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An honest historian cannot look at the Burning Times without
tracing the atmosphere of mass hysteria that could permit not only the collusion
of Popes and Kings but also a general justification why women had to be
murdered by the millions. The official religious line of the Roman Church
to explain massive persecution was "overzealousness" of
Emperors, and the " rudeness" of the impatient people eager
to root out heresy. The official Papal Website today gives this account
of the roots of heresy and the inquisition. |
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The people disliked what to them was the extreme
dilatoriness of the clergy in pursuing heretics. In 1144 Adalerbo II of
Liège hoped to bring some imprisoned Catharists to better knowledge through
the grace of God, but the people, less indulgent, assailed the unhappy creatures
and only with the greatest trouble did the bishop succeed in rescuing some
of them from death by fire. A like drama was enacted about the same time
at Cologne. while the archbishop and the priests earnestly sought to lead
the misguided back into the Church, the latter. were violently taken by
the mob (a populis nimio zelo abreptis) from the custody of the clergy
and burned at the stake. |
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Further the holy sea absolves the Roman Church of the past
crimes. Not only do they claim that none of the hierarchy of the Roman Church
from Pope to Priest could by Canon Law spill the blood of another but they
shifted the blame to the secular world. |
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Hence, the occasional executions of heretics
during this period must be ascribed partly to the arbitrary action of individual
rulers, partly to the fanatic outbreaks of the overzealous populace, and
in no wise to ecclesiastical law or the ecclesiastical authorities |
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In generally it was true that the clerics did not torch the
fagots below a woman tied to a stake. Nor did priests slip the noose around
the declared witch. Nor did they drive a stake into a warlocks heart. One
gets the picture of Pontius Pilate washing his hands. The Roman Church could
hide its bloody trail behind theocratic scholastic purity. |
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There were already, it is true, canonists who
conceded to the Church the right to pronounce sentence of death on heretics;
but the question was treated as a purely academic one, and the theory exercised
virtually no influence on real life. Excommunication, proscription, imprisonment,
etc., were indeed inflicted, being intended rather as forms of atonement
than of real punishment, but never the capital sentence |
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Let me pick one example to show how history is twisted to
absolve the Church to engage in political power plays. The scene is England
between the Normal Invasion and 1166. |
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Henry I had ordered the death of the Catholic Archbishop of
Canterbury Thomas a Beckett. The Roman Church released him from all punishment
after he successfully asserted his control in Ireland over the nobles and
had all the bishops swear allegiance to him in a tricky coup d'tat over
the Church. Digging deeper into the archives one discovers the Norman Loyalists
in the heat of battle accidentally killed Irish hostages rather than hold
them for high ransom that would have gone to England. To cover this tactical
blunder of the murder of 63 Irish noblemen, the English blamed a woman for
being possessed in her grief of the loss of her lover. In her madness she
cut off the heads of all 63 noblemen! So much for the frailty of the weaker
sex. Yet the Roman Church conveniently dismissed the murder of their finest
martyr in England. |
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England on the whole remained untainted by
heresy. When, in 1166, about thirty sectaries made their way thither, Henry
II ordered that they be burnt on their foreheads with red-hot iron, be beaten
with rods in the public square, and then driven off. Moreover, he forbade
anyone to give them shelter or otherwise assist them, so that they died
partly from hunger and partly from the cold of winter. |
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Just as Charlesmagne in 800 C.E. had started the practice
of forceful conversion to Christianity, other religious theocracies also
took up the same barbaric practice of killing unconverted "heretics".
The Moslems forced Jews and Christians to convert in their strongholds in
Spain and the Middle East, the Byzantine rules forced the Roman Church missionaries
to convert or die. So the Church used these blood feuds to blame the Byzantine
Church of the East for spreading heresy and for committing bloody massacres
of Christians. Of course a woman is to blame for triggering the crusades.
