Such severity, nay, such cruelty, shown to what we would call "a crime of opinion," is hard for men of our day to understand. "To comprehend it," says Lea, "we must picture to ourselves a stage of civilization in many respects wholly unlike our own. Passions were fiercer, convictions stronger, virtues and vices more exaggerated, than in our colder and self-contained time. The age, moreover, was a cruel one.... We have only to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in their dealings with one another. The wheel, the caldron of burning oil, burning alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to deter men from crime by frightful examples which would make a profound impression on a not over-sensitive population."[1]

[1] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 234, 235.

When we consider this rigorous civil criminal code, we need not wonder that heretics, who were considered the worst possible criminals, were sent to the stake.

This explains why intelligent men, animated by the purest zeal for good, proved so hard and unbending, and used without mercy the most cruel tortures, when they thought that the faith or the salvation of souls was at stake. "With such men," says Lea,—and he mentions among others Innocent III and St. Louis,—"it was not hope of gain, or lust of blood or pride of opinion, or wanton exercise of power, but sense of duty, and they but represented what was universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries."[1]

[1] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, p. 234.

It was, therefore, the spirit of the times, the Zeitgeist, as we would call it to-day, that was responsible for the rigorous measures formerly used by both Church and State in the suppression of heresy. The other reasons we have mentioned are only subsidiary. This is the one reason that satisfactorily explains both the theories and the facts.

But an explanation is something far different from a defence of an institution. To explain is to show the relation of cause to effect; to defend is to show that the effect corresponds to an ideal of justice. Even if we grant that the procedure of the Inquisition did correspond to a certain ideal of justice, that ideal is certainly not ours to-day. Let us go into this question more thoroughly.

It is obvious that we must strongly denounce all the abuses of the Inquisition that were due to the sins of individuals, no matter what their source. No one, for instance, would dream of defending Cauchon, the iniquitous judge of Joan of Arc, or other cruel Inquisitors who, like him, used their authority to punish unjustly suspects brought before their tribunal. From this standpoint, it is probable that many of the sentences of the Inquisition need revision.

But can we rightly consider this institution "a sublime spectacle of social perfection," and "a model of justice?"[1]

[1] The Civilta Cattolica, 1853, vol. i. p. 595 seq.

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. But we must grant that the accusatio in criminal law allowed a greater chance for justice to be done than the inquisitio. Besides, if the ecclesiastical inquisitio had proceeded like the civil inquisitio, the possibility of judicial errors might have been far less. "In the inquisitio of the civil law, the secrecy for which the Inquisition has been justly criticized, did not exist; the suspect was cited, and a copy of the capitula or articuli containing the charges was given to him. When questioned, he could either confess or deny these charges. The names of the witnesses who were to appear against him, and a copy of their testimony, were also supplied, so that he could carry on his defence either by objecting to the character of his accusers, or the tenor of their charges. Women, minors aged fourteen, serfs, enemies of the prisoner, criminals, excommunicates, heretics, and those branded with infamy were not allowed to testify. All testimony was received in writing. The prisoner and his lawyers then appeared before the judge to rebut the evidence and the charges."[1]

[1] Tanon, op. cit., pp. 287, 288.

In the ecclesiastical procedure, on the contrary, the names of the witnesses were withheld, save in very exceptional cases; any one could testify, even if he were a heretic; the prisoner had the right to reject all whom he considered his mortal enemies, but even then he had to guess at their names in order to invalidate their testimony; he was not allowed a lawyer, but had to defend himself in secret. Only the most prejudiced minds can consider such a procedure the ideal of justice. On the contrary, it is unjust in every detail wherein it differs from the inquisitio of the civil law.

Certain reasons may be adduced to explain the attitude of the Popes, who wished to make the procedure of the Inquisition as secret and as comprehensive as possible. They were well aware of the danger that witnesses would incur, if their names were indiscreetly revealed. They knew that the publicity of the pleadings would certainly hinder the efficiency of heresy trials. But such considerations do not change the character of the institution itself; the Inquisition in leaving too great a margin to the arbitrary conduct of individual judges, at once fell below the standard of strict justice.

All that can and ought to be said in the defence and to the honor of the Roman pontiffs is that they endeavored to remedy the abuses of the Inquisition. With this in view, Innocent IV and Alexander IV obliged the Inquisitors to consult a number of boni viri and periti; Clement V forbade them to render any grave decision without first consulting the bishops, the natural judges of the faith;[1] and Boniface VIII recommended them to reveal the names of the witnesses to the prisoners if they thought that this revelation would not be prejudicial to any one.[2] In a word, they wished the laws of justice to be scrupulously observed, and at times mitigated.[3] But, examined in detail, these laws were far from being perfect.

