Ping to post 5872
Thank you for that fascinating overview of history, which I am sure will be dismissed by some as fabricated.
Parts of it do fit in well, however, with what Daniel1212 posts where church decrees forbid the laity from debating with non-Catholics.
Even now, Ratzinger was head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the renamed Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. How anyone can know this and read and continue in association with this group is bewildering. But it seems Clement , in his 1776 encyclical explained that.....They are not allowed dissent. They cannot ask questions lest they become victim of those fires to which Clement referenced.