E. Vacandard

“ Theodore of Beza, who had seen several of his co-religionists burned in France for their faith, likewise wrote in 1554, in Calvinistic Geneva: "What crime can be greater or more heinous than heresy, which sets at nought the word of God and all ecclesiastic discipline? Christian magistrates, do your duty to God, Who has put the sword into your hands for the honor of His majesty; strike valiantly these monsters in the guise of men." ”

“ For religion is to be defended, not by putting to death, but by dying; not by cruelty but by patient endurance; not by crime but by faith.... If you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, by tortures and by crime, you no longer defend it, but pollute and profane it. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion." [2]
[1] Cf. Pascal, Lettre provinciale, xii.
[2] Divin. Institut., lib. v, cap. xx.
An era of official toleration began a few years later, when Constantine published the Edict of Milan (313) , which placed Christianity and Paganism on practically the same footing. ”

“ The death penalty inflicted later on placed the judges in a false position. On the one hand, by granting absolution and giving communion to the prisoner, they professed to believe in the sincerity of his repentance and conversion, and yet by sending him to the stake for fear of a relapse, they acted contrary to their convictions. To condemn a man to death who was considered worthy of receiving the Holy Eucharist, on the plea that he might one day commit the sin of heresy again, appears to us a crying injustice.
But should even unrepentant heretics be put to death? ”

“ The sacraments of the Church were a mere figment of the imagination. The Cathari made one sacrament out of Baptism, Confirmation, Penance and Eucharist, which they called the consolamentum; they denied the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, and they repudiated marriage.
Baptism of water was to them an empty ceremony, as valueless as the baptism of John. Christ had undoubtedly said: "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God." ”

“ Advocates of the death penalty, like Frederic II and St. Thomas, tried to defend their view by arguments from reason. Criminals guilty of treason, and counterfeiters are condemned to death. Therefore, heretics who are traitors and falsifiers merit the same penalty. But a comparison of this kind is not necessarily a valid argument. The criminals in question were a grave menace to the social order. But we cannot say as much for each and every heresy in itself. It was unjust to place a crime against society and a sin against God on an equal footing. ”

“ Let us observe, first of all, that the majority of the heretics abandoned to the secular arm merited the most severe punishment for their crimes. It would surely have been unjust for criminals against the common law to escape punishment under cover of their religious belief. Crimes committed in the name of religion are always crimes, and the man who has his property stolen or is assaulted cares little whether he has to deal with a religious fanatic or an ordinary criminal. In such instances, the State is not defending a particular dogmatic teaching, but her own most vital interests. ”

“ Such a defence of the Inquisition is not borne out by the facts. It is true, of course, that in the Middle Ages there was hardly a heresy which had not some connection with an anti-social sect. For this reason any one who denied a dogma of the faith was at once suspected, rightly or wrongly, or being an anarchist. But, as a matter of fact, the Inquisition did not condemn merely those heresies which caused social upheaval, but all heresies as such: "We decree," says Frederic II, "that the crime of heresy, no matter what the name of the sect, be classed as a public crime.... ”

“ Augustine was of the same mind. He thus addressed the Manicheans, the most hated sect of his time: "Let those who have never known the troubles of a mind in search for the truth, proceed against you with rigor. It is impossible for me to do so, for I for years was cruelly tossed about by your false doctrines, which I advocated and defended to the best of my ability. I ought to bear with you now, as men bore with me, when I blindly accepted your doctrines." [2] Wazo, Bishop of Liège, wrote in a similar strain in the eleventh century. ”

“ Critics who are ignorant of the Middle Ages may feel at liberty to shower insult and contempt upon a judicial system whose severity is naturally repugnant to them. But contempt does not always imply a reasonable judgment, and to abuse an institution is not necessarily a proof of intelligence. If we would judge an epoch intelligently, we must be able to grasp the viewpoint of other men, even if they lived in an age long past. ”

“ It is altogether a modern perversion of history to assume, as apologists do, that the request for mercy was sincere, and that the secular magistrate and not the Inquisition was responsible for the death of the heretic. We can imagine the smile of amused surprise with which Gregory IX and Gregory XI would have listened to the dialectics with which Count Joseph de Maistre proves that it is an error to suppose, and much more to assert, that a Catholic priest can in any manner be instrumental in compassing the death of a fellow creature. ”

“ The laws and letters of Innocent III never once mention the death penalty for heresy. He merely decrees against them banishment, and the confiscation of their property. When he speaks of having recourse to the secular arm, he means simply the force required to carry out the laws of banishment enacted by his penal code. This code, which seems so pitiless to us, was in reality at that time a great improvement in the treatment of heretics. For its special laws prevented the frequent outbreaks of popular vengeance, which punished not only confessed heretics, but also mere suspects. ”

“ The only legitimate marriage in their eyes was the union of the Bishop with the Church, or the union of the soul with the Holy Spirit by the ceremony of the consolamentum.
They condemned absolutely all marital relations. That was the sin of Adam and Eve. Pierre Garsias taught at Toulouse that the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden was simply carnal pleasure.
One of the purposes of marriage is the begetting of children. But the propagation of the human species is plainly the work of the Evil Spirit. A woman with child is a woman possessed of the devil. ”