[1] Clementinae, De Haereticis, Decretal Multorum Querela, cap. i, sect. i.

[2] Sexto, De Haereticis, cap. xx; cf. Tanon, op. cit., p. 391.

[3] Doellinger is very unjust when he says: "From 1200 to 1500 there is a long uninterrupted series of papal decrees on the Inquisition; these decrees increase continually in severity and cruelty." La Papaute, p. 102. Tanon (op. cit, p. 138) writes more impartially: "Clement V, instead of increasing the powers of the Holy Office, tried rather to suppress its abuses."

. . . . . . . .

Antecedent imprisonment and torture, which played so important a part in the procedure of the Inquisition, were undoubtedly very barbarous methods of judicial prosecution. Antecedent imprisonment may be justified in certain cases; but the manner in which the Inquisitors conceived it was far from just. No one would dare defend to-day the punishment known as the carcer durus, whereby the Inquisitors tried to extort confessions from their prisoners. They rendered it, moreover, all the more odious by arbitrarily prolonging its horrors and its cruelty.

It is harder still to reconcile the use of torture with any idea of justice. If the Inquisitors had stopped at flogging, which according to St. Augustine was administered at home, in school, and even in the episcopal tribunals of the early ages, and is mentioned by the Council of Agde, in 506, and the Benedictine rule, no one would have been greatly scandalized. We might perhaps have considered this domestic and paternal custom a little severe, but perfectly consistent with the ideas men then had of goodness. But the rack, the strappado, and the stake were peculiarly inhuman inventions.[1] When the pagans used them against the Christians of the first centuries, all agreed in stigmatizing them as the extreme of barbarism, or as inventions of the devil. Their character did not change when the Inquisition began to use them against heretics. To our shame we are forced to admit that, notwithstanding Innocent IV's appeal for moderation,[2] the brutality of the ecclesiastical tribunals was often on a par with the tribunals of the pagan persecutors. Pope Nicholas I thus denounced the use of torture as a means of judical inquiry: "Such proceedings," he says, "are contrary to the law of God and of man, for a confession ought to be spontaneous, not forced; it ought to be free, and not the result of violence. A prisoner may endure all the torments you inflict upon him without confessing anything. Is not that a disgrace to the judge, and an evident proof of his inhumanity! If, on the contrary, a prisoner, under stress of torture, acknowledges himself guilty of a crime he never committed, is not the one who forced him to lie, guilty of a heinous crime?"[3]

[1] This was the view of St. Augustine, Ep. cxxxiii, 2.

[2] Bull Ad Extirpanda, in Eymeric, Directorium inquisitorum, Appendix, p. 8.

[3] Responsa ad consulta Bulgarorum, cap. lxxxvi; Labbe, Concilia, vol. viii, col. 544.

The penalties which the tribunals of the Inquisition inflicted upon heretics are harder to judge. 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. Heretics, therefore, who were criminals against the civil law were justly punished. An anti-social sect like the Cathari, which shrouded itself in mystery and perverted the people so generally, by the very fact of its existence and propaganda called for the vengeance of society and the sword of the State.

"However much," says Lea, "we may deprecate the means used for its suppression, and commiserate those who suffered for conscience' sake, we cannot but admit that the cause of orthodoxy was in this case the cause of progress and civilization. Had Catharism become dominant, or even had it been allowed to exist on equal terms, its influence could not have failed to prove disastrous. Its asceticism with regard to commerce between the sexes, if strictly enforced, could only have led to the extinction of the race.... Its condemnation of the visible universe, and of matter in general as the work of Satan rendered sinful all striving after material improvement, and the conscientious belief in such a creed could only lead man back, in time, to his original condition of savagism. It was not only a revolt against the Church, but a renunciation of man's domination over nature."[1] Its growth had to be arrested at any price. Society, in proceeding against it without mercy, was only defending herself against the working of an essentially destructive force. It was a struggle for existence.

We must, therefore, deduct from the number of those who are commonly styled the victims of ecclesiastical intolerance, the majority of the heretics executed by the State; for nearly all that were imprisoned or sent to the stake, especially in northern Italy and southern France, were Cathari.[1]

[1] Jean Guiraud has proved that the Waldenses, Fraticelli, Hussites, Lollards, etc., attacked society, which acted in self-defense when she put them to death. La repression de l'heresie au moyen age, in the Questions d'histoire et d'archeologie Chretienne, p. 24 and seq.

