JoltinJoe wrote:Ibanez wrote:Ad extirpanda, papal bull that allowed torture during the Inquistion. You know what is interesting, the committe or department (whatever you want to call it) that oversaw the Inquistion still exists.
The past is the past, however you are the person that stated the RCC never committied genocide, murder or abortion. I'm sure you would extend this to torture and other crimes.
Never say never.
I think you're mischaracterizing, Ad extirpanda. That papal document actually condemned the practice of torture and sought to impose limitations on when torture was permissible. It was published in response to the free use of torture, which the Church found troubling.
And before you say it, yes, it would have been better if it outlawed torture entirely. Still, in historical context, it was a significant step in the right direction. The church remains an institution of men, and can and does make errors, sometimes many errors.
The catholic church, literally, wrote the book on torture:
Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, or “Conduct of the Inquisition Into Heretical Depravity.” The manual covers the nature and types of heresy an inquisitor might encounter and also provides advice on everything from conducting an interrogation to pronouncing a death sentence.
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An important point to be taken here is the danger of moral certainty and belief in absolutes. All religious, especially the catholic church owe a great deal to the many atheists, secularists and free thinkers who challenged the church and, often costing them their lives, forced them to change their moral positions.
The church is better today not because of the religious or the popes or religious leaders, it's better, more humane, more moral and ethical because of people like me.
Here's an excellent article from the Atlantic drawing distinct parallels between the torture practices and justifications of the catholic church and the American government.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... ce/308838/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Torturer’s Apprentice
The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.
Bernard Gui is a historical figure. He was a Dominican priest, and in 1307 he was indeed made an inquisitor by Pope Clement V, with responsibility for a broad swath of southern France. Over a period of 15 years, Gui pronounced some 633 men and women guilty of heresy. We know the disposition of these cases because Gui wrote everything down—the record survives in his Liber sententiarum, his “Book of Sentences.” It is a folio-size volume, bound in red leather. File a request at the British Library, in London, and before long the document will be delivered to the Manuscripts Reading Room, where you can prop it up on a wedge of black velvet. The writing, in Latin, is tiny and heavily abbreviated.
Inquisition records can be highly detailed and shockingly mundane. An itemized accounting of expenses for the burning of four heretics in 1323 survives from Carcassonne:
For large wood 55 sols, 6 deniers.
For vine-branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 sols, 3 deniers.
For straw 2 sols, 6 deniers.
For four stakes 10 sols, 9 deniers.
For ropes to tie the convicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 sols, 7 deniers.
For the executioner, each 20 sols . . . . . . . . 80 sols.
In all 8 livres, 14 sols, 7 deniers.
An event like this would typically have occurred on a Sunday, in the course of a ceremony known as a sermo generalis. A throng would gather, and the various sentences would be read aloud by the inquisitor. The recitation of capital crimes came last, and the prisoners were then turned over—relaxed was the euphemistic term—by the spiritual authorities to the secular ones: churchmen did not wish to sully themselves with killing. To emphasize that his hands were clean, the inquisitor would read a pro forma prayer, expressing hope that the condemned might somehow be spared the pyre—though there was no hope of that. Bernard Gui’s most productive day was April 5, 1310, when he condemned 17 people to death.
Late in 2010, Google Labs introduced something called the NGram Viewer, which allows users to search a database of millions of published works and discover how often particular words have been used from year to year. If you search for the word inquisition, you’ll get a graph showing a sharp upward climb beginning about a decade ago. The word comes up more and more because people have been invoking it as a casual metaphor when writing about our own times—for instance, when referring to modern methods of interrogation, surveillance, torture, and censorship. The original Inquisition was initiated by the Church in the 13th century to deal with heretics and other undesirables, and continued off and on for 600 years. But it’s a mistake to think of the Inquisition as just a metaphor, or as relegated to the past. For one thing, within the Church, it has never quite ended; the office charged today with safeguarding doctrine and meting out discipline occupies the Inquisition’s old palazzo at the Vatican. More to the point, the Inquisition had all the hallmarks of a modern institution—with a bureaucracy, a memory, a procedure, a set of tools, a staff of technocrats, and an all-encompassing ideology that brooked no dissent. It was not a relic but a harbinger.
Very enlightining (high level thought and an open mind is required) and intriquing point of views. 
