Burning of heretics

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How does the church explain their burning of heretics in the past especially now that they condemn death penalty (in the Catholic Church in my country, at least)? And why did they even burn heretics alive? What was the reason behind it? Was it to save their soul from damnation or to damn it to hell right away?
 
I dunno about the Church burnin heretics, but I can tell you about some Protestants that hung a few witches.

:cool:
 
pjcsisabel said:
How does the church explain their burning of heretics in the past especially now that they condemn death penalty (in the Catholic Church in my country, at least)? And why did they even burn heretics alive? What was the reason behind it? Was it to save their soul from damnation or to damn it to hell right away?
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Governments burned people, the Church never did.
 
Aelred_Minor said:
True, but Church courts would try and convict heretics and hand them over to the state, knowing the punishment would be death.
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I don’t think the Church handed over all heretics to the state, only the very troublesome unrepentant ones. Most were reconciled with a penance.
 
The theoretical morality of punishing heretics is a difficult subject, and political/sociological differences in late medieval and early modern Europe compared to the world today can come into play as well.

The most important point though is that the Church has always acknowledged that it is made up of sinners, and wrongdoing can happen on any level of the Church. I would encourage people to look at the actual formal doctrine and moral teaching of the Church, not the times when people in the Church perhaps acted in contradiction to those values.
 
PiousTemplar said:
I don’t think the Church handed over all heretics to the state, only the very troublesome unrepentant ones. Most were reconciled with a penance.
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No, certainly not all. I should have said some Church courts handed some heretics over to the State to be executed.
 
Kaninchen said:
Hm - if a government burned people (like Savonarola, for example) at the behest of the Church, then wasn’t the Church somewhat involved?
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As far as I know the Church was involved in determining whether or not people held heretical views, not lighting the pyre. Most of the time these people were already in custody.

The Church was involved, but priests weren’t roaming the country en masse terrorising and executing the locals as is so often portrayed whenever this topic comes up.

Then we get to hear some outlandish figure of women murdered by the Inquisition, usually somewhere up near the 10 million mark, but I’ve seen it go as high as 50 million.
 
LDNCatholic said:
Then we get to hear some outlandish figure of women murdered by the Inquisition, usually somewhere up near the 10 million mark, but I’ve seen it go as high as 50 million.
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Are you confusing the Inquisition (presumably the Spanish one) with the Witch Hunts? Or perhaps someone else did, and you are commenting on how wrong it is? Those were two extremely different events, and I’ve heard (don’t know if it’s true) that the Spanish Inquisition actually prevented witch-hunt mania from spreading in Spain the way it had in France, Germany, and England, and therefore possibly saved more lives than it (indirectly) took, though that in no way excuses the evils it did commit.

Anyway, your point is that the figures given for the number of lives lost through these things are often ridiculously exaggerated, which no doubt is true.
 
LDNCatholic said:
As far as I know the Church was involved in determining whether or not people held heretical views, not lighting the pyre. Most of the time these people were already in custody.

The Church was involved, but priests weren’t roaming the country en masse terrorising and executing the locals as is so often portrayed whenever this topic comes up.

Then we get to hear some outlandish figure of women murdered by the Inquisition, usually somewhere up near the 10 million mark, but I’ve seen it go as high as 50 million.
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I remember reading an article on Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes and how it had left such an impression on the West Country mind for centuries. The argument was that it wasn’t that the Assizes had killed all that many people but, rather, the sheer ‘performance’ around every execution so that the whole business went on, and on, and on.

I think there’s a lot of that when talking about things like the Inquisition - it didn’t take huge numbers of ‘performances’ to terrorize a population.

On the other hand, while the numbers involved may be exaggerated (but what did happen to all those Cathars?), “wasn’t us Guv, it was the State,” given the interrelationship between Church and State, isn’t all that convincing.
 
Kaninchen said:
I remember reading an article on Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes and how it had left such an impression on the West Country mind for centuries. The argument was that it wasn’t that the Assizes had killed all that many people but, rather, the sheer ‘performance’ around every execution so that the whole business went on, and on, and on.
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That’s interesting stuff, will definitely have to do a bit of reading on that.
Kaninchen said:
I think there’s a lot of that when talking about things like the Inquisition - it didn’t take huge numbers of ‘performances’ to terrorize a population.

On the other hand, while the numbers involved may be exaggerated (but what did happen to all those Cathars?), “wasn’t us Guv, it was the State,” given the interrelationship between Church and State, isn’t all that convincing.
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The Cathars are all on holiday. They promised to call when they got back.

Fair point though, I’m not trying to exonerate the role of members of Church hierarchy in these acts, just pointing out that it’s the norm to say ‘‘The Church murdered [insert religious minority] in their thousands!’’, while it’s not often you hear ‘‘English local government murdered [insert religious minority here]’’
 
In our time, Thomas More was made a saint. He burned people. I don’t think he ever said this was a bad thing.
 
Kaninchen said:
I remember reading an article on Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes and how it had left such an impression on the West Country mind for centuries. The argument was that it wasn’t that the Assizes had killed all that many people but, rather, the sheer ‘performance’ around every execution so that the whole business went on, and on, and on.

I think there’s a lot of that when talking about things like the Inquisition - it didn’t take huge numbers of ‘performances’ to terrorize a population.

On the other hand, while the numbers involved may be exaggerated (but what did happen to all those Cathars?), “wasn’t us Guv, it was the State,” given the interrelationship between Church and State, isn’t all that convincing.
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Do you have evidence that the “performances” of the Spanish Inquisition were that terrifying, psychologically controlling the whole population by fear? It’s a rather nasty idea to be asserting on a Catholic forum. I had been under the impression (from fellow Catholics) that the trials themselves were generally tedious affairs in which people sometimes feel asleep in the middle of the proceedings, by the end of which most people were let go, and the worst that would happen afterwards is you would be publicly burnt at the stake- horrible to be sure but not a long elaborate public torture and mutilation like they did in England.
 
As for the Cathars, here’s an interesting article on them:

oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Albigenses

Also, from what I’ve read there are still people in France today who know themselves to be descendents of the Cathars and who still call themselves Cathars, though for centuries these families have been Catholic.
 
Aelred_Minor said:
Do you have evidence that the “performances” of the Spanish Inquisition were that terrifying, psychologically controlling the whole population by fear? It’s a rather nasty idea to be asserting on a Catholic forum. I had been under the impression (from fellow Catholics) that the trials themselves were generally tedious affairs in which people sometimes feel asleep in the middle of the proceedings, by the end of which most people were let go, and the worst that would happen afterwards is you would be publicly burnt at the stake- horrible to be sure but not a long elaborate public torture and mutilation like they did in England.
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I’m sure people got the message.
 
pjcsisabel said:
How does the church explain their burning of heretics in the past especially now that they condemn death penalty (in the Catholic Church in my country, at least)? And why did they even burn heretics alive? What was the reason behind it? Was it to save their soul from damnation or to damn it to hell right away?
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As you say they execute murderers today. I’m sure it’s not to save their souls from damnation. Society justifies it, of course, by saying it will prevent others from committing same crimes.
 
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