This important observation has so impressed certain historians, that they have been led to think the Inquisition dealt only with criminals of this sort. "History," says Rodrigo, "has preserved the record of the outrages committed by the heretics of Bulgaria, the Gnostics, and the Manicheans; the death sentence was inflicted only upon criminals who confessed their murders, robberies, and acts of violence. The Albigenses were treated with kindness. The Catholic Church deplores all acts of vengeance, however strong the provocation given by these factious mobs."[1]

[1] Historia verdadera de la Inquisicion, Madrid, 1876, vol. i, p. 176, 177.

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.... and that every one who denies the Catholic faith, even in one article, shall be liable to the law; si inventi fuerint a fide catholica saltem in articulo deviare."[1] This was also the view of the theologians and the canonists. St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, who speaks for the whole schola, did not make any distinction between the Catharan heresy and any other purely speculative heresy; he put them all on one level; every obdurate or relapsed heretic deserved death.[2] The Inquisitors were so fully persuaded of this truth that they prosecuted heretics whose heresy was not discovered until ten or twenty years after their death, when surely they were no longer able to cause any injury to society.[3]

[1] Constitution Inconsutilem tunicam.

[2] Summa IIa, IIae, q. x, art. 8; q. xi, art. 3 and 4.

[3] Cf. Tanon, op. cit., pp. 407-412.

We need not wonder at these views and practices, for they were fully in accord with the notion of justice current at the time. The rulers in Church and State felt it their duty not only to defend the social order, but to safeguard the interests of God in the world. They deemed themselves in all sincerity the representatives of divine authority here below. God's interests were their interests; it was their duty, therefore, to punish all crimes against His law. Heresy, therefore, a purely theological crime, became amenable to their tribunal. In punishing it, they believed that they were merely fulfilling one of the duties of their office. We have now to examine and judge the penalties indicted upon heresy as such.

The first in order of importance was the death penalty of the stake, inflicted upon all obdurate and relapsed heretics.

Relapsed heretics, when repentant, did not at first incur the death penalty. Imprisonment was considered an adequate punishment, for it gave them a chance to expiate their fault. 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? No, taught St. Augustine, and most of the early Fathers, who invoked in favor of the guilty ones the higher law of "charity and Christian gentleness." Their doctrine certainly accorded perfectly with our Saviour's teaching, in the parable of the cockle and the good grain. As Wazo, Bishop of Liege said: "May not those who are to-day cockle become wheat to-morrow?"[1] But in decreeing the death of these sinners, the Inquisitors at once did away with the possibility of their conversion. Certainly this was not in accordance with Christian charity. Such severity can only be defended by the authority of the Old Law, whose severity, according to the early Fathers, had been abolished by the law of Christ.[2]

[1] Vita Vasonis, cap. xxv, in Migne, P.L., vol. cxlii, col. 753.

[2] St. Optatus (De Schismate Donatistarum, lib. iii, cap. vi and vii) was one of the first of the Fathers to quote the Old Testament as his authority for the infliction of the death penalty upon heretics. But in this he was not followed either by his contemporaries or his immediate successors. Before him, Origen and St. Cyprian had protested against this appeal to the Mosaic law.

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. Such reasoning would prove that all sins were crimes of treason against God, and therefore merited death.[1] Is not a sacrilegious communion the worst possible insult to the divine majesty? Must we argue, therefore, that every unworthy communicant, if unrepentant, must be sent to the stake?

[1] Mgr. Bonomelli, Bishop of Cremona, writes: "In the Middle Ages, they reasoned thus: 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 Clerge Francais, 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. The interpretation of St. John xv. 6: Si quis in me non manserit, in ignem mittent et ardet, made by the medieval canonists, is not worth discussing. It was an abuse of the accommodated sense which bordered upon the ridiculous, although its consequences were terrible.

. . . . . . . .

Modern apologists have clearly recognized this. For that reason they have tried their best to show that the execution of heretics was solely the work of the civil power, and that the Church was in no way responsible. "When we argue about the Inquisition," says Joseph de Maistre, "let us separate and distinguish very carefully the role of the Church and the role of the State. All that is terrible and cruel about this tribunal, especially its death penalty, is due to the State; that was its business, and it alone must be held to an accounting. All the clemency, on the contrary, which plays so large a part in the tribunal of the Inquisition must be ascribed to the Church, which interfered in its punishments only to suppress and mitigate them."[1] "The Church," says another grave historian, "took no part in the corporal punishment of heretics. Those executed were simply punished for their crimes, and were condemned by judges acting under the royal seal."[2] "This," says Lea, "is a typical instance in which history is written to order.... 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."[3]

[1] Lettres a un gentilhomme russe sur l'Inquisition espagnole, ed. 1864, pp. 17, 18, 28, 34.

