Pope Gregory IX Capital Punishment

[E_CT]

My question is regarding Pope Gregory IX’s papal bull Excommunicamus which many read as the pope endorsing burning heretics at the stake and sending repentant heretics to life in prison. The term “due punishment” is used in the bull and most people in the internet seem to interpret it as capital punishment. Emperor Fredrick II in 1231, the same year this bull was made, declared that heretics should be burned at the stake. Does anyone know if the punishments I mentioned are what Gregory was actually saying in his bull and if he was actually for the burning of heretics or just allowed it because that was the law of the state.

 

[BartholomewB]

I don’t know the answer to your question, but I can suggest a way to find out. For fourteen years Gregory IX was not only the head of the Catholic Church: he was also the temporal ruler of the Papal State. During those fourteen years, were any heretics burned at the stake in the Papal State? If there were, that would mean that Gregory authorized them himself, since it was within his power to make such acts illegal.

 

[Genesis315]

The same analysis for the just application of the death penalty would apply in this case as in others. Heresy during that time period–especially the kind punished with imprisonment or death–generally entailed more than just someone believing the wrong thing. It was the kind that was such a threat to the common good as to undermine the very peace and security of a society.

For better or worse, in the experience of many in those times and subsequent centuries, heresy did introduce bloody conflict and chaos, tearing at the very fabric of social stability and displacing peoples. Look at what people like the Albigensians, Arnold of Brescia, or Hus and Wycliffe promoted and what it led to? Look at what happened during the Reformation? Even Martin Luther changed his stance from opposing to supporting it after he saw the chaos those opposing the Lutheran order caused. Not to mention it had been taken for granted as necessary as having been part of imperial law in the East and West since the Justinian Code.

As St. Thomas More (before things had really gotten out of hand with the Reformation), who himself participated in such executions, put it this way:

If the heretics had never started with the violence, then even if they had used all the ways they had ways they could to lure the people by preaching, even if they had thereby done what Luther does now and Mohammed did before – bring into vogue opinions pleasing to the people, giving them licence for licentiousness – yet if they had left violence alone, good Christian people would perhaps all the way up to this day have used less violence towards them than they do now. And yet heresy well deserves to be punished as severely as any other sin, since there is no sin that more offends God. However, as long as they refrained from violence, there was little violence done to them. And certainly though God is able against all persecution to preserve and increase his faith among the people, as he did in the beginning, for all the persecution inflicted by the pagans and the Jews, that is still no reason to expect Christian princes to allow the Catholic Christian people to be oppressed by Turks or by heretics worse than Turks.

Hindsight is of course 20/20, there were no doubt abuses and sin (as there are in any justice system run by fallen humans), but in general they often had good faith reasons to believe it was necessary then to defend the common good. We have the benefit of a lot of practice and experience of peaceful pluralism and mutual tolerance (but even such a situation was born first from violence and bloodshed when the older order was destroyed).

 

[Genesis315]

To more directly answer the OP’s question, here is what the Catholic encyclopedia says of Gregory IX specifically:

Gregory IX was very severe towards heretics, who in those times were universally looked upon as traitors and punished accordingly. Upon the request of King Louis IX of France, he sent Cardinal Romanus as legate to assist the king in his crusade against the Albigenses. At the synod which the papal legate convened at Toulouse in November, 1229, it was decreed that all heretics and their abettors should be delivered to the nobles and magistrates for their due punishment, which, in case of obstinacy, was usually death. When in 1224 Frederick II ordered that heretics in Lombardy should be burnt at the stake, Gregory IX, who was then papal legate for Lombardy, approved and published the imperial law. During his enforced absence from Rome (1228-1231) the heretics remained unmolested and became very numerous in the city. In February, 1231, therefore, the pope enacted a law for Rome that heretics condemned by an ecclesiastical court should be delivered to the secular power to receive their “due punishment”. This “due punishment” was death by fire for the obstinate and imprisonment for life for the penitent. In pursuance of this law a number of Patarini were arrested in Rome in 1231, the obstinate were burned at the stake, the others were imprisoned in the Benedictine monasteries of Monte Cassino and Cava (Ryccardus de S. Germano, ad annum 1231, in Mon. Germ. SS., XIX, 363). It must not be thought, however, that Gregory IX dealt more severely with heretics than other rulers did. Death by fire was the common punishment for heretics and traitors in those times. Up to the time of Gregory IX, the duty of searching out heretics belonged to the bishops in their respective dioceses. The so-called Monastic Inquisition was established by Gregory IX, who in his Bulls of 13, 20, and 22 April, 1233, appointed the Dominicans as the official inquisitors for all dioceses of France (Ripoil and Bremond, “Bullarium Ordinia Fratrum Praedicatorum”, Rome, 1729, I, 47).

