But what was the nature of
the office as held by the saint? As far as Dominic was concerned, it is
argued by his friends that the office "was limited to the
_reconciliation_ of heretics and had nothing to do with their
_punishment_." It is also claimed that while Dominic did impose
penances, in some cases public flagellation, no evidence can be produced
showing that he ever delivered one heretic to the flames. Those who were
burned were condemned by secular courts, and on the ground that they
were not only heretics but enemies of the public peace and perpetrators
of enormous crimes.
But while it may not be proved that Dominic himself passed the sentence
of death or applied the torch to the faggots with his own hand, he is by
no means absolved from all complicity in those frightful slaughters, or
from all responsibility for the subsequent establishment of the Holy
Inquisition. The principles governing the Inquisition were practically
those upon which Dominic proceeded; the germs of the later atrocities
are to be found in his aims and methods. By what a narrow margin does
Dominic escape the charge of cruelty when it is boasted "that he
resolutely insisted on no sentence being carried out until all means had
been tried by which the conversion of a prisoner could be effected."
Another statement also contains an inkling of a significant fact,
namely, that secular judges and princes were constantly under the
influence of the monks and other ecclesiastical persons, who incited
them to wage war, and to massacre, in the Albigensian war as in other
crusades against heresy.
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