“ Granting that banishment and confiscation were just penalties for heretics who were also State criminals, was it right for the Church to employ this penal system for the suppression of heresy alone?
It is certain that the early Christians would have strongly denounced such laws as too much like the pagan laws under which they were persecuted. St. Hilary voiced their mind when he said: "The Church threatens exile and imprisonment; she in whom men formerly believed while in exile and prison, now wishes to make men believe her by force." ”

“ If rebellion against the prince deserves death, a fortiori does rebellion against God. Singular logic! It is not very hard to put one's finger upon the utter absurdity of such reasoning. For every sinner is a rebel against God's law. It follows then that we ought to condemn all men to death, beginning with the kings and the legislators;" quoted by Morlais in the Revue du Clergé Français, August 1, 1905, p. 457.
It is evident, therefore, that neither reason, Christian tradition nor the New Testament call for the infliction of the death penalty upon heretics. ”

“ We must not forget, however, that the penalty of imprisonment, which was at first a monastic punishment, had two objects in view: to prevent heretics from spreading their doctrines, and to give them an opportunity of atoning for their sins. In the minds of the ecclesiastical judges, it possessed a penitential, almost a sacramental character. In a period when all Europe was Catholic, it could well supplant exile and banishment, which were the severest civil penalties after the death penalty. ”

“ If a Christian has no right to use physical force, even in the name of the State, he is all the more bound not to use it against his dissenting brethren in the name of the Gospel, which is a law of gentleness. ”

“ In time, all this criminal code was to fall into desuetude, and no one to-day wishes it back again. Besides, the crying abuses committed by some of the Inquisitors have made the institution forever odious.
But in abandoning the system of force, which she formerly used in union with the State, does not the Church seem to condemn, to a certain degree, her past?
Even if to-day she were to denounce the Inquisition, she would not thereby compromise her divine authority. Her office on earth is to transmit to generation after generation the deposit of revealed truths necessary for man's salvation. ”

“ In doubtful cases, he should be very careful not to believe too easily what may appear probable, and yet in reality is false; nor, on the other hand, should he stubbornly refuse to believe what may appear improbable, and yet is frequently true. He should zealously discuss and examine every case, so as to be sure to make a just decision.... Let the love of truth and mercy, the special qualities of every good judge, shine in his countenance, and let his sentences never be prompted by avarice or cruelty. ”

“ If, in addition to this freedom from local partialities, the examiners and judges were men specially trained to the detection and conversion of the heretics; if also, they had by irrevocable vows renounced the world; if they could acquire no wealth, and were dead to the enticement of pleasure, every guarantee seemed to be afforded that their momentous duties would be fulfilled with the strictest justice—that while the purity of the faith would be protected, there would be no unnecessary oppression or cruelty or persecution dictated by private interests and personal revenge. ”

“ I promise to devote my life to God and to the Gospel, never to lie or swear, never to touch a woman, never to kill an animal, never to eat meat, eggs or milk-food; never to eat anything but fish and vegetables, never to do anything without first saying the Lord's Prayer, never to eat, travel, or pass the night without a socius. If I fall into the hands of my enemies or happen to be separated from my socius, I promise to spend three days without food or drink. I will never take off my clothes on retiring, nor will I deny my faith even when threatened with death. ”

“ Indeed, to maintain that the Church should use material force, is at once to make her subject to the State; for we can hardly picture her with her own police and gendarmes, ready to punish her rebellious children. Every Catholic believes that the Church is an independent society, fully able to carry out her divine mission without the aid of the secular arm. ”

“ He advocates the death penalty for the relapsed in the name of Christian charity. For, he argues, charity has for its object the spiritual and temporal welfare of one's neighbor. His spiritual welfare is the salvation of his soul; his temporal welfare is life, and temporal advantages, such as riches, dignities, and the like. These temporal advantages are subordinate to the spiritual, and charity must prevent their endangering the eternal salvation of their possessor. Charity, therefore, to himself and to others, prompts us to deprive him of these temporal goods, if he makes a bad use of them. ”

“ That to safeguard this treasure she uses means in one age which a later age denounces, merely proves that she follows the customs and ideas in vogue around her. But she takes good care not to have men consider her attitude the infallible and eternal rule of absolute justice. She readily admits that she may sometimes be deceived in the choice of means of government. The system of defence and protection that she adopted in the Middle Ages succeeded, at least to some extent. ”

“ Let us now ascertain what they substituted for the Catholic doctrines they denied.
Catharism, as we have already hinted, was a hodgepodge of pagan dualism and Gospel teaching, given to the world as a sort of reformed Christianity.
Human souls, spirits fallen from heaven into a material body which is the work of the Evil Spirit, were subject on this earth to a probation, which was ended by Christ, or rather by the Holy Spirit. They were set free by the imposition of hands, the secret of which had been committed to the true Church by the disciples of Jesus. ”