[2] Rodrigo, Historia verdadera de la Inquisicion, 1876, vol. i, p. 170.

[3] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 540, 227.

The real share of the Inquisition in a condemnation involving the death penalty is indeed a very difficult question to determine. According to the letter of the papal and imperial Constitutions of 1231 and 1232, the civil and not the ecclesiastical tribunals assumed all responsibility for the death sentence;[1] the Inquisition merely decided upon the question of doctrine, leaving the rest to the secular Court. It is this legislation that the above-named apologists have in mind, and the text of these laws is on their side.

[1] Decretals, cap. xv, De Haereticis, lib. v, tit. vii. Mon. Germ., Leges, sect. iv, vol. ii, p. 196.

But when we consider how these laws were carried out in practice, we must admit that the Church did have some share in the death sentence. We have already seen that the Church excommunicated those princes who refused to burn the heretics which the Inquisition handed over to them. The princes were not really judges in this case; the right to consider questions of heresy was formally denied them.[1] It was their duty simply to register the decree of the Church, and to enforce it it according to the civil law. In every execution, therefore, a twofold authority came into play: the civil power which carried out its own laws, and the spiritual power which forced the State to carry them out. That is why Peter Cantor declared that the Cathari ought not to be put to death after an ecclesiastical trial, lest the Church be compromised: "Illud ab eo fit, cujus auctoritate fit," he said, to justify his recommendation.[2]

[1] Cf. Sexto, v. ii, cap. xi, and xviii. De Haereticis, in Eymeric, Directorium, p. 110.

[2] Verbum abbreviatum, cap. lxxvii, P.L., vol. ccv, col. 231.

It is therefore erroneous to pretend that the Church had absolutely no part in the condemnation of heretics to death. It is true that this participation of hers was not direct and immediate; but, even through indirect, it was none the less real and efficacious.[1]

[1] In Spain, the manner in which the Inquisition abandoned heretics to the secular arm denoted a real participation of the State in the execution of heretics. The evening before the execution the Inquisitors brought the King a small fagot tied with ribbons. The King as once requested "that this fagot be the first thrown upon the fire in his name." Cf. Baudrillart, A propos de l'Inquisition, in the Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, July 15, 1906, p. 354, note.

The judges of the Inquisition realized this, and did their best to free themselves of this responsibility which weighed rather heavily upon them. Some maintained that in compelling the civil authority to enforce the existing laws, they were not going outside their spiritual office, but were merely deciding a case of conscience. But this theory was unsatisfactory. To reassure their consciences, they tried another expedient. In abandoning heretics to the secular arm, they besought the state officials to act with moderation, and avoid "all bloodshed and all danger of death." This was unfortunately an empty formula which deceived no one. It was intended to safeguard the principle which the Church had taken for her motto: Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine. In strongly asserting this traditional law, the Inquisitors imagined that they thereby freed themselves from all responsibility, and kept from imbruing their hands in bloodshed. We must take this for what it is worth. It has been styled "cunning" and "hypocrisy;"[1] let us call it simply a legal fiction.

[1] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, p. 224.

. . . . . . . .

The penalty of life imprisonment and the penalty of confiscation inflicted upon so many heretics, was like the death penalty imposed only by the secular arm. We must add to this banishment, which was inscribed in the imperial legislation, and reappeared in the criminal codes of Lucius III and Innocent III. These several penalties were by their nature vindicative. For this reason they were particularly odious, and have been the occasion of bitter accusations against the Church.

With the exception of imprisonment, which we will speak of later on, these penalties originated with the State. It is important, therefore, to know what crimes they punished. As a general rule, it must be admitted that they were only inflicted upon those heretics who seriously disturbed the social order. If the death penalty could be justly meted out to such rioters, with still greater reason could the lesser penalties be inflicted.

