M
Montalban
Guest
Murder is always murder
- Status
Z
Zooey
Guest
OK…Let me see if I get this straight. In 1949, a
drunk driver killed my mother & father.From the Nazi takeover in Germany, in the 1930s, to the fall of the 3rd Reich in 1945, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews.:byzsoc:
Now, they were my parents. I loved my parents. My father actually turned the car around, sacrificing his own life, to get between me & the other vehicle.He:crying: died to save me. But even** I** know, you see, that the Holocaust/Shoah was a heluva lot bigger, in the scheme of things, than that!
Can you see what we are saying now,in that light, when we say, “3000 is not 10 million”? If not, may I suggest a trip to Israel? Or, if that is too far, the Holocaust Museum, or the Museum of Intolerance, both here in the USA??
Luther lapsed into heresy. He was excommunicated. He was forbidden from public teaching of his views.
He was in a Catholic country; they had the right to uphold Catholic teachings.
He went to an area where there was a prince in power who liked Luther’s ideas. I
very much doubt that there were :bigyikes: any cloned albino assassins sent out after him, although that does sound like it might be an :idea: for a Dan Brown novel.
It is handy, and it also happens to have information that is often useful.But you have had the Catholic Answers homepage & library, as well as the Catholic Encyclopedia linked for you. Both are solidly Catholic sources.
See the links all ready given,above, please.
M
Montalban
Guest
What about massacres by Cromwell?
Z
Zooey
Guest
Now there is an excellent question…I don’t know numbers, but
he sure did 
slaughter as many as possible.
M
Montalban
Guest
Not a ‘reliable’ source, but the only one I can find for the moment…
c.15-20,000 battlefield casualties, and over 200,000 civilians, from war-related famine or diseases
Z
Zooey
Guest
Well, I read the part on the Siege of Drogheda, & they were, if anything, a bit kind to Cromwell, according to what I have read…
So, those are fairly minimal figures…It would be, therefore, hard for anyone to argue that wiki had overplayed it.
Thank you.
M
Maria1212
Guest
Let me know what you think of the above link, and particularly, the book.
I also recommend you search the library, and The Rock magazine, both located on the CAF homepage.
Sincerely,
Maria1212
C
Contarini
Guest
I’ll accept that, and revise my “few hundred” (I was thinking somewhere along the lines of 200-400) to “several hundred.” It doesn’t change my general point.
Edwin
C
Contarini
Guest
I guess I wasn’t thinking of those for two reasons: they come under the heading of wartime atrocities rather than religious persecution per se, and they took place sometime after the Reformation and outside my period of specialization. If we start counting all the people who were massacred when cities were captured during wars between parties of different confessions, the numbers on both sides will go up drastically (we’d have to count on the Catholic side incidents such as the Sack of Magdeburg in the 30 Years’ War, and of course the massacre of Protestant colonists for which Cromwell’s atrocities were probably an act of revenge).
Edwin
C
Contarini
Guest
If you are talking about judicial executions (obviously if you count riots and massacres the number will go way up on both sides) I honestly don’t know of any outside Britain (not counting people who were executed for assassinating monarchs!). I will accept that the English martyrs were killed “just for being Catholics” in the sense that most or all of them were killed for harboring priests, attending/celebrating Mass, etc. (Obviously the motivation of the government was not just that they were Catholics, but that they were perceived as a threat to the regime).
I am not sure why you limit the Catholic executions to the Inquisition. That is not a fair standard of comparison. Catholic governments–particularly France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Catholic England under Henry VIII and Mary (even not counting the executions of Protestants under Henry after the break with Rome) executed quite a few people. I do not know the numbers, but I’m confident that it exceeded the 600 English Catholic martyrs (plus the two people whom I understand to have been killed in Scotland).
If Protestant governments on the Continent carried out judicial executions of Catholics “just for being Catholic” (excluding those who actually committed violent acts, such as the assassins of Henri IV and William the Silent), I would like to hear of it. I have made this challenge on this forum a number of times, but no one has taken me up on it. And in all fairness, England was somewhat of a special case because of the succession issue.
I certainly agree that the Inquisition was relatively much fairer and more merciful than secular governments (though probably more thorough and in that sense more ruthless), and that the use of “Inquisition” to equal “religious persecution” is unfair, since many of the people killed on both sides were not tried by the Inquisition. However, it is also unfair to line up all the Catholics killed by Protestants on the one hand and only those killed by the Inquisition on the other.
Edwin
Y
Yerusalyim
Guest
Monti,
Technically, since it was a court, these were not murders but executions carried out by a legitimate state authority. Besides, I was speaking of the 2400 deaths of the Spanish Inquisition but rather about the whole Spanish Inquisition…it was the most liberal court of its day. And it’s a shame the Catholic Church had allowed itself to be used like it was.
M
mgrfin
Guest
"After the pilgrimage of grace and the rising of Lincolnshire many, probably several hundred, were executed, of whom no record remains. "
That simple sentence moves the martys into the thousands. Their names are written in the book of life, to Henry’s shame. Of course, he has lots to be ashamed of.
I never got passed St. Thomas More, and St. John Fisher. I spent time living in parishes dedicated to both, a fact of which I am very proud.
Anglican England has their Cranmer and their Cromwell. We have their Fisher and their More.
peace
mgrfin
B
bobzills
Guest
But the method of execution was burning alive at the stake, which was an extremely cruel and barbaric form of punishment, for anyone, but most expecially for innocent people such as St. Joan of Arc.