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06796a.htm

Note, the “Patarini” is what the Cathars/Albigensians were called in Italy during his time (not to be confused with the Patarini of a couple centuries earlier). Here is what they did to Dominican Friars sent to preach among them around that time, including St. Peter of Verona (aka Peter Martyr):

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

Again, maybe Gregory IX went too far, but there is certainly evidence that he could have had a good faith belief it was necessary. In the West we have learned to live peacefully among those of diverse religions and so such punishments being needed seems unthinkable. But even in our societies our governments still oppose certain terroristic sects and other dangerous cults–whether categorized as religious or ideological–with military or other state sanctioned violence and punishments where necessary.

 

[Genesis315]

Sorry to spam the thread, but one last point to show there is usually more to the story than a group peacefully believing something different.

Here’s how Archbishop John Hughes of New York explained the harsh measures against them enacted in a concilliar canon in a 19th century debate with a Presbyterian minister about the Catholic doctrine on religious freedom:

Let any man apply the doctrines of the Albigenses, simply on two points, viz. the tenet that the devil was the creator of the visible world ; and that, in order to avoid co-operation with the devil in continuing his work, the faithful should take measures by which the human race should come to an end ; and then say whether those errors were merely speculative. They were, on the contrary, pregnant with destruction to society. Was it persecution, or rather, was it not self-preservation, to arrest those errors? We shall see presently, however, that these men, like the Calvinists in France at a later period, took up the sword of sedition, and wielded it against the government under which they lived. We shall see, that long before the canon of Lateran was passed, their course was marked with plunder, rapine, bloodshed. And if so, it follows that their crimes against society springing from their doctrines, constitute the true reason of the severity of the enactment against them.

Their existence was known from the year 1022. If, then, the extermination of heretics had been a doctrine of the Catholic Church, why were they not exterminated from the first? If it was not a doctrine of the church in 1022, it was not a doctrine in 1215; for the gentleman himself admits and proclaims that our doctrines never change. Why then did not the Catholics exterminate them at once ? Is it that they were not able ? No : for at first the heresy had but few supporters. But why were they afterwards persecuted ? The reason is, that in the interval they had proceeded to sustain and propagate their infernal principles, by violence. They had placed themselves under the patronage of factious and rebellious barons, and had fought in pitched battles against their sovereigns. In the former controversy, the gentleman garbled the twenty-seventh canon of the third Council of Lateran, to show that these poor heretics were condemned to awful penalties, for nothing at all but protesting against the errors of the Church of Rome. This he did by quoting the beginning and conclusion of the canon, and, without indicating any omission, suppressing the crimes of these proto-martyrs of Calvinism. It was proved, by the very document from which he quoted, that these lambs of the Albigensian fold were “exercising such cruelty on the Christians, (ie. the Catholics) that they paid no respect to churches or monastaries, spared neither virgins nor widows, neither old nor young, neither sex nor age, but after the manner of pagans destroyed and desolated every thing.”

 

[E_CT]

Genesis315 I understand the problems heresy posed in medieval society. I probably was not clear in my question but the thing I am questioning is if the pope has the authority to make sentence people to death because I thought the church taught that clergy cannot do that only the state. Is the pope able to make these sentences because he was the civil leader of the Papal States? I also get confused at times with the relationship between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papal States in the early Middle Ages, I understand that they were separate later on but were they always separate? I had these questions besides trying to understand what Gregory IX said in his bull because most sites and book I find seem to have an anti-catholic bias.

 

[Genesis315]

Genesis315 I understand the problems heresy posed in medieval society. I probably was not clear in my question but the thing I am questioning is if the pope has the authority to make sentence people to death because I thought the church taught that clergy cannot do that only the state. Is the pope able to make these sentences because he was the civil leader of the Papal States? I also get confused at times with the relationship between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papal States in the early Middle Ages, I understand that they were separate later on but were they always separate? I had these questions besides trying to understand what Gregory IX said in his bull because most sites and book I find seem to have an anti-catholic bias.

Ahh, sorry. Usually fellow Catholics need help from the anti-Catholic accusations surrounding such things. To answer your actual question, the Catholic Encyclopedia article I posted above says he enacted the law for Rome, which as capital of the Papal States would have been within his civil jurisdiction. So yes, he would have been doing it as the civil ruler of that territory.

The death penalty was on the books in Vatican City from its inception in 1929 to 1969, but it was never used (it only applied to the crime of assassinating the Pope). Like most countries, the Papal States (which ended in 1870) applied capital punishment for all of its history, almost exclusively for murder for the last few hundred years. Those were all punishments imposed by laws enacted by a Pope acting in his role as the civil power there.

 

[E_CT]

Thank you for the clarification. This is something I was confused with because I know the church teaches that only the state has the authority to use capital punishment and I believe Pope Gregory IX even mentioned it in one of his writings. The pope being the head of the papal states and the existence of prince bishops made this a confusing topic to discuss with people and it is very easy for to conflate their authorities over church and states. It is important to show that prince bishops and popes had two separate authorities to show why they were able to say people could be executed and why other bishops could not have done this.