Again! Oh my gosh!
The modern Catholic Church is a much better Church than it was.
John Paul II 1978 until his death in 2005
Now do you want me to read you some quotes from the Malleus Maleficarum....the Church's torture manual for women?
I think we have had enough of that.
You need to start a thread on the good that the Catholic Church has done in the past and now.
Amazon Prime has about 20 books on Mother Teresa.
The past is the past....it time to look to the future and make the changes that will allow it to be a good future.
Malleus Maleficarum was placed on the list of forbidden books, a notorious book book of the times that had nothing to do with Church teaching. You strain gnat and swallow a camel.
Innocent VIII: BULL Summis desiderantes, Dec. 5th, 1484
Innocent, bishop, servant of the servants of God,
Ad futuram rei memoriam
It has recently come to our ears, not without great pain to us, that in some parts of upper Germany,……many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offenses, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, (read abortion)
The above words were written at a time when superstition and the concept of witchcraft and sorcery existed in Europe side by side as part of a cultural norm. The following two-hundred years would see those same concepts wrapped up together in an overblown and ugly way as unchecked fear ramped up and took hold of the culture and attitude around them.
Some attribute it to this Papal Bull and its appearance in
a notorious book of the time, The Malleus Maleficarum written in 1487; a manual for the identification, prosecution, and punishment of those suspected of witchcraft, divination, and other (mostly imagined) offenses.
What many individuals forget is that the
Summis Desiderantes was not written for the book nor intended as blanket permission for the Inquisition or church elders to torture and execute individuals that were suspected or rumored or biasedly accused without proper evidence of atrocities.
The history is this:
The bull was written in response to the request of Heinrich Kramer, an inquisitor in the Dominican order, for explicit authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany. He had been refused assistance by local church and secular authorities, who stood by their decision that as the original letter of deputation for Kramer did not specifically mention where the inquisitors could operate, they could not legally exercise their duties as inquisitors in their [the local] areas. The bull had been requested to remedy this dispute by identifying individual jurisdictions, specifically the dioceses of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen.
Pope Innocent’s bull put into effect nothing new. Its direct purpose was to ratify the powers already conferred upon Heinrich Kramer (also called Henry Institoris in the
Malleus) and James Sprenger, to deal with witchcraft as well as heresy, and it called upon the Bishop of Strasbourg to provide the inquisitors with whatever support was possible.
However, a short time later, Kramer published the book Malleus Maleficarum and used the wording of the Papal bull as a foreword. It gave the impression that the actions and thinking described in the book were condoned and supported by the Pope and the Church.
Neither was true as could be seen with the Inquisition denouncing Kramer in 1490 and the book being added to the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) in by Pope Paul IV in 1559.
Unfortunately, the damage was done. The book was reproduced and found in several corners of Europe and the “witch craze” was under way with the worst scenes to be found in Germany and France.
The Catholic Church had many official doctrines out that defined witch craft, sorcery, divination, etc as separate and unique practices. How to identify these individuals, counsel them, and punish only if they had broken secular or created heresy.
The misrepresentation of the bull by Kramer created huge distrust and fear among folks who were formally neighbors and friends.
The damage was done and the ramifications were beyond what they could then perceive.
The complete wording of the the Papal Bull by Pope Innocent VIII can be found
here.
Keep it up, Grailhunter, I'm having fun exposing your
gross misrepresentations of history.
You are on a witch hunt of your own.