SUMMARY: CROSS-SECTION: Persecution of/by Christians

2000+ killed

~60K Catholics Killed underr Henry VIII

The Waldensian movement started in Lyon towards the end of the 12th century and spread throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. It joined with the Reform Movement and they were violently persecuted, only able to maintain resistance in the Alpine valleys of the Piedmont. Today, their Church proudly remembers its tragic past and has members in the major towns of Italy as well as in Uruguay and Argentina.

Melanchthon accepted the chairmanship of the secular inquisition that suppressed the Anabaptists in Germany with imprisonment or death. . . . he was convinced that God had destined all Anabaptists to hell. (Durant [S], 423)

‘Luther never attempted to solve this contradiction. In practice he was content that the princes should have supreme control over religion, doctrine and Church, and that it was their right and their duty to suppress every religious creed which differed from their own.’ (Janssen, XIV, 230-231; citing Johann von Dollinger: Kirche und Kirchen, 1861, 52 ff.)

“Books and pamphlets (of the Anabaptists, Sacramentarians, etc.) must not be allowed to be bought or sold or read . . . also those who are aware of such breaches of the orders laid down herein, and do not give information, shall be punished by loss of life and property.” (Armstrong; Janssen, XIV, 232-233; BR, IV, 549)

The presence at sermons [in Zwingli’s Zurich] . . . was enjoined under pain of punishment; all teaching and church worship that deviated from the prescribed regulations was punishable. Even outside the district of Zurich the clergy were not allowed to read Mass or the laity to attend. And it was actually forbidden, ‘under pain of severe punishment, to keep pictures and images even in private houses’ . . . The example of Zurich was followed by other Swiss Cantons.

~60K Catholics Killed underr Henry VIII

In the preface to the Institutes he [John Calvin] admitted the right of the government to put heretics to death . . . He thought that Christians should hate the enemies of God . . . Those who defended heretics . . . should be equally punished. (Smith [S], 178)

[During Calvin’s reign in Geneva, between 1542 and 1546] “58 persons were put to death for heresy.” (Durant [S], 473)

The ablest defence of persecution during the 17th century came from the Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford (A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty Of Conscience, 1649). (Chadwick [P], 403)

In Puritan Massachusetts, for successive convictions, a Quaker would suffer the loss of one ear and then the other, the boring of the tongue with a hot iron, and sometimes eventually death. In Boston three Quaker men and one woman were hanged. Baptist Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts in 1635 and founded tolerant Rhode Island (Stoddard, 208).

Lord Baltimore allowed several hundred Puritans, unwelcome in Episcopalian Virginia, to enter Maryland in 1648.

Locke published his first Letter concerning Toleration, to be followed by three others, denying the state all right of interference in religious matters and demanding toleration for all except RCs and atheists. (Cross, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church [P], 1383-1384)
[In John Knox’s Scotland] It was . . . forbidden to say Mass or to be present at Mass, with the punishment for a first offence of loss of all goods and a flogging; for the second offence, banishment; for the third, death. (Hughes, 300)

the Puritan element . . . October, 1654, repealed the Act of Toleration and outlawed the Catholics . . . condemning ten of them to death, four of whom were executed . . . From . . . 1718 down to the outbreak of the Revolution, the Catholics of Maryland were cut off from all participation in public life, to say nothing of the enactments against their religious services and . . . schools for Catholic instruction . . . During the half-century the Catholics had governed Maryland they had not been guilty of a single act of religious oppression.