism states that they have "occupied a predominant place" in teaching the faith since the time of Saint Augustine (AD 354–430).

Thus rendering all Catholics beholden to;

Exodus 20:13 You shalt not kill

Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, there are exceptions to this God ordained commandment. Notably scandal, but the word scandal only turns up in scripture as a post-hoc definition in the notes of the New American Bible. The punishment for this, one assumes would be death, but I am unable to find any reference to punishment at all. Let alone how it should be applied to those that carry out scandal in the name of their own Catholicism. Perhaps they do not think it applies to them, which might go some way to understanding why Catholics can rationalise the killing of thousands of people because of their positions on faith.

Personally, I find it divisive, hypocritical and despicable.

Of course, another apologia goes on to state that as the embodiment of the state in medieval times, it was its responsibility to try and to kill heretics and apostates. But in today's secular states, the Catholic Church has been thankfully relinquished of that role, thus - they rationalise - their barbaric history has been absolved.

But enough with the Inquisition. Where does the blog's title fit into all of this?

Original sin

Once again we turn to the Catholic Encyclopaedia to elucidate its meaning within the Catholic theology;

Original sin may be taken to mean: (1) the sin that Adam committed; (2) a consequence of this first sin, the hereditary stain with which we are born on account of our origin or descent from Adam.

Needless to say, this is very damning for those that wish to claim that, 'The children's children cannot be held accountable for the misdeeds of their forefathers.'

Catholics might be tempted to say something along the lines of, 'but Adam was created directly from God.', but then that would refute the argument that we are all God's children.

Gah! I am bored of this now. In short, the Catholic apologia for the Inquisitory courts is utterly falsified by the fundamental precepts of the Catholic faith in Original Sin.

What you got?