An Open Letter to Jenny Gibbons

Dear Madame,
you have written: "Actually the Inquisition immediately rejected the legal procedures Kramer recommended and censured the inquisitor himself just a few years after the Malleus was published." I read some Kramer's biographies. For instance the Introduction to the 1948 edition of Malleus says: "During the summer of 1497, he had returned to Germany, and was living at the convent of Rohr, near Regensburg. On 31 January, 1500, Alexander VI appointed him as Nuncio and Inquisitor of Bohemia and Moravia, in which provinces he was deputed and empowered to proceed against the Waldenses and Picards, as well as against the adherents of the witch-society. He wrote and preached with great fervour until the end. He died in Bohemia in 1505." It seems to me highly improbable that somebody censured in 1490 have been in 1500 named the Inquisitor again.

I have tried to trace this story to the sources. The oldest mention that Kramer was a bad inquisitor I have found was Herbert Thurston: Witchcraft. In The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XV, 1912. He said: "But the "Malleus" professed (in part fraudulently) to have been approved by the University of Cologne..." It seems to me we are the victims of modern Catholic effort to white wash the Church by blaming some individuals only exactly as the Communists try to white wash the Party by blaming Stalin and Beria only.

What is your opinion? Do you have some details on it?