The question is for us as Catholic’s was the Church personally responsible for the laws at that time. Some can choose to blame the Church for the laws, but hey why not blame the Church for everything.
This is different because of the official way in which Church leaders and theologians endorsed and participated in this behavior.
And the division between “members of the Church” and “the Church” is one of the major difficulties I have with Catholicism. It seems to me to be another form of the “invisible Church” idea. Catholics have tried and tried to explain to me why it isn’t so, and maybe I’m just being dense and stubborn:blush:
But the truth is yes, the leaders played a part in saying if a person was a heretic or was not. But we must remember there were other reasons were killed also. For their own evil behavior, some were burned for being revolutionist.
No, burning was not usually the punishment used for sedition. Other, generally quite horrible punishments were used.
The truth of the matter is heresies threatened to brake up the unity of the Church. The purpose of the Inquisition was to find heretics and force them to repent and accept Catholicism as practiced by the Church. The heretics that confessed were given a penance, like confession today, and the ones who did not were indeed killed, rather burned at the stake or hanged.
Right. They were pretty consistently burned, but some of them were strangled first. (One nuance: repeat offenders were typically executed even if they repented because the view was that they couldn’t be trusted and the protection of the innocent came first. However, if they repented, even at the last minute, then they would be strangled before being burned.)
It also needs to be said that the Inquisition was generally more careful not to condemn the innocent, and more concerned to avoid the necessity of imposing the death penalty, than civil authorities were. Michael Sattler, who was tried by the civil authorities, asked for someone to dispute with him and was told by the judge, “The hangman will dispute with you, you heretic.” A court run by the Church wouldn’t have done that. Jacques Fournier, the one medieval Inquisitor for whose activities (over a period of several years) we have detailed evidence, rarely handed anyone over for execution (in fact, I think that in the period for which we have evidence he didn’t hand over a single person). I’ve heard a PBS documentary claim that he was unusual, but we really don’t know that. Clearly some people were handed over, so our evidence for one period of a few years in the career of one Inquisitor can’t be generalized too straightforwardly. But he may just have been a fairly typical, conscientious Inquisitor.
In other words, the picture of bloodthirsty, sadistic Church officials that Protestants and secular people have in their heads is inaccurate (taken as a whole). But in some ways that makes the issue more serious. You want to portray it as the fault of bad Church officials. But it wasn’t. These were, often, conscientious and sincere people, steeped in the Church’s tradition and in the best traditions of Roman law, who were doing what their culture
and their religion caused them to believe was the best thing to do for the common good.
Yes leaders made big mistakes, and was this the teaching of God, no.
so Leo was wrong and Luther was right?
What Luther wrote heretics being burned goes against the will of the Spirit. I don’t believe that is wrong, because we know that Purgatory is a burning punishment, hell is. etc.
But he wasn’t talking about that. There is no reason to think he was, and every reason to think he was talking about temporal punishment in this life imposed by the civil authorities at the behest of the Church.
If Luther condemned them being burned at the stakes, he sure changed his mind.:
Where did he do so? He later justified punishing Anabaptists for sedition, which as I said was a different crime with different punishments.
shrug: So if you are going to condemn the Pope you better give Luther a piece of that pie.
It isn’t about condemnation. It’s about accuracy.
Did the Pope know darn well what Luther was condemning? It could go either way, and depend on how you see this comment. As shown many great theologians are separated in their thinking on this.
No, you haven’t shown anything of the sort. There is no dispute that I know of among scholars of the period, nor have any Church officials or people with formal theological credentials endorsed your position that I know of. It’s a desperate move by lay apologists who are trying to “defend too much territory.”
But as stated its impossible to truly debate, because as with the theologians everyone has their own opinion on this, and if all were to be honest, this statement could be taken many ways.
That just isn’t true. Informed people do not disagree about what Luther meant or what Leo intended to condemn. Among scholars of the early modern period, it wouldn’t enter anyone’s head to question that they were both talking about the judicial punishment of heretics. Your interpretation is far-fetched and historically unbelievable, and I have only ever heard it on this forum.
Edwin
