Catholic Heretics and the Death Penalty

  • Thread starter Thread starter robert_newman
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Tantum Ergo’s wrote that below are ‘a small sample from the more than 800 Catholic martyrs estimated to be executed during the reign of Elizabeth 1’ in England -

**Saint John Fisher
Saint Thomas More
The Forty Martyrs
The Carthusian Martyrs
Thomas Abel
John Adams (Blessed)
Robert Dalby (Blessed)
James Duckett (Blessed)
John Duckett (Blessed)
Edmund Duke (Blessed)
John Forrest (friar)
George Gervase
William Gibson (Catholic martyr)
Blessed Richard Hill
John Hogg (Blessed)
Richard Holiday (Blessed)
Robert Johnson (Catholic martyr)
William Knight (martyr)
John Lowe (Blessed)
Blessed John Nelson
Blessed Thomas Pickering
Maurus Scott
Thomas Thwing (Blessed)
Robert Wilcox (saint)
Peter Wright (Blessed) **

This is the list we will start with. (The one above).

Basic questions still remain unanswered but we can certainly get it between us.
  1. What dates were they executed ?
  2. Were the people above executed for heresy ? Yes or No ?
We can also work together to get the dates for the above persons. When we have the dates we can next find out if they were executed for heresy. Agreed ?

Thanks
 
Since one of the requirements of the civil authorities was that every person in England was to swear an oath of allegiance to the King or Queen as “head of the church of England”, and to attend an Anglican Church, and not to hear a Catholic Mass, or harbor a Catholic priest, all of which were seen as ‘treasonable offences’, that makes a person seen as a heretic according to the Anglican faith a traitor, and a ‘traitor’ to the civil authorities for adhering to the Catholic faith is seen as a heretic to the Anglican faith. The two are intertwined as the civil authorities pronounced the sanction on what the ‘head’ of the church, who was also the sovreign, pronounced to be treason–refusal to submit to the Anglican faith.

Thus, those Catholics who refused to abjure their Catholic faith were seen as traitorous heretics. Had they not been heretics according to the Anglican faith, they would not have been traitors, so called, to the English government which also happened to be headed by the King or Queen who additionally was head of the Anglican church.

The fact is that those ‘treasonable’ offences would have been forgiven simply by the Catholic foresaking his or her faith. Many Catholics indeed were loyal to the sovereign of England but insisted on following the dictates of their conscience, their belief in the truth of the Catholic faith. And for this they were killed; not for harming any person, not for killing any person, but for the Catholic faith.
 
Elizabeth was only 2 years old when St John Fisher was executed ! (He was executed in 1535 - long before Elizabeth became queen !).

Surely, surely, Tantum Ergo has started his list with a big mistake. This list is not solely of Elizabeth 1st’s reign is it ?
 
JKirkLVNV said:
Most faiths do have some complete and total nutters in them. It would hardly be fair to indict the whole of Catholicism because a couple of Holy Mother Church’s children shouldn’t be left alone with the scissors, now would it?
Click to expand...
:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
 
** XIII. [INTOLERANCE AND CRUELTY

](http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm#REF_XIII)**
The Church’s legislation on heresy and heretics is often reproached with cruelty and intolerance. Intolerant it is: in fact its raison d’être is intolerance of doctrines subversive of the faith. But such intolerance is essential to all that is, or moves, or lives, for tolerance of destructive elements within the organism amounts to suicide. Heretical sects are subject to the same law: they live or die in the measure they apply or neglect it. The charge of cruelty is also easy to meet. All repressive measures cause suffering or inconvenience of some sort: it is their nature. But they are not therefore cruel. The father who chastises his guilty son is just and may be tender-hearted. Cruelty only comes in where the punishment exceeds the requirements of the case. Opponents say: Precisely; the rigours of the Inquisition violated all humane feelings. We answer: they offend the feelings of later ages in which there is less regard for the purity of faith; but they did not antagonize the feelings of their own time, when heresy was looked on as more malignant than treason. In proof of which it suffices to remark that the inquisitors only renounced on the guilt of the accused and then handed him over to the secular power to be dealt with according to the laws framed by emperors and kings. Medieval people found no fault with the system, in fact heretics had been burned by the populace centuries before the Inquisition became a regular institution. And whenever heretics gained the upper hand, they were never slow in applying the same laws: so the Huguenots in France, the Hussites in Bohemia, the Calvinists in Geneva, the Elizabethan statesmen and the Puritans in England. Toleration came in only when faith went out; lenient measures were resorted to only where the power to apply more severe measures was wanting. The embers of the * Kulturkampf* in Germany still smoulder; the separation and confiscation laws and the ostracism of Catholics in France are the scandal of the day. Christ said: “Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). The history of heresy verifies this prediction and shows, moreover, that the greater number of the victims of the sword is on the side of the faithful adherents of the one Church founded by Christ (see INQUISITION).
 
Thomas More was not executed by Elizabeth 1st. She, again, was only 2 years old at the time. He was executed in 1535 - years before Elizabeth became queen !

Please, Tantum Ergo, take more care in these things.

Please give us a list of English Catholics executed for heresy during the reign of Elizabeth 1st of England. Then we can examine each case.

Thank You
 
Fisher and More were executed by Henry VIII.

You know, Robert, I started this whole thing by talking about from Henry VIII on. However, in dealing with having to cut-and-paste from sites because you refuse to read links, somehow Henry’s name was left out. Just to be absolutely fair (you do want to be absolutely fair?) I’ll tell you that Catholics were executed in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, James I and VI (this is one person, because he was the first king of England named James but the sixth king of Scotland named James), Charles I, Charles II, (and Oliver Cromwell, who governed England in the interregnum of 1639-1660 until the restoration of Charles II, James II (who became Catholic and was deposed because of it), William III, Mary II, Anne, George I, George II, and George III. The majority were executed under Elizabeth, although many were executed under various other monarchs, particularly between James II and William, and during the two Scots rebellions (Highland Scots being mainly Catholic while lowland Scots were mainly Protestant) in 1715 and 1745 (Bonnie Prince Charlie).
 
Yes, but you were the one who said your list was a sample of Catholics killed by Elizabeth 1st of England. You were wrong.

Can we please have, from you, a list of Catholics killed in England by Elizabeth 1st on the charge of heresy ?

Thank You
 
And you are discourteous and disingenous, Robert. I provided a long list above. Those martyred under Elizabeth are there, though I listed only the English martyrs and of course Elizabeth’s government also was over Ireland and Wales. I do not have to list every one of the 800 (the word was estimated, because sources for the period cannot possibly record every martyr).

This thread has wandered far from the original purpose.

I find it increasingly suspicious that rather than answer anyone else’s questions or deal with the answers you have been given, you either disregard the answers or try to discredit the one giving them; further, you have completely changed the topic many times.

I’m going to bed now because I have a lot to do for the family Thanksgiving tomorrow.

I left you plenty of reading material which answers your questions. If you’d rather keep asking the same questions and pretending nobody has answered them, well, that is your business.

Have a pleasant evening–or morning. . .wherever you are.
 
Well, we find out that your list is not even accurate.

You will agree it was necessary to start somewhere. So, if you like, please give when you can a list of English Catholics who you say were executed in England for heresy during the reign of Elizabeth 1st, Queen of England.

No great hurry. We can start from there. If you have dates for these events that will be helpful. And I will give a report on each case individually as promised.

Regards
 
It is profoundly unproductive to engage in a comparative body count. There is enough blood on everyone’s hands to make every Christian hang his head in shame. The people of the Church are neither are innocent as many of the posts here would have us believe, nor nearly as guilty as the OP is desperate to claim.

The Church does not have a death penalty for heresy. To insist otherwise is calumny. Pure and simple. Continue in this claim and you brand yourself a liar.

To try to claim that this is some great change of dogma or doctrine is, at best, a demonstration of profound and, by this time, willful ignorance.
 
This topic is both exhausted and drifting from its topic.
Therefore it is now closed.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top