[BipolarBob]

By having millions of people murdered, hitler had left the Catholic church long ago. He acted against the teaching of the Church.

What is the acceptable number of people murdered to keep in teaching with the Church? The Inquisition had many thousands burned and tortured but it may not have reached millions.

[Campion]

You have it backwards. Secular states defined heresy as a capital offense. The church insisted on conducting those trials, because it alone defined what "heresy" was. Some of those found guilty were remanded back to the state for punishment.

"Many thousands burned and tortured" -- The total number executed under the Spanish Inquisition was about 9,000 over 350 years, according to secular historians. That's twice the number killed in a single month in Soviet Russia in the first years after the revolution.

[Wallace T.]

For the most part, the trials and executions during the Inquisition were conducted as a civil, and not an ecclesiastical, matter. Protestant nations such as England persecuted, tried, convicted, and executed Catholics, as well as Protestant dissenters such as the Puritans and the Quakers. As with the Catholic nations, it was performed through the civil government. Heresy and other infractions of the dogma of the state sponsored church were against the criminal code.

Revulsion against the excesses of religious persecution led to the Enlightenment, which undermined the prestige of the state churches. To a considerable extent, the reaction led to anti-clerical governments in revolutionary France, early 20th Century Mexico, and Spain before the rise of Franco. The Enlightenment ideas helped to foster the rise of Marxism, which led to the deaths of over 100 million human souls.