Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/987221
19 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 MAY 2018 I welcome my friend Vladimir Cini (Letters, 20 May 2018) who appeared on the horizon to further inflate, by his letter, the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western History of the Inquisition and the debunking centuries of anti-Catholic history. But what if these long-held beliefs were all wrong? Why have we held these wrong-headed ideas so strongly and for so long? A slight look at his letter reveals an accumulation of prejudice against the Church and an acerbic polychromatic assessment of confused history. But he is wrong on both counts. I am sure Cini admits that the stand- ard of living of any country is techni- cally and practically the sole respon- sibility of the State and the Church has no such mandate, but even so, to sidestep the universal humanitarian much admired and acknowledged work of the Catholic Missions is either an irreverent amnesia or ma- licious erratic consideration of the Church in the most negative light perpetrator of the monstrosity of the Inquisition and nothing else. This brings us to the second count. How can I be shorter than this? The tales of weekly mass burnings all across Spain is the biggest lie of all and vicious nonsense, because the Inquisitors were far more concerned with repentance than with punish- ment. I would not speculate but refer to the fully recorded period of 44,674 cases of which only 826 people were executed which amounts to 1.8 per- cent. All told, then, during the entire period from 1480 to 1700, only about ten deaths per year were meted out by the Inquisition all across Spain, a small fraction of the many thousands of Lutherans, Lollards and Catho- lics that Henry VIII is credited with having boiled, burned, beheaded or hanged. These deaths are all tragic and condemnable but we must remember that they occurred over a period of 300 years and this before AD1700. After this widespread and sustained welfare to all humanity, around a whopping 100 million mass murders by Stalin, Mao Zedong and Hitler were committed in the space of a few decades. Without condoning such heinous crimes, there is no warrant for con- sidering the Inquisition a world of distant-past massacre of any sort. It is a monumental injustice to focus on an apparent holocaust committed by religious fanatics over 300 years ago while at the same time keeping a sepulchral silence about the sani- tary God's ordained covenant and Church's teachings – Thou shalt not kill – the crucial legislation currently in debate. The mythical Bible is another mat- ter… I can feel the editor's guillotine. John Azzopardi Zabbar Muscat has it all IN Josanne Cassar's opinion (6 May, 2018), she wrote "No matter how many arrows are slung at Muscat from all directions, they seem to fall ineffectively to the ground without ever penetrating his formidable armour of widespread popularity support". How right she is. Frankly I couldn't put it better myself. When Adrian Delia decides to wear only one face maybe he might amount to something but as yet he has two fac- es, one that makes him a sickly lion when he is with his "friends", and the other one which has some sort of charisma when he is interviewed alone. As for Muscat, the man has it all. Need one say more? Valerie Borg Valletta Conventional wisdom and truth Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications