Why did the catholic Church create the Malleus Maleficarum?

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Churchman25

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Why did the Catholic Church create the Malleus Maleficarum, if the one of the purposes of the church is to get people to reject sin and have their sins forgiven even in the middle ages? One thing I dont understand is how burning someone alive was not rejected at the time.
 
I never heard of the Malleus Maleficarum before, so I looked it up.

The information I saw would indicate that it was rejected by the Church in the 15th Century when it was written and same with its author.

Do you have any proof that it was created by or even approved of by the Catholic Church?
 
It didn’t. From Wikipedia:
In 1484 Heinrich Kramer had made one of the first attempts at prosecuting alleged witches in the Tyrol region. It was not a success and he was asked to leave the city of Innsbruck. According to Diarmaid MacCulloch, writing the book was Kramer's act of self-justification and revenge. Ankarloo and Clark claim that Kramer's purpose in writing the book was to explain his own views on witchcraft, systematically refute arguments claiming that witchcraft does not exist, discredit those who expressed skepticism about its reality, claim that those who practiced witchcraft were more often women than men, and to convince magistrates to use Kramer's recommended procedures for finding and convicting witches.

Kramer wrote the Malleus following his expulsion from Innsbruck by the local bishop, due to charges of illegal behavior against Kramer himself, and because of Kramer's obsession with the sexual habits of one of the accused, Helena Scheuberin, which led the other tribunal members to suspend the trial.

Kramer received a papal bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, in 1484. It directed Bishop of Strasburg (then Albert of Palatinate-Mosbach) to accept the authority of Heinrich Kramer as an Inquisitor, although the motivation of the papal bull was likely political. The Malleus Maleficarum was finished in 1486 and the papal bull was included as part of its preface, implying papal approval for the work. However, the Malleus Maleficarum received an official condemnation by the Church three years later, and Kramer's claims of approval are seen by modern scholars as misleading.
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And
The Malleus Maleficarum, usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, is the best known and the most important treatise on witchcraft. It was written by the discredited Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name Henricus Institoris) and first published in the German city of Speyer in 1487. It endorses extermination of witches and for this purpose develops a detailed legal and theological theory. It was a bestseller, second only to the Bible in terms of sales for almost 200 years. The top theologians of the Inquisition at the Faculty of Cologne condemned the book as recommending unethical and illegal procedures, as well as being inconsistent with Catholic doctrines of demonology.
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So that book was never created by the Church and it was fairly quickly condemned for that period. Reading up on this, it seems witch hunts largely occurred on a secular level, but the Church’s position in its early days was actually pretty tolerant on the issue and discouraged our outright condemned these practices on numerous occasions and stated it shouldn’t be investigated (witch hunts seem to have been recognized as a political, hysterical tool even then). There was a rise of popular interest in it with the Renaissance, but it appears even then the Church advised imprisonment, punishment, and correction instead of the harsher things we’ve seen. Witch hunt fever took off during the mid 1400s through 1600s.

Now, there have been a number of things we can look back on in Church history as tragic occurrences and bad. But the witch hunt fever seems to have actually been more of a protestant phenomenon. That’s not to say witches were never burned or killed in Catholic nations by Catholics, but the Church seems to have an overall history of denouncing these methods and types of persecutions.
 
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Historian here. The church clearly didn´t supported it, it was forbidden to publish by the church quickly after it appeared.
This piece of violence is one of the most common false ideas students tend to bring into the classes 🙂
 
The bull was written prior to the book. The author of the book included the text of the bull to make it look like official approval of the book.
 
I knew it was a witchcraft book the Inquisition seek to destroy. As in the book itself was written by a witch. But this I know from a novel. Well at least the history shows the Inquisition disapproved of it so the novel in which I read about it was half true.
 
Can you answer honestly did you write this the way you did to try to mis inform or mislead or were you honestly looking for clarification on the matter.
 
no just trying to gain more information or clarification on the on the matter thats all.
 
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