For two or three centuries, many Protestants
have given figures concerning the total number of people killed directly or indirectly by the Papacy during the Middle Ages.
The numbers given include 50 million, 68 million, 100 million, 120 million, and 150 million.However, events in Nazi Germany
show how easily persecution can revive, so it is necessary to be on guard against it and maintain an awareness of its history.
Of course, many other groups besides the Papacy have persecuted. And all of us, without Christ, have the roots of sin
in ourselves. The reason the Papacy stands out is that it has ruled for such a long period of time over such a large
area, exercised so much power, and claimed divine prerogatives for its persecutions. The magnitude of the persecutions
is important for the following reason: One can excuse a few thousand cases as exceptional, but millions and millions
of victims can only be the result of a systematic policy, thereby showing the harmful results of church-state unions.
In order to consider this subject, it is necessary
to recall many unpleasant events. The dreadful totals, computations, and examples that follow, one after another, are
not for the faint hearted.
Chapter 1. Examples of figures concerning the number
killed
Here are some of the places where figures about religious persecutions are given. Dowling in his History of
Romanism says
"From the birth of Popery in 606 to the present time,
it is estimated by careful and credible historians, that more than fifty millions of the human family, have been slaughtered
for the crime of heresy by popish persecutors, an average of more than forty thousand religious murders for every year of
the existence of popery."
This is the number cited by John Dowling, who published
the classic "History of Romanism" in 1847 (book VIII, chapter 1, footnote 1). Only seven years after its first printing, it
could be said of Dowling’s book, "it has already obtained a circulation much more extensive than any other large volume
ever published in America, upon the subject of which it treats; or perhaps in England, with the exception of Fox’s Book
of Martyrs." Clark’s Martyrology counts the number of Waldensian martyrs during the first half of the 13th century in
France alone at two million. From A.D. 1160-1560 the Waldensians which dwelt in the Italian Alps were visited with 36 different
fierce persecutions that spared neither age nor sex (Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists, "Post-Apostolic Times - The
Waldensians," 1890). They were almost completely destroyed as a people and most of their literary record was erased from the
face of the earth. From the year 1540 to 1570 "it is proved by national authentic testimony, that nearly one million of Protestants
were publicly put to death in various countries in Europe, besides all those who were privately destroyed, and of whom no
human record exists" (J.P. Callender, Illustrations of Popery, 1838, p. 400)
Catholic historian Vergerius admits gleefully that during
the Pontificate of Pope Paul IV (1555-1559) "the Inquisition alone, by tortures, starvation, or the fire, murdered more than
150,000 Protestants." These are only small samples of the brutality which was poured out upon "dissident" Christians by the
Roman Catholic Church during the Inquisition. .
The Spanish monarch and his confederates acknowledged that
they must have lost 400,000 men, in that tremendous conflict, and immediately after it-but the Papists boasted, that including
the women and children, they had massacred more than two millions of the human family, in that solitary croisade against the
southwest part of France.
-- Bourne, George, The American Textbook of Popery, Griffith
& Simon, Philadelphia, 1846, pp. 402-403.
The Catholic crusade against the Albigenses in Southern France
(from 1209-1229), under Popes Innocent III., Honorius III. and Gregory IX., was one of the bloodiest tragedies in human history.
… The number of Albigenses that perished in the twenty years’ war is estimated at from one to two millions.
-- Cushing B. Hassell, History of the Church of God,
Chapter XIV.
The following quotation is from The Glorious Reformation
by S. S. SCHMUCKER, D. D., Discourse in Commemoration of the Glorious Reformation of the Sixteenth Century; delivered before
the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of West Pennsylvania, by the Rev. S. S. Schmucker, D.D., Professor of Theology in the Theological
Seminary at Gettysburg. Published by Gould and Newman. 1838.
Need I speak to you of the thirty years’ war in
Germany, which was mainly instigated by the Jesuits, in order to deprive the Protestants of the right of free religious worship,
secured to them by the treaty of Augsburg? Or of the Irish rebellion, of the inhuman butchery of about fifteen millions of
Indians in South America, Mexico and Cuba, by the Spanish papists? In short, it is calculated by authentic historians, that
papal Rome has shed the blood of sixty-eight millions of the human race in order to establish her unfounded claims to religious
dominion (citing Dr. Brownlee’s “Popery an enemy to civil liberty”, p. 105).
Estimates range up to 7 to 12 million for
the number who died in the thirty years’ war, and higher:
This was the century of the last religious wars in “Christendom,”
the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, fomented by the Jesuits, reducing the people to cannibalism, and the population of
Bohemia from 4,000,000 to 780,000, and of Germany from 20,000,000 to 7,000,000, and making Southern Germany almost a desert,
...
-- Cushing B. Hassell, History of the Church of God,
Chapter XVII.
Concerning the Irish rebellion, John Temple's
True Impartial History of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, written in 1644, puts the number of victims at 300,000, but other estimates
are much smaller. Some estimates are larger:
In addition to the Jesuit or Catholic atrocities of this
century already enumerated with some particulars, they massacred 400 Protestants at Grossoto, in Lombardy, July 19th, 1620;
are said to have destroyed 400,000 Protestants in Ireland, in 1641, by outright murder, and cold, and hunger, and drowning;
…
-- Cushing B. Hassell, History of the Church of God,
Chapter XVII.
In fact, the population of Ireland is estimated to have decreased
from 2 million in 1640 to 1.7 million in 1672, according to R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988).