Over 50 years ago, Monty Python did an episode called ‘Spanish Inquisition’, which has since then led to many memes along the theme of ‘No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition’.
Through ridicule, one of the more shameful chapters in the history of the Catholic Church is diminished.
However, I am not sure that the Catholic Church has apologised about this.
Not that it is a singular matter for which the Church should offer apologies.
There is also the fraud which was the Gift of Constantine, the lie on which the Church based its rule over Rome for 1300 years. Has any Pope apologised for that?
More seriously, given that I am an Anglomorph living in an Anglophonic country where English common and constitutional law prevails, is the reaction of the Catholic Church to the Magna Carta. This was, as readers of this blog are likely to already know, granted by King John to his unhappy barons in 1215.
This is, in its various forms from that time onward, the foundation of English constitutional law and the first significant codification of the doctrine of Due Process, which is taken so seriously within the Anglophonic countries.
Yet at the time, Pope Innocent, preoccupied with growing his own political power, declared the Magna Carta to be ‘not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust’. He stated that it was ‘null and void of all validity for ever’. He ordered King John to not observe it (an order which King John was delighted to receive).
Hence the Pope not only allowed King John to perjure himself, but he repudiated the rights set out in the Magna Carta in perpetuity.
Has any Pope ever apologised for this egregious wrong?
Lost For Words! 