[ought-six]

The Church did indeed bring order to the trials. But it also championed the use of torture, as it reasoned that a confession was necessary to save the souls of the accused (not a confession in the sense that someone confessed to committing a crime or a civil wrong, but in the way of a mea culpa); and the Church opined that for such serious offenses as heresy, the confession must be particularly heartfelt, and the surest way of enacting true contrition was by suffering pain (i.e., torture). The Church realized
-- correctly -- that an accused would gladly confess to almost any crime in order to escape torture, thus such a confession was not valid. In order for the confession to be true, the Church reasoned that it must be "confirmed" by torture and pain and suffering.

[RobbyS]

Which gets us down to the particulars of what constituted torture, which could be anything from being racked to punishment that a monk might take on voluntarily, and how many accused were severely tested as the prisoner in Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum "and how many were simply " punished." Torture would serve the salutary purpose of discouraging the heretic from lapsing. In an age where the pain and pleasure calculus is regnant, and where the euthanasia movment has taken hold because pain has become the only evil to avoided absolutely,
it is hard to understand an age in which cardinals dressed in silk also wore hairshirts.