PODCAST · history
Holy Hell by Vyrse
by Vyrse
True stories of what was done in God's name: the Inquisition, the witch trials, the residential schools, the cover-ups. Told from the historical record, with every claim sourced. Each episode is the audio edition of a Holy Hell deep-dive on vyrse.app, where the full piece and all its citations live.
Episodes
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The Usual Names: Spain's Stolen Children and the 300,000 Myth
A 1941 Franco law gave children of unknown parentage "the usual" names. For forty years, Catholic prisons, homes, clinics and a nun with "a good file" of adopters moved children away from their mothers, often on falsified papers. The 300,000 figure is a myth. The paperwork is not. Read the full...
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The Meadow: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Missing Apology
On September 11, 1857, Mormon militiamen massacred ~120 emigrants they had disarmed under a white flag, sparing only children too young to testify — then blamed the Paiutes for a century. One man was ever punished, on his own coffin, at the site. The church's 2007 statement of "profound regret"...
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The Founder: Marcial Maciel and the Vatican's Envelopes
John Paul II called him "an efficacious guide to youth." The Vatican's own communiqué, once he was safely dead, called his life "devoid of scruples." Marcial Maciel abused at least 60 boys by his order's own count, while accusations sat in Vatican mailboxes from 1978 — and the envelopes kept...
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Simonino: The Blood Libel Rome Gave a Feast Day
A toddler drowned in Trent in 1475. Seventeen Jews were tortured into confessing his "ritual murder"; thirteen were executed. The papal investigator found them innocent — Rome censured him, and later gave the invented martyr a feast day. The cult ran 490 years, until a notice in a diocesan…
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The Rite: The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel
She had a seven-year medical file: temporal lobe epilepsy, confirmed by EEG, treatable. Her bishop authorized the Rite of Exorcism instead. Sixty-seven sessions later she weighed 68 pounds and was dead — and a German court convicted her parents and both priests of negligent homicide. The rite...
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The Voice of an Angel: Three Centuries of the Church's Castrati
In 1587 the pope made castration excommunicable. In 1589 the same pope hired four castrati for St Peter's. For three centuries the church bought the voices of boys cut at eight years old — each one legally required to claim a wild boar did it. The last of them made recordings. You can still…
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Significant Quantities: The Children Under the Tuam Mother-and-Baby Home
A local historian bought 796 death certificates with her own money and found no graves. The state confirmed "significant quantities of human remains" in the chambers of a disused sewage system at a Catholic mother-and-baby home. The excavation began in 2025. It is recovering the children one by...
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Kill Them All: The Quote Is Legend. The Letter Is Worse.
On July 22, 1209, a crusading army massacred the Catholic town of Béziers for sheltering 222 accused heretics. The famous quote is a legend no eyewitness recorded. The legate's own letter to the Pope is worse: "neither sex nor age," nearly twenty thousand claimed dead, reported as a miracle. Read...
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The List: The Secret Roster the SBC Said Couldn't Exist
For 20 years America's largest Protestant denomination told abuse survivors that tracking predators was impossible. Its own commissioned investigation found the Executive Committee had been keeping a secret list the whole time: 703 names, guarded for the lawyers, never used to warn a single…
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Away With Them: Luther's 1543 Book and Its Long Shadow
In 1543 the father of the Reformation published a numbered program: burn the synagogues, raze the homes, seize the books, expel the people. In 1938 a Lutheran bishop celebrated Kristallnacht as its birthday fulfillment. At Nuremberg, a hanged propagandist called the book his precedent. Read the...
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The Cure: The Day Conversion Therapy Was Ruled a Fraud
A religious industry sold orientation change to 700,000 Americans. The APA found no evidence it works; its own flagship president admitted a 99.9% failure rate and shut it down with an apology; and in 2015 a unanimous New Jersey jury ruled it what it always was: consumer fraud. Read the full…
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The Wedding of Magdeburg: The Worst Day of the Wars of Religion
On May 20, 1631, the Catholic League's army stormed Protestant Magdeburg. Four in five inhabitants died and the city burned to its stones. The soldiers nicknamed the massacre a wedding, and Catholic Europe sang thanksgiving for it. The worst day of a war fought under God's name. Read the full...
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The Going Rate: How Quebec Priced Children Into Asylums
In Duplessis-era Quebec, an orphan brought $1.25 a day in subsidy; a psychiatric patient brought $2.75. So church-run institutions certified thousands of healthy children insane and converted orphanages into asylums. The province apologized twice and paid. The church never has. Read the full…
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Brother Devil: The Friar Who Ran a Death Camp
In 1941 a fascist state made Catholicism the price of survival: it outlawed a faith by decree, forcibly converted 200,000 people, and murdered tens of thousands at a camp commanded, for a time, by a Franciscan friar. A court hanged him in 1946. The numbers here are the Holocaust Museum's. Read…
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The Shield: The Law That Lets Faith Healing Kill Children
In most of America, a 1974 rule written under church lobbying made it legal to pray instead of calling a doctor while a child died. Oregon repealed its shield and convicted the parents. Idaho kept its shield, and a third of the graves in one church's cemetery are child-sized. Read the full piece,...
