- Testimony from prominent Catholics who opposed the wars and spoke up against those who were wrong on both sides
I’ve summarized some important points that I got from various resources related especially to the fourth point. Those who opposed the violence included Popes, Papal legates, and bishops and priests, and moreover the Canon Law of the Church supported restraint. Those who supported the violence, on the Catholic side, included most English Catholic clerics and almost all the Statesmen. Nevertheless everyone who executed heretics was acting in disobedience to the Church.
Among the Popes who condemned persecution was Gregory XIII, who after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre called the Catholic instigators murderers and refused to see them when they were present. (Lettres de Catherine de Médicis vol. 4 | Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1891, p. cxvi.) Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII were two Popes during the early Inquisitions, before the Reformation, and they condemned the violence with which many heretics were persecuted. In fact the Spanish Inquisition was closed down for a period, due to its increasing and unconscionable violence, and at one point Charles V was severely rebuked for killing non-violent Protestants in the Netherlands. (Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward, Catholic Evidence Training Outlines, page 76)
Cardinal Pole was the Papal legate to England during the reign of Queen Mary. He clashed with the State’s policy of burning heretics and, when they were delivered to him, he would absolve them and issue penance rather than deliver them up to the secular powers for burning. (See “History of the Church of England” by Dixon, volume 4, page 582, in the footnotes.) The priest Juan Pedernales preached of his opposition to the killings in an audience with the queen; and he was the confessor of King Phillip of Spain. (Cobbett, The History of the Protestant Reformation, Letter VIII, #248.) Erasmus was well known for urging charity and restraint in the conflicts between the Protestants and the Catholics. As an illustration of his thoughts, take these words which he penned in response to the religious wars: If there is in the affairs of mortal men any one thing which it is proper uniformly to explode, and incumbent on every man by every lawful means to avoid, to deprecate, to oppose, that one thing is doubtless war. … There is nothing more unnaturally wicked, more productive of misery, more extensively destructive, more obstinate in mischief, more unworthy of man, as formed by nature, much more of man professing Christianity. Yet, wonderful to relate! war is undertaken, and cruelly, savagely conducted, not only by unbelievers, but by Christians. (Erasmus, Antipolemus)The whole Catholic participation in the Reformation is simply this: it is a case where Statesmen and clerics ordered and approved of executions of heretics, and used the Church’s doctrine concerning just war and capital punishment as a pretext to justify their actions, even though they did not satisfy the criteria for just war or for using capital punishment. The clerics shouldn’t have ordered and approved of executions, and the State should not have authorized them. In the case of the Reformation the conditions for the just application of the death penalty were not in place.
It is true that the Church may conceivably order the State to inflict the death penalty, when that is a moral responsibility. During the Reformation it essentially never was necessary, but was in fact a violation of the Church’s just war doctrine. Our doctrine was advanced enough at that time to prove the moral error of the killings, and this is shown by the authors, quoted above, who knew that the killings were not justified. Moreover, the fact should have been written on the hearts of every leader, although we might forgive them for not seeing it perfectly, given the mental fever and pressures of the time.
The Reformation Wars, as far as the Catholic persecutions went, were a case of clerics and Statesmen not abiding by the Church’s high moral standards, and not only the more sensible Catholics show this, but also the Church’s Canon Law, which understood the division of temporal and spiritual authority, as shown below, and which therefore implied the sophistication of the doctrine which tells us never to kill unless utterly forced to it by circumstances beyond our control; this doctrine they violated, though not in the matter of confusing spiritual and temporal authority.
Now for the Canon Law: In 1748 Bianchi de Lucca noted: “In earlier ages the Church had not the power to condemn to corporal inflictions or to exile; still less to mutilation or death. … Does she not expressly forbid it by her Canons, both of modern and of ancient law?” (Della Potesta e della Polizia della Chiesa,” as quoted in Tolerance (page 66) by Arthur Vermeersch) This is true. The Canons of the Church prohibited clerics from using the right of the sword, reserving that to the secular authorities: “But the holy Church of God is not bound up in worldly laws; she does not have that sword, but the spiritual; does not kill, but gives life.” (Gratian’s Decretum, C. 33, q. 2, c. 6, translated by me and Google Translate from
this page; the original is “Sed sancta Dei ecclesia numquam mundanis constringitur legibus; gladium non habet, nisi spiritualem; non occidit, sed vivificat.”) But the Church may, when the State has a responsibility to execute a criminal, order it to do so; and this was the pretext clerics and Statesmen used to justify persecutions and murders of the Protestants, which were not authorized by the Church’s just war doctrine.