B
bobzills
Guest
However, some of the Inquisition torture methods described by Kamen are horrfic and barbaric enough.
P
Petergee
Guest
Compared to say, the male Catholics in England who were hanged, drawn and quartered?
Or the female Catholics who were slowly crushed to death under a stone? Or the modern “lethal injection” which can leave its victim in excruciating pain for hours but totally paralysed?And as you know, those burnt were frequently already dead from strangulation, drugged or killed quickly with a charge of gunpowder.
P
Petergee
Guest
Don’t confuse their propaganda with their motivation. The Catholics were killed because the Anglicans wanted to stamp out Catholicism. But in order to protect their alliances with some Catholic countries and to avoid a mass popular uprising by the common people who still overwhelmingly preferred Catholicism, the Anglican rulers invented the story that the Catholics were being killed for treason and that they were working to have their native country invaded and ruled by foreigners. The legacy of this lie is with us to this day, with rumours and even open statemnents by high-ranked protestants (and today atheists who have the basic protestant worldview) that Catholics are traitors who plan tro take over the country and hand it over to foreign rule.
Because that was the question asked in this thread.
In countries where the Inquisition was operating, the State was required to refer all accusations of heresy to the Inquisition.
The only relevant “issue” about the succession was whether a Catholic or a Protestant succeeded to the throne. And expect to get some protests for your apparent use of “England/English/Britain” to include Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the British colonies. The much lower execution rate of Catholics on the European continent probably reflects the fact that escape is easier from a non-island country. In some respects Elizabethan England was the first “police state”.
M
Montalban
Guest
1600s Britain is right in my field of specialisation. To say that the Reformation was over is technically true, but new Protestant groups continued to emerge and face persecution (Adamites*, Levellers, Diggers (see Gerrard Winstanley), etc.), and the eventual Protestant ascendancy after 1688 meant long-term Catholic persecution.
As for Cromwell, his whole army was deeply centred on non-Conformist religious zeal. For him, it was a kind of Crusade.
Many Protestants looked to their own era as the ‘end times’ as per book of Revelations (see Fifth Monarchists)
*-they call this group Revivalists - because they’re linked to earlier groups of the same name.
For more info on these see Hill, C., “The World Turned Upside Down”
C
Contarini
Guest
I’m sorry, but this is untrue. The Pope had explicitly called on English Catholics to rise up, and a few of the Catholic missionaries were engaged in plots against Elizabeth. The Elizabethan government did not execute Catholics until the excommunication, as far as I know. The political motivation was not simply propaganda, although it certainly resulted in an all-out persecution of missionary priests and their sympathizers, the vast majority of whom were not engaged in political activity as well.
I think the best analogy is Communist persecution of Christians. Communists certainly hated Christianity, but when they perceived that Christians were likely to side politically with the West against Communist governments, this resulted in more active and virulent persecution, and it was not simply propaganda–Westerners did regard the defense and promotion of Christianity in Communist countries as a way to fight Communism politically.
If you read the OP, you will see that the poster has only the vaguest notion of what the Inquisition was (he seems to think that the Inquisition had something to do with Luther’s interrogation at Worms, which it didn’t).
Sure, in a sense, but it wasn’t that simple, because Elizabeth’s claim to the succession was bound up with Henry’s break with Rome and subsequent marriage to Elizabeth’s mother.
I wasn’t including Scotland, and I don’t know of executions of Catholics in the colonies, though it may have happened. I should have said “the English government,” which ruled Wales and Ireland. I said “England” in order to exclude Scotland specifically, since I have read that two Catholics were executed in Scotland but have no idea of the circumstances.
Just how do you see Elizabethan England as more of a “police state” than Spain of that same era? What is your standard of comparison?
It seems to me that a major factor in whether a sixteenth-century government used the death penalty (as opposed to exile or imprisonment or other lesser punishments) against religious dissenters was the size and degree of centralization of the country in question. To test this, I’d need to know whether Catholics were executed in Scandinavia, and if not why the Scandinavian countries were gentler than England (and yes, I mean “England”–there was no “United Kingdom” and I’m talking about the English government). Lutherans, by and large, were slower to execute than either Catholics or Reformed (and Anglicans at this point were basically Reformed with a lot of Catholic structures). That may be it. The three big executors (if I can use this word in a literal and macabre sense) were England, France, and the Hapsburgs wherever they ruled (during 1553-58 they could be said to rule in some indirect sense in England, so the two overlap to some extent). All three governments were trying to establish some kind of centralized control over a medium-to-large extent of territory. Catholic Poland, on the other hand, was probably the most tolerant country in Europe (except for Transylvania), and this was in large part due to Poland’s extreme decentralization. The small city-states of Germany and Switzerland generally found exile an appropriate punishment for religious dissenters, although both Zurich and Geneva were quite willing to resort to the death penalty (against religious radicals rather than against Catholics).
So arguably England’s harsher policies were due to the political aims of the Tudors–which is what I think you are saying in speaking of England as a “police state.”
Edwin
C
Contarini
Guest
You can’t start counting rebels whose uprising had a religious basis. Then the numbers go up astronomically on both sides.
I’m just arguing for a fair and equitable method of comparison here, not contradicting your praise of the Catholic rebels or saying that their uprising was unjustified.
Edwin
Y
Yerusalyim
Guest
No arguement, the form of execution was cruel by today’s standards…but standard practice back then.
- Status