The penalty of confiscation was especially cruel, inasmuch as it affected the posterity of the condemned heretics. According to the old Roman law, the property of heretics could be inherited by their orthodox sons, and even by their agnates and cognates.[1] The laws of the Middle Ages declared confiscation absolute; on the plea that heresy should be classed with treason, orthodox children could not inherit the property of their heretical father.[2] There was but one exception to this law. Frederic II and Innocent IV both decreed that children could inherit their father's property, if they denounced him for heresy.[3] It is needless to insist upon the odious character of such a law. We cannot understand to-day how Gregory IX could rejoice on learning that fathers did not scruple to denounce their children, children their parents, a wife her husband or a mother her children.[4]

[1] 4 and 19, cap De haereticis, iv, 5, Manichaeos and Cognovimus.

[2] Decretal Vergentis of Innocent III. Decretals, cap. x, De Haereticis, lib. v, tit. vii.

[3] Mon. Germ., Leges, vol. ii, sect. iv, p. 197; Ripoll, Bullarium ordinis Praedicat., vol. i, p. 126.

[4] Bull Gaudemus, of April 12, 1233, in Ripoll, vol. i, p. 56.

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."[1] St. 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 Liege, wrote in a similar strain in the eleventh century.[3]

[1] Liber contra Auxentium, cap. iv; cf. supra, p. 6.

[2] Contra epistolam Manichaei, quam vocant Fundamenti, n. 2 and 3, supra, p. 12.

[3] Vita Vasonis, cap. xxv and xxvi, Migne, P.L., vol. cxlii, col. 752, 753; cf. supra, p. 51.

But, continued St. Augustine, retracting his first theory,—and nearly all the Middle Ages agreed with him,—"these severe penalties are lawful and good when they serve to convert heretics by inspiring them with a salutary fear." The end here justifies the means.

Such reasoning was calculated to lead men to great extremes, and was responsible for the cruel teaching of the theologians of the school, who were more logically consistent than the Bishop of Hippo. They endeavored to terrorize heretics by the specter of the stake. St. Augustine, bold as he was, shrank from such barbarity. But if, on his own admission, the logical consequences of the principle he laid down were to be rejected, did not this prove the principle itself, false?

If we consider merely the immediate results obtained by the use of brute force, we may indeed admit that it benefited the Church by bringing back some of her erring children. But at the same time these cruel measures turned away from Catholicism in the course of ages many sensitive souls, who failed to recognize Christ's Church in a society which practiced such cruelty in union with the State. According, therefore, to St. Augustine's own argument, his theory has been proved false by its fatal consequences.

We must, therefore, return to the first theory of St. Augustine, and be content to win heretics back to the true faith by purely moral constraint. The penalties, decreed or consented to by the Church, ought to be medicinal in character, viz., pilgrimages, flogging, wearing the crosses, and the like. Imprisonment may even be included in the list, for temporary imprisonment has a well-defined expiatory character. In fact that is why in the beginning the monasteries made it a punishment for heresy. If, later on, the Church frequently inflicted the penalty of life imprisonment, she did so because by a legal fiction she attributed to it a purely penitential character. Any one of these punishments, therefore, may be considered lawful, provided it is not arbitrarily inflicted. This theory does not permit the Church to abandon impenitent heretics to the secular arm. It grants her only the right of excommunication, according to the penitential discipline and the primitive canon law of the days of Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Lactantius, and Hilary.

. . . . . . . .

But is this return to antiquity conformable to the spirit of the Church? Can it be reconciled in particular with one of the condemned propositions of the Syllabus: Ecclesia vis inferendae potestatem non habet?[1] The Church has no right to use force.

[1] Proposit, xxiv.

Without discussing this proposition at length, let us first state that authorities are not agreed on its precise meaning. Every Catholic will admit that the Church has a coercive power, in both the external and the internal forum. But the question under dispute—and this the Syllabus does not touch—is whether the coercive power comprises merely spiritual penalties, or temporal and corporal penalties as well. The editor of the Syllabus did not decide this question he merely referred us to the letter Ad Apostolicae Sedis of August 22, 1851. But this letter is not at all explicit; it merely condemns those who pretend "to deprive the Church of the external jurisdiction and coercive power which was given her to win back sinners to the ways of righteousness." We would like to find more light on this question elsewhere. But the theologians who at the Vatican Council prepared canons 10 and 12 of the schema De Ecclesia on this very point of doctrine did not remove the ambiguity. They explicitly affirmed that the Church had the right to exercise over her erring children "constraint by an external judgment and salutary penalties," but they said nothing about the nature of these penalties. Was not such silence significant? It authorized, one may safely say, the opinion of those who limited the coercive power of the Church to merely moral constraint. Cardinal Soglia, in a work approved by Gregory XVI and Pius IX, declared that this opinion was "more in harmony with the gentleness of the Church."[1] It also has in its favor Popes Nicholas I[2] and Celestine III,[3] who claimed for the Church of which they were the head the right to use only the spiritual sword. Without enumerating all the modern authors who hold this view, we will quote a work which has just appeared with the imprimatur of Father Lepidi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, in which we find the two following theses proved: 1. "Constraint, in the sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws, originated with the state." 2. "The constraint of ecclesiastical laws is by divine right exclusively moral constraint."[4]