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The Civilizing Mission: How 'Saving' the Congo Killed Millions
Leopold II seized the Congo as his private property and sold it to the world as a Christian "civilizing mission." Behind the cross was a rubber regime that cut off hands by the basket and killed on a scale we still argue about. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources:...
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Spectral Evidence: The Satanic Panic Was a Witch Trial
In the 1980s, evangelical spiritual-warfare theology convinced America that satanic cults were abusing children in its daycares. There was no conspiracy. But the trials were real, and innocent people served decades. The witch trial, run on cable TV. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources:...
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The Mark That Wasn't There: The Bible Verse That Built Slavery
For four hundred years, the enslavement of Africans leaned on the "Curse of Ham" in Genesis 9. The catch: the text curses Canaan, not Ham, is about servitude, and never mentions race or skin color at all. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-mark-that-wasnt-there
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The Imported Fire: Uganda, the Bible, and the 'Kill the Gays' Law
Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act quotes no verse, but for "aggravated" cases it hands down the sentence Leviticus 20:13 does: death. The panic that produced it was fanned by American evangelicals. The same literal reading that burned witches is hunting gay people in our own decade. Read the full...
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Terra Nullius: The Pope's Bull That Became U.S. Law
In 1493, a Pope drew a line across an ocean and gave away the Western Hemisphere. The Doctrine of Discovery didn’t just authorize colonization. It became U.S. law. The Vatican repudiated it in 2023. American courts have not. Read the full piece, with all 5 sources:...
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Sanctuary: When Rwanda's Churches Became Killing Grounds
For a century, Rwandans were taught that when the killing came, you ran to the church and you were safe. In 1994 the churches became the killing grounds, and courts of record convicted the priests and nuns who helped. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/sanctuary
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Deus Vult: The True History Behind the Crusader Battle Cry
“God wills it.” The Crusades gave Christendom holy war, the indulgence, the massacre, and a battle cry that white nationalists still chant today. Here's the history under the romance. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/deus-vult
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The Last Laundry: Ireland's Magdalene Machine Closed in 1996
The last Magdalene laundry in Ireland did not close in some Victorian past. It closed in 1996. Behind it stood a machine that confined women for the sin of being women. It let one in seven of their children die. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-last-laundry
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The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre: When Rome Celebrated a Slaughter
It began with a church bell before dawn and ended with thousands of French Protestants dead in the streets. When the news reached Rome, the Pope did not mourn. He sang a Te Deum, struck a medal, and hung the slaughter on his own walls. Read the full piece, with all 7 sources:...
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The Files They Kept: How Two Churches Built the Same Cover-Up
The Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention agree on almost nothing. Confronted with abusers in their own pulpits, they built the identical machine from opposite blueprints: a sin instead of a crime, a transfer instead of a trial, a secret file instead of a 911 call. Read the full...
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The Witch Children: The Witch Hunts Are Still Happening
The witch trials never ended. Today, children are branded witches, tortured, and killed in the name of Pentecostal deliverance, on the same Bible verse that burned 50,000 in Europe. Read the full piece, with all 5 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-witch-children
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An Act of Faith: The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition
Everyone “knows” the Spanish Inquisition burned millions. It didn't. The real number, about 3,000 burned over 350 years of bureaucratic terror, is the more honest indictment. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/an-act-of-faith
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Thou Shalt Not Suffer: The Bible Verse Behind the Witch Trials
Everyone “knows” nine million witches burned. The real number is a fraction of that, and a single Bible verse lit every fire. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/thou-shalt-not-suffer
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The Third Baptism: When Zurich Drowned the Anabaptists
They asked for more water. Reformation Zurich obliged. Read the full piece, with all 5 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/the-third-baptism
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Kill the Indian, Save the Man — the Church and the Residential Schools
For over a century, churches took 150,000 Indigenous children to “kill the Indian” in them. Thousands never came home. The men who ran the schools knew. Read the full piece, with all 6 sources: https://vyrse.app/holy-hell/kill-the-indian
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
True stories of what was done in God's name: the Inquisition, the witch trials, the residential schools, the cover-ups. Told from the historical record, with every claim sourced. Each episode is the audio edition of a Holy Hell deep-dive on vyrse.app, where the full piece and all its citations live.
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Vyrse
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Holy Hell by Vyrse have?
Holy Hell by Vyrse currently has 30 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Holy Hell by Vyrse about?
True stories of what was done in God's name: the Inquisition, the witch trials, the residential schools, the cover-ups. Told from the historical record, with every claim sourced. Each episode is the audio edition of a Holy Hell deep-dive on vyrse.app, where the full piece and all its citations live.
How often does Holy Hell by Vyrse release new episodes?
Holy Hell by Vyrse has 30 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Holy Hell by Vyrse?
You can listen to Holy Hell by Vyrse on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Holy Hell by Vyrse?
Holy Hell by Vyrse is created and hosted by Vyrse.
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