MADRID, Spain -- Pope John Paul II said Wednesday the Spanish Inquisition, which tortured and burned thousands of 'heretics' during a three-century reign of terror, was a historic mistake.
The pontiff, addressing students and teachers at Madrid University on the fourth day of his 10-day visit to Spain, also warned scientists against allowing their work to be 'perverted' for making nuclear weapons.
It was the third time the pontiff, spiritual leader of 579 million Catholics, has acknowledged -- without actually apologizing -- that the Roman Catholic Church has been historically in the wrong.
On a 1980 trip to West Germany, the pontiff admitted the Catholic Church was partly responsible for the rift that started the Protestant reformation.
Last year, he also formally rehabilitated the astronomer Galileo, condemned for heresy by the Vatican for teaching the earth revolves round the sun.
'If times such as those of the Inquisition produced tensions, mistakes and excesses ... it's necessary to recognize that Spanish intellectuals have known how to reconcile full freedom of research with religious feeling,' the pope said.
The pope said past discord between scientists and the church had largely been overcome 'thanks to the recognition of mistakes that deformed the relationship between faith and science' -- an apparent reference to the Galileo case.
The pontiff was to embark Thursday on a gruelling journey around Spain, travelling first by helicopter to Guadaloupe, 102 miles southwest of Madrid, then on to the medieval towns of Toledo and Segovia.
But Spanish officials were concerned that bad weather in the Guadaloupe area might force a change in plans, possibly a postponement of the stop there.
The Inquisition, which began under papal order in Rome in the 13th century to silence those the church regarded as heretics, was made a state institution in Spain in 1478.
During the Inquisition's first 12 years, Spain's Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torequemada ordered more than 2,000 people burned at the stake, most of them scientists, intellectuals, Jews and Moslems.
Most countries abolished the Inquisition by the 18th century but it was active in Spain until 1834. It was formally abolished by the Vatican in 1870.
The pope later told some 160,000 youths in the city's Santiago Bernabeu stadium, site of last summer's World Soccer Cup finals, 'Neither drugs, alcohol nor sex nor a resigned and uncritical passivism are an answer to evil.'
Cheered by cries of 'Viva El Papa,' John Paul warned the young Spaniards, whose country is plagued by separatist violence in the northern Basque country, to eschew terrorism.
The pope also condemned arms research as 'a scandal' and said science needed to be rooted in faith.
He said science should 'defends man's identity, dignity and moral greatness.' And he appealed to scientists to exercise their 'enormous moral power' against research for purely destructive purposes.