“ Saint Raymond of Pennafort, the compiler of the decretals of Gregory I, who was the highest authority in his generation, lays it down as a principle of ecclesiastical law that the heretic is to be coerced by excommunication and confiscation, and if they fail, by the extreme exercise of the secular power. The man who was doubtful in faith was to be held a heretic, and so also was the schismatic who, while believing all the articles of religion, refused the obedience due to the Roman Church. ”

“ One of the results, or rather one of the causes of their abstinence from meat, was the absolute respect they had for animal life in general. We have seen that they admitted metempsychosis. According to their belief, the body of an ox or an ass might be the dwelling place of a human soul. To kill these animals, therefore, was a crime equivalent to murder. "For that reason," says Bernard Gui, "they never kill an animal or a bird; for they believe that in animals and birds dwell the souls of men, who died without having been received into their sect by the imposition of hands." ”

“ But he never invokes the death penalty against them. On the contrary, he declares that no practical Christian can be an executioner or jailer. He even goes so far as to deny the right of any disciple of Christ to serve in the army, at least as an officer, "because the duty of a military commander comprises the right to sit in judgment upon a man's life, to condemn, to put in chains, to imprison and to torture." ”

“ Finally, however, some Inquisitors, realizing the emptiness of this formula, dispensed with it altogether, and boldly assumed the full responsibility for their sentences. They deemed the rôle of the State so unimportant in the execration of heretics, that they did not even mention it. The Inquisition is the real judge; it lights the fires. "All whom we cause to be burned," says the famous Dominican Sprenger in his Malleus Maleficarum. ”

“ They read how Saul, the chosen king of Israel, had been divinely punished for sparing Agag of Amalek; how the prophet Samuel had hewn him to pieces; how the wholesale slaughter of the unbelieving Canaanites had been ruthlessly commanded and enforced; how Elijah had been commended for slaying four hundred and fifty priests of Baal; and they could not conceive how mercy to those who rejected the true faith could be aught but disobedience to God. ”

“ Heretics in the Middle Ages were considered amenable to the laws of both Church and State. Men of that time could not conceive of God and His revelation without defenders in a Christian kingdom. Magistrates were considered responsible for the sins committed against the law of God. Indirectly, therefore, heresy was amenable to their tribunal. They felt it their right and duty to punish not only crimes against society, but sins against faith.
The Inquisition, established to judge heretics, is, therefore, an institution whose severity and cruelty are explained by the ideas and manners of the age. ”

“ But in view of the advantage to the Church, either from the maintenance of the public peace, or from the conversion of individuals, the State may employ a certain amount of force against heretics.
"God forbids us to put them to death," continues St. Chrysostom, "just as he forbade the servants to gather up the cockle," [1] because he regards their conversion as possible; but he does not forbid us doing all in our power to prevent their public meetings, and their preaching of false doctrine. St. Augustine adds that they may be punished by fine and exile. ”

“ As late as the middle of the fourth century and even later, all the Fathers and ecclesiastical writers who discuss the question of toleration are opposed to the use of force. To a man they reject absolutely the death penalty, and enunciate that principle which was to prevail in the Church down the centuries, i.e., Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine [1] (the Church has a horror of bloodshed) ; and they declare faith must be absolutely free, and conscience a domain wherein violence must never enter. ”

“ To call the Inquisition a model of justice is a manifest exaggeration, as every fair student of its history must admit.
The Inquisitorial procedure was, in itself, inferior to the accusatio, in which the accuser assumed the burden of publicly proving his charges. That it was difficult to observe this method of procedure in heresy trials can readily be understood; for the poena talionis awaiting the accuser who failed to substantiate his charges was calculated to cool the ardor of many Catholics, who otherwise would have been eager to prosecute heretics. ”

“ As the necessity grew apparent of special and permanent tribunals, devoted exclusively to the widespread sin of heresy, there was every reason why they should be wholly free from the local jealousies and enmities which might tend to the prejudice of the innocent, or the local favoritism which might connive at the escape of the guilty. ”

“ Hardly had the Inquisition been established, when Frederic II tried to use it for political purposes. He was anxious to put the prosecution for heresy in the hands of his royal officers, rather than in the hands of the bishops and the monks. When, therefore, in 1233, he boasted in a letter to Gregory IX that he had put to death a great number of heretics in his kingdom, the Pope answered that he was not at all deceived by this pretended zeal. He knew full well that the Emperor wished simply to get rid of his personal enemies, and that he had put to death many who were not heretics at all. ”

“ A Catholic apologist fails in his duty to-day if he writes merely to edify the faithful. Granting that the history of the Inquisition will reveal things we never dreamed of, our prejudices must not prevent an honest facing of the facts. We ought to dread nothing more than the reproach that we are afraid of the truth. ”

“ Human passions are responsible for the many abuses of the Inquisition. The civil power in heresy trials was far from being partial to the accused. On the contrary, it would seem that the more pressure the State brought to bear upon the ecclesiastical tribunals, the more arbitrary their procedure became.
We do not deny that the zeal of the Inquisitors was at times excessive, especially in the use of torture. But some of their cruelty may be explained by their sincere desire for the salvation of the heretic. They regarded the confession of the suspects as the beginning of their conversion. ”