Historian Thomas Madden, director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University, writes that the "Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions."
In medieval Europe, heresy was a crime against the state, Mr. Madden explains. Local nobles, often greedy, illiterate and eager to placate the mob, gleefully agreed to execute people accused of witchcraft or some other forms of heresy. By the 1100s, such accusations were causing grave injustices (in much the same way that apparatchiks in Communist countries would level charges of disloyalty in order to have rivals "disappeared").
"The Catholic Church's response to this problem was the Inquisition," Mr. Madden explains, "first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184."
I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was indefensible. But there's a very important point that needs to be made here that transcends scoring easy, albeit deserved, points against Mr. Obama's approach to Islamic extremism — which he will not call Islamic.
Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.
Christianity ended greater barbarisms under pagan Rome. The church often fell short of its ideals — which all human things do — but its ideals were indisputably a great advance for humanity.
Obama's comparison of Christianity, radical Islam defies logic - Baltimore Sun