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But eventually Christian Europe was so endangered
by heresy, and penal legislation concerning Catharism had gone so far, that
the Inquisition seemed to be a political necessity. That these sects were
a menace to Christian society had been long recognized by the Byzantine
rulers. As early as the tenth century Empress Theodora had put to death
a multitude of Paulicians, and in 1118 Emperor Alexius Comnenus treated
the Bogomili with equal severity, but this did not prevent them from pouring
over all Western Europe. Moreover these sects were in the highest degree
aggressive, hostile to Christianity itself, to the Mass, the sacraments,
the ecclesiastical hierarchy and organization; hostile also to feudal government
by their attitude towards oaths, which they declared under no circumstances
allowable. |
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The early seeds of democracy, egalitarianism, equity between
the sexes that the Cathars incorporated within their Christian outposts
were a threat. The Cathars emerged out of disillusionment with the mercenary
"holy wars" (the crusades) and they championed "chivalry"
at a time that women were treated as "manumission" (permanently
indentured servants). The Roman Church claimed that the stubborn Cathars
committed "massive suicide" within the prisons of the inquisition
rather than recant their errors. Yet the councils during the lengthy inquisition
legalized the use of any torture to obtain confessions to save the immortal
soul of the heretics. The Roman Church did not want to admit that the Cathars
were martyrs to their beliefs just as the early Christians had been. |
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The extermination of small newly formed country of Stedinger
is particularly interesting in revealing the charge of heresy and witchcraft.
In 1204 a group of democratic minded peasants calling themselves Frieslanders
in what might be called central Germany today, organized a revolt. They
established their own government. They were still patriarchical in structure
but they had warded off assaults by surrounding Normans and Saxons. The
Archbishop of Bremen, together with the Count of Oldenburn formed an alliance
with other surrounding fiefdoms to destroy this venture into the world of
democracy. It took 30 years and direct intervention of Pope Gregory IX to
defeat this early experiment in liberty. The Pope organized a "crusade"
of 40,000 to crush the population of 11,000 citizens of Stedinger. The entire
population were branded as heretics and witches - no one was left alive
and the entire countryside was burned. |
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One doesn't have to strain their brain to see that the Roman
Church in hindsight finds it easy to blame anyone but their "infallible"
patriarch. The year is 1231 the country to blame is Germany. This hides
the fact that it was the Archbishop in Germany who asked for a Papal pillage.
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We need only recall the trickery of the emperor
and his Pretended eagerness for the purity of the Faith, his Increasingly
rigorous legislation against heretics, the numerous executions of his personal
rivals on the pretext of heresy, the hereditary passion of the Hohenstaufen
for supreme control over Church and State, their claim of God-given authority
over both, of responsibility in both domains to God and God only etc. What
was more natural than that the Church should strictly reserve to herself
her own sphere, while at the same time endeavouring to avoid giving offence
to the emperor? |
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The Church justified its central role in the persecution of
heresy by claiming that their holy orders were above earthly influence (bribes).
Yet throughout the Middle Ages every council, every synod reminded their
bishops and priests not to allow themselves to be bribed (simony) to accept
money, mistresses and land to influence their selection of novices. |
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The Roman Church's debate was not worried about fabricated
charges by paid witnesses, who would profit from their testimony, but about
how much autonomy the representatives of the Pope had over local bishops
and newly emerging religious orders. |
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And if, on the strength of their papal jurisdiction,
inquisitors occasionally manifested too great an inclination to act independently
of episcopal authority it was precisely the popes who kept them within right
bounds. As early as 1254 Innocent IV prohibited anew perpetual imprisonment
or death at the stake without the episcopal consent. Similar orders were
issued by Urban IV in 1262, Clement IV in 1265, and Gregory X in 1273, until
at last Boniface VIII and Clement V solemnly declared null and void all
judgments issued in trials concerning faith, unless delivered with the approval
anti co-operation of the bishops. The popes always upheld with earnestness
the episcopal authority, and sought to free the inquisitional tribunals
from every kind of arbitrariness and caprice |
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When the Black Death hit Europe in the mid 14th century the
Roman Church had already conducted deep propaganda that the Jews were responsible
for the death of the messiah. Yet the Roman Church large reliance on Jewish
scholars and merchants for centuries meant that the Pope sometimes called
for restraint in blaming the Jews for the Black Plague. When it was convenient
to invoke hatred and to strip the Jews of their property, their faith, it
was done with total Papal sanction to the point of prohibiting integration
with the emerging population in the cities |
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Jewish women were forced to wear yellow dresses with hats
decorated with small bells - a symbol in the Middle Ages for prostitutes.
The Jewish Sabbath became the witches Sabbath where the Jewish harp was
a call to Satan (Fourth Lateran Council 1215 Innocent III). |
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There were pogroms and attacks on Jewish communities during
the Black Death that the Roman Church mildly wrote letters from afar suggested
their followers were misguided in the belief that all illness came from
the devil and his earthly allies. This mild scolding was due in part to
the fact that some of the more benevolent missionaries who cared for plague
victims brought the illness back from their pilgrimages and infected others.
