This is crucial to understand. The Inquisition, as far as I know, executed no one--an if you read the trial transcripts in those cases where people were found guilty of obstinate heresy, you find over and over again the line "and he was handed over to the secular arm to be burned." I.e. it was NOT the Church that was executing people--it was the state.
You're arguing that because the state was doing the executing, the Church (Pontius Pilate-like) had clean hands?
>> You’re arguing that because the state was doing the executing, the Church (Pontius Pilate-like) had clean hands? <<
I’m not sure I’d’ve taken Claud’s rhetorical tactic, since plainly the Church did hold that someone could be punished for making arguments contrary to church doctrine. But the point is that the Church did not deem science as being contrary to church doctrine, even in the hypthetical instance, as St. Bellarmine relates, wherein scientific discovery challenges the church’s understanding of revelation. And Claud also is correct in pointing out that most of what the average person “knows” about inquisitions is a combination of black propaganda, and grave confusion.
However, to relate the Church’s behavior to that of Pilate is completely upside-down: Pilate could find no guilt in Christ under Roman law, so he handed Christ over to a mob to be killed. The action of the Church was the exact opposite. By claiming ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the charge of heresy, the Church denied the State the authority to punish someone under that charge.
Kings claimed a right to govern based on their assertion that they governed justly. (Hence, the Declaration of Independence was actually an appeal that the colonies were not guilty of sedition, but were acting legally and justly by opposing the king.) When a person propagandized against the state, he usually did so by moral assertions (”The King is an unjust ruler because he claims the right to sleep with any newlywed bride, which is in fact the sins of adultery and rape!”). Thus, a king would charge political opponents with heresy, and torture and terrorize them.
By asserting itself as the arbiter of heresy, the Church was actually protecting political dissent. If the dissident was not, in fact, a heretic, the State could not punish the dissident for their speech; the State would have to rely on some capital crime, such as killing a minister of the law.
If the dissident was a heretic, normally a recanting of the heresy was sufficient. The *SPANISH* Inquisition was unique in that it was a state inquisition specifically authorized by Rome. The unique circumstance was that Spain had been an Islamic land for hundreds of years. Muslims who openly acknowledged Islam, and Jews who openly acknowledged Judaism were not under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, but the Inquisition feared that Muslims had faked Christianity to undermine its doctrines from within and foment revolution.
The tragedy of the Inquisition is that Spain had given the Church the authority to prosecute people for faking conversions to Christianity, but the Church lacked the civil power to prevent mobs from arracking those who remained Muslim or Jewish. So, Muslims and Jews were faced with a tragic choice of remaining openly Muslim and Jews, and therefore face mob violence, or claim to convert to Christianity, and be tried as a heretic for retaining their Muslim or Jewish faith.
(By the way, Luther preached that any Catholic prince was a servant of the anti-Christ, and therefore unfit to rule. Can you see where the interests of Church and State intersected there? Also, the Catholic Church had taught that risking one’s life to defend against the Muslim onslaught alleviated the temporal consequence of sin; Luther taught that there were no temporal consequences of sin, at a time when the Muslims were about to sweep across the Austerreich. Initially, he even wrote that he vastly preferrred Islamic rule to a Catholic king. (He later changed his mind) Can you see why his heresies were a matter of civil government?)
No I'm not. I'm completely open to a discussion of the morality of what ecclesiastical authorities did in particular cases: and they were recommending death sentences in any case, so clearly they were involved.
What I am arguing (and what I believe history shows) is that the Church did not set up the Inquisition as a court to exterminate heretics--which is what too many people think it was. It was set up to protect the rights of the accused under civil law.