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Show CHURCH NEVER BURNED HERETICS. No More a Favorite Method of Catholics Than of Protestants in Reformation Period. The reviewer of Dr. Cowan's "John Knox and the Reformation,"' in the Boston Transcript, speaks of burning at the stake as "Rome's favorite method of suppressing heresy," forgetful of the fact, says the Sacred Heart Review, that Protestants Protest-ants were not at all backward in burning at . the stake those who differed from them in religious belief. be-lief. The fact is that burning at the stake for heresy was no more a favorite method of Catholics than of Protestants. It appears to be useless to repeat what history shows, and what every one now ought to know, namely, that the Church never burned anyone at the stake. Some Catholic countries coun-tries may have adopted such a punishment, but this obviously is an entirely different 'thing. Heresy at the time of the Reformation was not exclusively an ecclesiastical crime. It was, indeed, considered a grievous sin against God and against the Church which the Son of God established and commanded all men to hear, but it was also a most serious offense of-fense against the state, society, the stable order of things as it existed. It was a civil and social disorder dis-order of the utmost gravity, and a heretic was looked upon with somewhat the same horror in those days that a murderous anarchist is viewed today. Heresy then was anarchy, and the heretic an anarchist. The temper of the age was to treat this crime with severity with capital punishment and burning at the stake was the usual form of such punishment, and was as common then as hanging or electrocution is for murder in our own day. The states and nations then- existing (even though they were Catholic) had. it will be admitted, as much right as the states and nations existing today to-day to suppress crimes which they considered to be subversive of the very foundations of civil order. That they chose burning at the stake as the means of executing criminals convicted of the offense of heresy is regrettable to our twentieth century view, which sees in heresy only a mere difference of opinion opin-ion in ecclesiastical matters having nothing to do with the state, and which views burning at the stake as a mode of execution peculiarly horrible. But we should not judge the people of past centuries by our standards. We see today that "the best people" peo-ple" in some of our western and southern states do not hesitate to burn at the stake, with circumstances circum-stances of peculiar cruelty, fellow men convicted or even suspected of a certain crime, thus showing I that" in ?ino respect we are not so far removed. 1a7U5r. alih oia t jieei"i6f The -iiiudle Ages. "Our legal treatment of condemned persons is, however, on the whole, less harsh than that which obtained in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.' But five centuries cen-turies from now. the people then on earth may look back to our methods of punishing criminals to our hangings and electrocutions and buriiihgs at the stake with horror. . So that this and all similar allusions-to bunting at the stake, as if it were a special invention of Rome's diabolical cruelty to punish pious, inoffensive inoffen-sive Protestants, only reveal the uncritical, unhis-toric, unhis-toric, ignorant and anti-Catholic temper which has so long prevailed among Protestants of average second-hand education, and which only time and research can cure. We. are glad that the old unhappy un-happy days are gone when Catholic states thought it necessary to burn heretics as a means to preserve pre-serve ecclesiastical, civil and social order. We are glad also that Protestants no longer, in justification justifica-tion of their right, of private opinion in religious matters, find it incumbent upon them to burn Catholics, Cath-olics, or one another, as Calvin burned Servetus. We are glad that the persecutors of Catholics. Henry Hen-ry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth, are dead, and we do not hanker to resurrect that unfortunate ruler far more a woman but less a diplomat than Elizabeth Eliz-abeth Queen Mary. We are glad that the old order has changed, and we are hopeful that despite such slurring allusions as this, which we notice in the Transcript, that the ignorance which still seems to becloud so many non-Catholic writers on the Reformation period is disappearing before the light of truth. , x . i |