The solution for the Roman Church was to engage in abstract debate of "how
many angels danced on the head of a pin" and quarantine higher church
officials from the peasantry. |
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Both Jews and women were convenient scapegoats for all the
ills of the Middle Ages. But women were even more detestable in the eyes
of the Roman Church as can be seen in the decree of Orvieto of 1350. Pope
Clement VI blessed this law. |
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If Christian and Jew were to fall in love then
the woman, regardless of her faith must be beheaded or burned alive. |
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Meanwhile this same Pope Clement VI imposed heavy taxes on
the Italian people to pay for sumptuous banquets, to confer posts on his
relatives, and his illicit sexual affairs produced several illegitimate
children became so scandalous that the Vatican version of the History of
the Popes has to acknowledge his "misinterpretation of canon law".
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During the terrible pogroms of Ferdinand and Isabelle in 1492
Jews could not escape persecution by using the defense that they were converts.
Pope Alexander VI called Catholic families with Jewish lineage pseudo converts
or "Marranos". Yet the teaching of the Talmud offered no relief
to the persecution of women, which was rampant in Germany at the time, The
Rabbis were declaring: |
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Women are naturally inclined to witchcraft. |
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Historians also have to deal with the psychological makeup
of the time. Because of the sexual prohibition on the populace were severe,
the clergy hypocritically were often the worst abusers of their own admonitions.
We see a great deal of sexual sadism - pleasure in the debasement of women,
in stripping women naked and puncturing their bodies with needles to find
the "devils mark". Religious enslavement of half the population
was defended under the guize of Original Sin. Rather than acknowledge marital
divorce the Church allowed men to accuse their wives of "intercourse
with the devil". It was a time that the Roman Church also open sanctioned
the slave trade (Pope Nicholas V). The more witches that were burned the
more were found to be burned. The fever of the AntiChrist and the End Times
could be invoked for any petty fault. Weaping for a branded witch was itself
enough evidence to warrant the same fate. The common prayer among women
in the Middle Age was that they never grow old or ugly or alone. The fairy
tales in our day stem from the stereotype of the ugly cruel spinster. |
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There were glimmers of the ordinary compassionate humanity
in the midst of this mania. I offer two so the reader will feel that all
was doom and gloom. |
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In 1570 the jailer of Canterbury Castle released
a condemned witch, citing popular opinion among those under her care that
she did more good for the sick with her home made remedies than all the
priests prayers and exorcisms. |
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Near the conclusion of witch mania in the mid 17th century,
a confessor for the witches, Frederick von Spee, allowed his writings of
the horrible use of the rack to obtain confessions to be published. Without
this exposure many of the fabrications of Roman Church history would have
remained unchallenged. The excerpt below is from a protestant source. |
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His principal work, through which he obtained
a well-deserved and world-wide reputation, is the "Cautio Criminalis",
written in admirable Latin. It is an arraignment of trial for witchcraft,
based upon his own awful experiences probably principally in Westphalia,
for the traditional assumption that he acted for a long time as "witch
confessor" in Würzburg has no documentary authority. This work was
printed in 1631 at Rinteln without Spee's name or permission, although he
was doubtlessly widely known as its author. He does not advocate the immediate
abolition of trials for witchcraft, but describes in thrilling language
and with cutting sarcasm the horrible abuses in the prevailing legal proceedings,
particularly the inhuman use of the rack. He demands measures of reform,
such as a new German imperial law on the subject, liability to damages on
the part of the judges, etc., which, if they had been conscientiously carried
out, would have quickly put an end to the persecution of witches. |
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In summation the violent persecution of witches marked the
death of theocracy as a viable absolute form of rule in Europe. Not for
any conscience on the part of the "holy sea" as you read above,
but because the rise of scientific inquiry and literacy. It is not well
known that the Roman Church had banned the ordinary citizens of Europe from
reading the bible for themselves thus insuring that the challenges to religious
and secular infallibility would be labeled heresy. The climate of superstition,
fear and assigning of blame on a section of the population have withered
but theocratic patriarchy has not been totally uprooted. Ironically the
codification of the "crimes" of the witches led to the development
of modern rules of testimony and a reversal of torture as a means of extracting
confession. |
