(Singinbeauty) the church still let the government do these things in it’s name.
No it didn’t. Firstly, the State executed heretics in its own name because it saw heresy as a threat to the good of the State. The State contracted the Inquisitors to find out if a person was a heretic, because they were the experts in that field. What you’re saying is equivalent to “In the USA, Crime Scene Investigators execute people for murder” or “The US executes people for murder in the name of Forensic Medicine.”
Secondly, the popular idea that the Popes virtually told Catholic kings what to do and they did it , was NEVER true. The strongest thing a Pope could do was excommunicate a king for persistent sin or heresy, and this frequently had no effect on the behaviour of the excommunicated king.
Thirdly and most importantly, the Inquisition was set up at the Pope’s direction for the specific purpose of SAVING the lives of people accused of being heretics or “witches” who would otherwise have been summarily executed by the State. The Inquisition gave them a much fairer trial, legal representation, much better gaol conditions, much less torture (it was the Inquisition itself which first proposed the idea of abolishing torture altogether) and much less chance of being convicted and executed. In countries which had no Inquisition, the State executed many thousands of accused “witches”. The Inquisitions regarded almost all accused “witches” as innocent.
(Mercygate) Nobody today condones torture
Not quite nobody. Last year a distinguished Australian academic quite seriously proposed that torture be used to combat terrorism. And then of course there was Abu Ghraib.
(Catilieth) St. Paul himself condoned slavery; he returned a runaway slave to his master! Never once was anything said against slavery in the Gospels, and in fact slaves were explicitly told to obey their masters. It took 1500 years before Christian realize that slavery was an offense against human dignity
Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world was a very different thing from the slavery of 16th-19th century America. The slaves of old were usually enslaved for a set period of time to pay off a debt, and were then freed. (In ancient Israel they could be held for a maximum of six years.) The children of slaves were not “born slaves” but free. And the Popes condemned racial slavery long before Columbus sailed.
(Dancus) Jewish historians, several of them Rabbis, put the figure at 2000. Which begs the question, are they only counting the Jews that suffered? I doubt that’s the case since the Inquisition was directed basicly at Jews, secondly at Moors. As far as as those naughty words Heresy and Heritic that surface regularly in most threads. When some writers can’t respond with reason they resort to those words. According to our Churchs defination at that time, anyone who did not believe in Jesus was a Heritic.(Surprise, surprise to some of you, I am a Roman Catholic) To continue, Jews were therefor Heritics. To it’s credit, the Church has modifed that strict definition and now go by degrees of Heresy.
By definition, a Jew CANNOT be a heretic, and this has never changed. A heretic is a baptised Christian who rejects part of the Christian faith. The Inquisition had no power or authority to try non-Christians. It did try some Catholics of Jewish descent who were accused of secretly practising Judaism and only making a show of their Catholicism.
