The Irish standard., 1897-02-06

them gave themselves with all the fury
OF fanatical zeal, with all the zest OF
modern Bashi- bazouks or Kurds, to
violence. rapine and slaughter. They
burned churches and monasteriee, tor
tured and assassinated priests and
monks, pillaged and laid waste whole
tracts of country, changing the dwell
ings of men into wild beasts dens'', says
an eyewitness, and respecting neither
youth nor gray hairs, nor any age, nor
SEX"
Apart altogether from orthodoxy and
religion, such people were enemies OF
public welfare, civic peace and social Or
der They outraged the first rights OF
more enemies of the church than they
were traitors to any civilized state. In
deed they aimed at nothing short Of rev.
olution, civil as we'll as ecclesiastical, ex-
pressly seeking to restore the primeval
liberty of mortals, and universal equal
Hy, to the exclusion of all subordinaton
and civil authority"
The crimes standing proved against
those Manicheans in the inquisition ar
chives OF Paris, Vienna and Rome were
such as would earn now In any civilized
country on earth the fate of anarchists
Of the reddest dye. How summarily the
Prussian police Of Konigsberg dealt
with the Manichean sect of Muc]1ers
there in 1885. How speedily like sect
was exterminated In Norway In 1852
How long would such conduct be suf-
fered in the United States today? There
was in those days nothing like the pub
lie protection afforded by our armies,
nor anything like our detective and po-
lice force. And as to those hideous ten-
cts, with such fanaticism and ferocity
behind them to live them out and prop
agate them, left no place for civilized
life, social order or public security.
Surely it Was no time for states to be
imbecile or Tor the church to be slug
glish. Quick action and extreme meas
ures were urgent and indispensable. An
infalEble church, set up to guard NOR
atty and order in the world, had to
raise her voice now or never speak
again. And the Christian state must
strike with sharp-edged sword or be ef-
faced and let the world sink into barbar-
ism. Society was calling both powers
for relief and protection. And III an
swer came the confederated action OF
both in the establishment of the court of
investigation, since known as the in-
QUESTION.
The first move in the establishment of
the inquisition was the decree Of the
council, or rather conference of Verona,
in 1884, under Pope Lucius III and the
Emperor Barbarossa, that each bishop
should yearly visit suspected parts of
his diocese and from the dispositions Of
sworn witnesses search out any they
might know to be he~etics or members
of secret associations. This regulation
was repeated by the general council of
Lateran in 1915. And Frederick II, at
his coronation in 1920, swore that he
would use the sword received by him
from God against the enemies Of the
faith. Still no action Of any conse-
quence appears to have been taken for
several years until aftn~ the close of the
Albigensian war. In 1929, at the synod
of Toulouse, under Pope Gregory TX, the
inquisition was established as regular
permanent tribunal, with e. set of rules
for it's procedure It was ordered that
there being in every parish standing
commission Of the parish priest and two
or three laymen of repute to note and re-
port to the bishop and magistrate any
cases of suspected orthodoxy in the dis
trict. Inquiry conducted by such courts
would naturally in those times be more
learned, more judicial, and less harsh
than by the civil courts. The Episcopal
courts admonished twice before arrest
ing; they pardoned those abjuring the
errors charged to them, and frequently
let them with only moral punishment,
where corporal would have been inflict-
ed by the lay courts. They never went
farther than when the accused was con-
tumacious, or set in his errors, to report
accordingly to the cure power of "secu-
lar ARM when he became subject to
the sentence already passed by the
state. Through it all the most emphatic
attitude OF the pope was interfering to
moderate the rigor Of the judgments, re-
straining by threats of punishment,
cruelty or injustice on the part Of the
inquisitors and this so remarkably and
VIGOROUSLY that the heretics themselves
appealed to him from the local tribunals,
One Of the clauses of the decree estab
fishing the lnquisition has served to
bring up and keep up against the church,
for it's attitude against the Bible, a
charge that is false and mean enough to
clause or chapter xiv, in which in con-
have come from Manichaeism itself: it is
sequence of the indignities with which
those sections treated the Bible, and OF
the shameful caricaturing of it's text in
their pretended translation of it, lay