Feedback | 1 January 2005

We are not evil

I am sorry that Steve (‘We are all Pagans now’, 18/25 December) believes that we Dominicans are evil. I expect he thinks that we are so awful because we are supposed to have run the Inquisition. Actually, there were many different ‘inquisitions’, some run by the Church and others by the State. Sometimes they did terrible things, and we Dominicans should repent of our part in their cruelty. But we did not generally run the inquisitions and were not even the order most involved. Witches should look back to the inquisitions almost with affection, since wherever they operated there was vastly less persecution of witches. They were one of the first courts to operate on the basis of the rigorous testing of the evidence and so opposed the mass hysteria that often led to the deaths of hundreds of witches where there was no inquisition, as in Scotland.