[1] Institutiones juris publici ecclesiastici, 5 ed., Paris, vol. i, pp. 169, 170.

[2] Nicolai, Ep. ad Albinum archiepiscop., in the Decretum, Causa xxxiii, quaest. ii, cap. Inter haec.

[3] Celestine, according to the criminal code of his day, declared that a guilty cleric, once excommunicated and anathematized, ought to be abandoned to the secular arm, cum Ecclesia non habeat ultra quid faciat. Decretals, cap. x, De judiciis, lib. ii, tit. i. This was the common teaching.

[4] Salvatore di Bartolo. Nuova expozitione dei criteri teologici, Roma, 104, pp. 303, 314. The first edition of this work was put upon the Index. The second edition, revised and corrected, and published with the approbation of Father Lepidi, has all the more weight and authority.

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. Whether governments are favorable or hostile to her, she must pursue her course and carry on her work of salvation under them all.

. . . . . . . .

"Heresy," writes Jean Guiraud, "in the Middle Ages was nearly always connected with some antisocial sect. In a period when the human mind usually expressed itself in a theological form, socialism, communism, and anarchy appeared under the form of heresy. By the very nature of things, therefore, the interests of both Church and State were identical; this explains the question of the suppression of heresy in the Middle Ages."[1]

[1] Jean Guiraud, La repression de l'heresie au moyen age, in the Questions d'archeologie et d'histoire, p. 44.

We are not surprised, therefore, that when Church and State found themselves menaced by the same peril, they agreed on the means of defence. If we deduct, from the total number of heretics burned or imprisoned the disturbers of the social order and the criminals against the common law, the number of condemned heretics will be very small.

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. We will never understand it, unless we consider it in its environment, and from the viewpoint of men like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Louis, who dominated their age by their genius. 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.

But although we grant the good faith and good will of the founders and judges of the inquisition—we speak only, be it understood, of those who acted conscientiously—we must still maintain that their idea of justice was far inferior to ours. Whether taken in itself or compared with other criminal procedures, the Inquisition was, so far as the guarantees of equity are concerned, undoubtedly unjust and inferior. Such judicial forms as the secrecy of the trial, the prosecution carried on independently of the prisoner, the denial of advocate and defence, the use of torture, etc., were certainly despotic and barbarous. Severe penalties, like the stake and confiscation, were the legacy which a pagan legislation bequeathed to the Christian State; they were alien to the spirit of the Gospel.

The Church in a measure felt this, for to enforce these laws she always had recourse to the secular arm. 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. 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. We cannot maintain that it was absolutely unjust and absolutely immoral.

Undoubtedly we have to-day a much higher ideal of justice. But though we deplore the fact that the Church did not then perceive, preach or apply it, we need not be surprised. In social questions she ordinarily progresses with the march of civilization, of which she is ever one of the prime movers.

But perhaps men may blame her for leaving abandoned and betrayed the cause of toleration, which she so ably defended in the beginning. Do not let us exaggerate. There was, undoubtedly, a period in which she did not deduce, from the principle she was the first to teach, all its logical consequences. The laws she enforced against heretics prove this. But it is false to say that, while in the beginning she insisted strongly on the rights of conscience, she afterwards totally disregarded them. In fact, she exercised constraint only over her own stray children. But while she acted so cruelly toward them, she never ceased to respect the consciences of those outside her fold. She always interpreted the compelle intrare to imply with regard to unbelievers moral constraint, and the means of gentleness and persuasion. If respect for human liberty is to-day dominant in the thinking world, it is due chiefly to her.

In the matter of tolerance, the Church has only to study her own history. If, during several centuries, she treated her rebellious children with greater severity than those alien to her fold, it was not from a want of consistency. And if to-day she manifests to every one signs of her maternal kindness, and lays abide for ever all physical constraint, she is not following the example of non-Catholics, but merely taking up again the interrupted tradition of her early Fathers.

THE END