Inquisition

(-kwe-zish'ūn,) (The,) or HOLY OFFICE. [From L. inquisitio, a seeking after.] (Eccl. Hist.) An ecclesiastical court founded by Innocent III., who, in / 1206, sent St. Dominic and others to excite the Roman Catholic princes and people to extirpate heretics, to inquire into their number and quality, and to transmit a faithful account of these particulars. From the nature of their office, these agents were called inquisitors; and thus arose a tribunal which became established throughout Italy and the dominion of Spain (excepting the kingdom of Naples and the provinces of the Netherlands), and of Portugal. The proce es of a court of 1., by imprisonment, secret examination, and torture, are well known. After a person had been convicted and sentenced to death, he was burnt at an auto-da-fe (q. v.). In 1542 the 1. was established at Rome as a congregation of cardinals, styled the Holy Office, to which all the courts of 1. throughout the Catholic world were subjected. The authority of that tribunal was never recognized in France, where the I. had long fallen into desuetude, until its formal abolition by Napoleon I. The tribunal of the I. still exists at Rome under the direction of a congregation, but its action is confined to the examination of books and the trial of ecclesiastical offenders, and the investigation of questions of church law. [s. 485]