Sorry for the incomplete message. My seven-month-old daughter hit the keyboard and sent the message prematurely, and then I needed to do some other things, with the result that 20 minutes elapsed before I finished the message.
Here is what I was going to say:
restrict the numbers to Catholics killed by Protestants vs. Protestants killed by Catholics, and they go down even more. Restrict them to Catholics specifically executed as heretics, and they go down do zero (as far as I am aware). Protestants did not execute Catholics as heretics. In England they executed them as traitors for reasons that were clearly religious (attending Mass, celebrating Mass). I believe that in Scotland a couple of Catholics may have been executed for blasphemy. On the Continent Catholics were killed in battles and mob violence (even with regard to mob violence, though, I don’t think it’s true that Protestants gave as good as they got–their violence was primarily directed toward Catholic symbols rather than toward people, though they certainly did kill people). But they were not executed as heretics. This is arguably a pro-Catholic argument–Protestants could see how ridiculous it was to describe something as “heresy” that everyone had believed until recently. But it also reflects the fact that Protestants tended to execute people for other religion-related charges rather than heresy.
Now to quantumDeus’s response to me:
The view is not supported by historical fact.
Sorry, but it is. The statistics are hard to compile with certainty, I admit. But for a starting point I refer you to Brad Gregory’s *Salvation at Stake *as the best survey (Gregory is a Catholic, for whatever that’s worth to you).
Protestantism did not exist in Spain at the time of the Inquisition.
That is false. Protestantism indeed did not exist in Spain (or anywhere else) when the Spanish Inquisition was first established. It came along some decades later, and the relatively small numbers of Protestants who popped up in Spain were indeed dealt with by the Inquisition (one reason why their numbers stayed small!).
I can’t for the life of me see how this is relevant. When did I or anyone else mention the Spanish Inquisition? That was only one of the Inquisitions, and the church’s official Inquisitions were only one of the ways in which Catholics persecuted heretics (local bishops, and more to the point Catholic governments, did a lot of the persecuting).
Though, had there been such, they would have held to tribunal. Those that could be saved would be given every opportunity to rejoin the kata holos church.
Again, how is this relevant? No one is claiming that the Church didn’t want heretics to repent and rejoin the Church.
The Protestant Inquisition was primarily directed against Catholics and “witches.” So the assertion made is incorrect, as the primary aim of Protestant Inquisitions was the elimination of the Catholic Church and those deemed “witches.”
First of all, there never was such a thing as the Protestant Inquisition. The Inquisition was a Church court using Roman law to investigate and punish heresy. Inquisition should not be used as a blanket synonym for religious persecution. For one thing, it’s very unfair to the Inquisitors, who were not responsible for the often more brutal (if less pure-minded and thus arguably less relentless) persecutions launched by civil authorities. For another, it gives the Protestant churches too much credit–they never had the kind of autonomous authority that would have enabled them to establish an Inquisition, although the Calvinists came closest.
In the second place, Protestant
governments did a lot more persecuting of radicals than of Catholics. They shut down the public functions of the Catholic Church (when they could), often forcing Catholics into exile. But there simply aren’t a lot of cases (outside the special circumstances of England) where Catholics were tried and punished judicially for practicing their faith, much less executed. You are wrong here.
With regard to witches–sure, many Protestant countries, like many Catholic countries, executed people as witches. The main advantage of the Catholics was that where the Inquisition operated the prosecution of witches was much more rational, which meant that very few people were ever executed. In areas where the prosecution was left up to the civil authorities, or even to local bishops’ tribunals, things were much worse. And of course this was the case in Protestant countries. The worst of the bloodshed took place along the Rhine valley, an area where there were both Protestant and Catholic governments–and historians have not found a difference between Protestants and Catholics.
Edwin
